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Posted By

MMS
on 2016-09-18
18:57:14
 Re: What would I do differently in the Plus/4

1571: that drive did no exist at the time of Plus/4 development.

They developped a brand new parallel communication interface, JUST and purely for the floppy drive.
It became 4 times faster than the IEC (IEE-488 serial implementation). Same speed as the IEE-488 drives.

But is required extra IC, housing for the device, etc. and only self-compatible, and used up the Expansion port.

At the same time, Commodore HAD a lot of IEE-488 devices, like the huge, 1MB capacity SFD1001 (I also have), 8050, 8250 drives, the really attractive MPP1361, CBM6400 printers, plotters and other more professional products.
Instead of develop a self-compatible floppy drive, they should have enstrenghten the professional part of the Plus/4 by adding an IEE-488 port. With that step, a lot of already existing (more professional) hardware would have been available for the Plus/4, with higher speed (1550 byte/sec for SFD1001 VS 400byte/sec of 1541)
It was told, that for VIC-20 and C64 the IEEE-488 was dropped due to the high price of implementation, but in 1983 the Commodore team should already now, how much debate the snail speed 1541 generated, and partially destroyed C64's image as a professional computer.
So instead of developing a new standard, they should have been working on a cheap IEEE-488 integration, and no new floppy drive should have been developped, just to use the available ones.

Then the Plus/4 could underline it's professional part and could became a Janus platform. Start as a cheap computer for starters with IEC devices (even datasettes), but could upgrade it's capabilities significantly with more professional grade IEE-488 devices.
Certainly it would add some USD to the platform price (but save a lot of 1551 development costs), but (including the dropped numeric keyboard idea) could step up as an educational and semi serious platform, and noone would expect it to be a playing computer with sprites and fancy sound.



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