PC) anything[/i that assumes a PC-style floppy drive (wether an actual PC, or a USB floppy drive case,) will not work with a Macintosh floppy drive, and therefore, no Macintosh 400K or 800K disks. My PowerBook 100 running System 6 has no problems reading my MacWrite 1.0 disk from an original Macintosh 128k.īecause the two mechanisms are so different (Mac vs. Unfortunately, because of the difference in the physical style of writing lower-density disks, PCs could not just have software to let them read Mac lower-density disks.īut, the ability to read and write older 400K and 800K Mac disks remained. Then all it took was software to be able to read and write PC disks. The deal is that when Apple introduced the 1.4 MB controller chip, they not only added the ability to read and write High Density disks, but they changed the raw method in which the disks are read to and written from to be the same physical style as PC disks. It's just that in an 800K-only computer, the drive will act exactly as an 800K drive, since the controller chip doesn't know about 1.4 MB disks. On a Mac, you can slap a 1.4 MB "SuperDrive" into a computer that only understands 800K drives, because the raw electronics in the drive are the same, only the read head's ability to deal with the newer disks is different. This is because the controller won't speak the same language as the drive. The big deal here is that, for example, a PC that can only talk to a 720 KB floppy drive, is incapable of using a 1440 KB floppy drive.
(Note that even though my explanation is long winded, it's still technically simplified, so some things are technically inaccurate in the name of ease of understanding.) The data cable carries not the raw 'straight-from-the-heads' data, but is similar in concept (if not implementation) as IDE and SCSI in that the data arrives packaged. This also means that the floppy drive needs its own separate power. This is because the drive itself has some 'smarts' to it. The controller on the motherboard (or, on very early PCs, an add-in card,) is much simpler than the chip on a Mac. On a PC, much of the electronics are on the drive itself. This cable contains all of the 'raw' data pins, as well as the power to run the motors. There is only one cable running in to an Apple floppy drive. On the Apple II, it was an add-in controller card, on all Macs (again, up to the beige G3 and the last PowerBook G3 with a floppy drive,) it's on the motherboard. This is true from the Apple II all the way up to the beige G3 and PowerBook G3. The floppy drive controller chip resides on a board in the computer. The drive is just a dumb set of motors and heads. Apple's floppy drives are unique in that they have almost no circuitry on the drive themselves.
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