Amdek 3" Floppy Drives

[Chuck Guzis]

On 12/12/2005 at 12:21 AM Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:

>    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.

The discussion of 3.5" floppies probably wouldn't be complete wtihout
mentioning HP.  What follows is a case of IIRC.

Sony had originally brought the 3.5" drives out as 40 track 600 RPM
drives.(OAD-1).  While impressive with their shorter latency, the 600 RPM
drive was not compatible with existing controllers.  HP adopted the Sony
3.5" format but standardized on a 300 RPM 80 track drive.

Cheers,
Chuck