Did these Side A/Side B diskettes predate the 'standard' 360KB 5.25" floppies? I recently purchased some new double-sided, double-density 360KB disks and was wondering about this -- I'm guessing my 1986 XT's drive just read both sides simultaneously since flipping a disk over yields an error.
When approximately did these changes place?
older non pc machines often had 1 head (c64, apple 2 etc), xt with 360kb disk had 2 heads, so no need to flip the disk.
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Didn't the IBM 5150 have a single sided floppy disk drive ?
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wrote:Didn't the IBM 5150 have a single sided floppy disk drive ?
Only very early iterations of the 5150, I would imagine they are quite tough to find now. Most later iterations that were somewhat affordable for home users had a double sided drive.
Don't quote me without researching it though 😜, We (my family) didn't get a PC until an AT around '87.
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?
Yes, early 5150s had single sided floppy drives. DOS 1.0 and 1.1 would format a single sided disk to 160kB. DOS 2.0 and later would format the same disk to 180kB. Anything in an XT or later would have been the double sided 360k drive.
Also, the 5150 is the only IBM PC to have a cassette port on the back, right next to the keyboard connector. You could order a 5150 without any floppy drive at all and just use a cassette. These were the Model 1 and later the Model 104 configurations.
I remember that we purchased a commercial product that punched a factory looking square write protect notch on the other side of our disks. We used this on our C64, since the 1541 disk drive was single sided. All of our disks had programs loaded on both sides.
The only systems where this method would not work, were with hard sectored disk drives that had a sensor for the index hole. When you flipped a disk over in one of these types of drives, the index sensor was no longer aligned with the hole in the disk jacket, and could not detect the index hole in the spinning magnetic media inside. Luckily for us, Commodore systems did not use hard sectored disk drives.
