Amdek 3" Floppy Drives

[Curt at Atari Museum]

Hi Al,

    I have a couple of Amdisk drives, love the little buggers, yeah the 
whole 3" drives vs the 3.5"s was weird, its what sank the drives in the 
long run as Sony really pushed those drive hard and of course Apple's 
adoption of them into its Mac's in 84' then Atari and Amiga following in 
85/86 with their systems using 3.5's and eventually IBM catching up in 
87' with its PS/2 line.



Curt



Al Hartman wrote:

>When I worked for Zebra Systems in the 1980's, we were
>selling a Floppy Disk System for the Timex/Sinclair
>2068 (which also worked for the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum
>with a different Adaptor), that was basically a
>seperate Z-80 Computer with 64k of RAM and could run
>CP/M in 80 Column Mode on an RGB Monitor plugged into
>the Controller Unit.
>
>At the time, Timex Portugal who made these units...
>Gave us a choice of 5.25" Disk Drives, 3.5" Disk
>Drives or 3" Disk Drives made by Amdek.
>
>They pushed the Amdek drives the hardest on us.
>
>And I BEGGED Stewart to go with either NO Disk drives
>as we could buy them cheaper in the U.S. and add them
>to the Controller ourselves... Or, go for 5.25"
>Drives.
>
>For reasons I don't fully understand... Stewart opted
>for the Amdek 3" Drives.
>
>They were plenty reliable, but... We couldn't get
>media for them from anywhere but Timex Portugal, which
>meant importing large orders of blank media from
>overseas. Rather than getting them from a domestic
>source as we did our 3.5" and 5.25" media for our
>Coco, Atari-ST, Amiga and other products.
>
>To this day, I think we would have sold MANY more
>units had we gone to another media format than 3"
>Amdek disks.
>
>I still have a couple here with the OS for that system
>on them.
>
>I have a ZX-Spectrum Bus Adapter here, but no drive
>controller or drives.
>
>Al Hartman
>
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