Amstrad Bet on 3-Inch Floppies When Everyone Else Went 3.5
Why Amstrad chose the 3" drives
A Hacker News thread digs into why Amstrad equipped machines like the PCW 8256 with 3-inch drives instead of the cheaper, higher-capacity 3.5-inch standard. Commenters swap memories of the era: one installed a 3.5-inch drive in the second slot for twice the storage at a lower price, another learned Z80 assembly and CP/M on a PCW 8256, and a third only now learned 3-inch floppies ever existed.
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.
- roryirvine
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!
- AkBKukU
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.
[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...
- fanf2
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.
- noir_lord
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).
There are some interesting hobby projects to add IDE drives and internet access https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA_YpQ9suJ8
- unnah
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#3-inch_%2...