This is something I've done a lot of research on and getting timelines ironed out. Sony did sell the 3.5in Micro Floppy Disk drive before Matsushita and Hitachi were able to get the 3in Compact Floppy Disk on the market, but only by months, not years. The Amdek Amdisk III was being shown in 1982 [1] using 3in CFD drives. It was being reviewed by publications in 1983 [2]. The drives were on the market before Amstrad used them and were very seriously contending with Sony [3].
The Sony MFD had more industry support than the CFD, but it didn't hit critical mass until the Macintosh released in 1984. Every single machine before that using Sony MFDs failed to widely compete because the drives and disks were still too uncommon, aside from HP who had a closed ecosystem. Some (Jonos Escort, CDI DOT) even attempted to re-released with 5.25in drives to save the base computer design. In 1984 there were still new [4] small floppy formats being introduced, it absolutely made sense to still try to use CFD. I would say especially for a lower end market aimed at children CFDs would be better as they are more robust.
Acorn started using 3.5” drives in 1984 with the Electron Plus 3 (and later the Master Compact in 1986 and Archimedes in 1988, possibly some earlier peripherals that I don’t remember).
AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
The long-rumoured explanations went something along the lines of Amstrad getting them from a bankruptcy auction and/or salvaging them from a scrapheap after another computer manufacturer abandoned their project when it became clear that 3.5" had become the de facto standard.
Neither of those really made much sense - the choice would have been made about a year before 3.5" became unstoppable, and if there'd been a big computer manufacturer bankruptcy then why not sell off the whole computers rather than just the disk drives?
RP's explanation still hangs on Amstrad's reputation for being cheap'n'cheerful (reusing the ubiquitous 5.25" controllers & drivers definitely will have brought the cost down) but rings a lot more true than those other stories.
I was a 8512 owner so had the fancy-pants DSDD variant as my B: drive. The disks were great - not just more robust than 3.5", but the Amsoft-branded ones came with a jewel case with standardised inlay and labels. Even the soft slip cases you got with the Maxell ones were pretty useful!
I had the Amstrad version of the speccy (+3) (I had a few different speccies over the years all the way back to the rubber keyed one) that took the 3" disks, it overlapped with getting a PC so the writing was already on that particular wall.
The disks worked great, I don't recall one ever failing in use (unlike the 3.5" on the PC), it was night and day compared to faffing with tapes at least.
They where in my opinion the best spectrum made and while Amstrad may have a reputation for cheaping out they were (from what I remember it has been a long time) no worse than the previous speccies (and better than the early ones).
I remember that when my father took me to get a computer and there were 2 CPC464 versions, one with the tape and the other with the 3" disk, I thought that tapes are something there for years and that is what I'm getting.
Truth be told, I was just 7 at the time so it was just a choice based on that I was more familiar with audio tapes :)
According to Wikipedia, 3-inch disks were not only used in Amstrad and Sinclair home computers, but also by the smaller British home computer makers Oric and Tatung, as well as Sega and Yamaha. However there are no details about which Sega and Yamaha models those might be...
It's interesting to hear Tatung described as "British", but for their computers that's an accurate description. I know the same 'Tatung' from their iconic Taiwanese electric steamer[0]. While Tatung is a Taiwanese company, their British research lab designed the Tatung Einstein TC-01 home computer with a 3" Hitachi floppy drive.
I highly recommend this newsletter on the Tatung electric steamer. Likely worthy of its own HN post.
The Oric Microdisc was a rare peripheral, rather than being built into a computer like with the Amstrads.
It was originally promised for the Oric-1 (with no details about what form it would take) but details were initially vague, with it being announced as a 3" drive only around the time of the release of the follow-up model (the Oric Atmos). It finally arrived on sale around a year after the Atmos, only a few months before Tangerine went out of business. I can't imagine many were actually sold in the UK, though some probably turned up in France where the Atmos was a bit more successful.
My first computer was an Amstrad 8256 (also known as the Joyce). It came with a 3" drive. They worked ok but were expensive. After a while I installed a standard 3.5 " drive in the second drive slot. Besides being cheaper and much easier to obtain, they also had twice the capacity, as I recall. Over time I also installed a modem and replaced the 8 bit dot matrix printer with a 16 bit one.
Do you mean replacing the 9-pin dot matrix printer with a 24-pin one? 9 pins allowed printing a line of text with ascenders and descenders in one pass.
So much nostalgia. The CPC6128 was my first computer back in the mid 80s so I’ve got a lot of love for it - including these discs. The little tab switch on the top I could stuff with paper if I wanted to make an unwritable system disc into something I could use to store that game my cousin had.
They came back to nz from a trip in the uk with a load of games on tape and we didn’t have a tape machine. As a workaround I pulled my sisters ghetto blaster and the amstrad apart so I could hot-wire the two together so I could play Gryzor (Contra). Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.
