Sometimes a Floppy is Still Required

I’ve been having too much fun recently to write. Sorry about that.

One of the problems I have found is that there is no way (that I have yet found) to use the MicroDrive with CP/M or UCSD Pascal. (There is a way to use the MicroDrive with DOS 3.3, it is called DOSMASTER and I still have not been able to get it to work.)

But finding a supply of 5.25” floppies is challenge. All of mine left for places unknown years ago and the only ones I have found around locally have been high density or something from a mushroom farm. I have read about the problems of the magnetic medium or its top coating clogging the disk drive heads and forcing the owners to clean and almost rebuild the drives. Not something I look forward to doing myself.

I found a listing in an online auction for a supply of still sealed disks and bid. The final price was about equal to the shipping charges. So I am now the owner of 50 blank new disks for less than $20 delivered. (When I first started with Apple in the late 1970s the same disks were $10 each.

I have completed the creation of a base set of CP/M disks so I now have a fully operational system on that side including:

• dBase II (or perhaps dBase ][ as I have seen it sometimes)
• WordStar and Word Perfect
• COBOL
• FORTRAN
• Pascal
• Assembler
• FORTH
• PL/I
• BASIC Compiler

It’s a great start.

Sometimes a Floppy is Not Enough

Hard disks for microcomputers were just starting to come on the scene when I exited Apple for the dark side of a PC clone and a copy of MS DOS. Over the almost thirty years since then the price has declined from around $20,000 for a 5 MB drive to less than $100 for over .5 TB. Along with this decrease in price has also come an increase in reliability and access speed. Given those circumstances, I am not a purist to the extent of demanding a hard disk originally intended for an 8-bit Apple. Plus, I have lost hard disks that were less than a year old. I could not imagine depending upon a hard disk 25 or more years old. Thankfully, I do not have to rely on one.

Current companies have developed an IDE adapter that fits the original Apple expansion bus. Other bright people have combined this type adapter with a Compact Flash (CF) memory cardholder allowing the CF card to be a solid-state hard disk. After a bit of research I selected the MicroDrive from ReactiveMicro of New Jersey (http://www.reactivemicro.com/). At $135, it includes all I needed to restart in Apple computing.

Beyond the essential hardware (including a 128 MB CF card yielding four 32 MB Apple ProDOS hard disks and a USB CF adapter for using the CF card on a PC or Mac), Henry Courbis of ReactiveMicro preloads all four hard disks with preformatted disk images. While disks 3 and 4 are empty and ready for anything you may want to put there (mine are still empty), disk 2 has Glen Bredon’s DOS.MASTER preinstalled to allow you to use DOS 3.3 applications within an Apple ProDOS hard disk. Disk 1 is already formatted with the final ProDOS release and many critical utilities. Among those utilities are:

- MicroDrive Utilities
- ShrinkIt
- CopyIIPlus
- DiskMaker 8
- Disk2File

Also included is a 5.25” flip floppy to get you started as well as a CD with additional documentation and utilities such as Andy McFadden’s Windows based CiderPress file manager.

Since the Apple nominally boots from the highest slot number to the lowest, I put the MicroDrive in slot 7, turned on the power, and grinned from ear-to-ear.