I had a 6128. It was pretty great, booting straight to the BASIC prompt, but it wasn't too hard to load programs either. I used to get the bus to town to grab my copy of Amstrad Action with a tape on the front every month and excitedly try and get the games to load off a cheap tape player. I can still hear those loading noises - oooo eeeee shshshshshshshshsh
He's referring to the Shugart bus, which was used for almost all floppy disk drives (Apple and Commodore being the great exceptions), regardless of format. That absolutely spoke not against 3.5" floppies, which Sony released quite a number of years earlier.
Funny that he leaves out Atari, which managed to release in spring of '85 a system with 3.5" FDD to a comparable price.
Don't know why he felt the need to justify their decision 40 years later and then still just emit phrases from marketing.
I love the first response, which says that anyone who is interested in computers should know the reason why they chose 3" floppies.
I think, by definition, anybody who is arguing about 3.5" and 3" floppies in 2021 probably knows a fair bit more about computers than the average person. But everything is relative, huh?
Yeah I know a lot about computers and I was very active in those days and I had no idea 3" floppies existed. I've never seen them in a shop, at a computer show or club or anything else.
And speaking of Matsushita setting up a dedicated production line for the 3-inch floppy drives, they will have done the same for the dedicated 2-inch floppy drives production line 5 years later:
Another cost-saving measure: 3.5" floppies couldn't be flipped, so needed heads on both sides. Actually (TIL!) the first Macs had single-sided 3.5" drives, which wasted half the capacity of the disk (not sure if there were single-sided disks too?).
The Sony MFD had more industry support than the CFD, but it didn't hit critical mass until the Macintosh released in 1984. Every single machine before that using Sony MFDs failed to widely compete because the drives and disks were still too uncommon, aside from HP who had a closed ecosystem. Some (Jonos Escort, CDI DOT) even attempted to re-released with 5.25in drives to save the base computer design. In 1984 there were still new [4] small floppy formats being introduced, it absolutely made sense to still try to use CFD. I would say especially for a lower end market aimed at children CFDs would be better as they are more robust.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=ia91vNwYgLIC&pg=PA24&dq=mi...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=ui8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA75&dq=am...
[3] https://archive.org/details/ComputersElectronics1982-11/page...
[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=lC4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
AFAIK Acorn used a constant angular speed format (as did PCs when they started using 3.5” drives) and the same controller chips as for 5.25” drives. I thought the variable speed thing that Roland Perry talks about was proprietary to Apple, not a general requirement of the Sony drives.
Neither of those really made much sense - the choice would have been made about a year before 3.5" became unstoppable, and if there'd been a big computer manufacturer bankruptcy then why not sell off the whole computers rather than just the disk drives?
RP's explanation still hangs on Amstrad's reputation for being cheap'n'cheerful (reusing the ubiquitous 5.25" controllers & drivers definitely will have brought the cost down) but rings a lot more true than those other stories.
I was a 8512 owner so had the fancy-pants DSDD variant as my B: drive. The disks were great - not just more robust than 3.5", but the Amsoft-branded ones came with a jewel case with standardised inlay and labels. Even the soft slip cases you got with the Maxell ones were pretty useful!
The disks worked great, I don't recall one ever failing in use (unlike the 3.5" on the PC), it was night and day compared to faffing with tapes at least.
They where in my opinion the best spectrum made and while Amstrad may have a reputation for cheaping out they were (from what I remember it has been a long time) no worse than the previous speccies (and better than the early ones).
There are some interesting hobby projects to add IDE drives and internet access https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA_YpQ9suJ8
Tapes were a lot easier to copy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#3-inch_%2...
I highly recommend this newsletter on the Tatung electric steamer. Likely worthy of its own HN post.
0: https://newsletter.yunhai.shop/p/-taiwan-and-its-steam-cooke...
It was originally promised for the Oric-1 (with no details about what form it would take) but details were initially vague, with it being announced as a 3" drive only around the time of the release of the follow-up model (the Oric Atmos). It finally arrived on sale around a year after the Atmos, only a few months before Tangerine went out of business. I can't imagine many were actually sold in the UK, though some probably turned up in France where the Atmos was a bit more successful.
There's a bit of info at https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31261/Oric-Microdisc... so it definitely did exist (unlike several other peripherals promised by Tangerine over the years!)
S-220 maybe. By the time of the S550 they'd switched to 3.5" like everyone else.
They came back to nz from a trip in the uk with a load of games on tape and we didn’t have a tape machine. As a workaround I pulled my sisters ghetto blaster and the amstrad apart so I could hot-wire the two together so I could play Gryzor (Contra). Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.
Funny that he leaves out Atari, which managed to release in spring of '85 a system with 3.5" FDD to a comparable price.
Don't know why he felt the need to justify their decision 40 years later and then still just emit phrases from marketing.
I'm glad all the others chose 3.5".
I think, by definition, anybody who is arguing about 3.5" and 3" floppies in 2021 probably knows a fair bit more about computers than the average person. But everything is relative, huh?
https://youtu.be/YhKWMHN4m0U?t=67
I don't recall who made them, but I recall a three and a quarter floppy. Or maybe my memory's wrong?