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Commodore 64 Peripherals
This article is about the various external peripherals of the Commodore 64 home computer. Due to the backwards compatibility of the Commodore 128, most peripherals will work on that system, as well. There's some compatibility with the VIC-20 and PET too. Storage Tape drives In the United States, the 1541 floppy disk drive was widespread. By contrast, in Europe, the C64 was often used with cassette tape drives (Datasette), which were much cheaper, but also much slower than floppy drives. The Datasette plugged into a proprietary edge connector on the Commodore 64's motherboard. Standard blank audio cassettes could be used in this drive. Data tapes could be write-protected in the same way as audio cassettes, by punching out a tab on the cassette's top edge. An adapter for the proprietary connector was available from CARDCO It was assigned as device 1 (default). The Datasette's speed was very slow (about 300 baud). Loading a large program at normal speed could take up ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stream (computing)
In computer science, a stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time. A stream can be thought of as items on a conveyor belt being processed one at a time rather than in large batches. Streams are processed differently from batch data – normal functions cannot operate on streams as a whole, as they have potentially unlimited data, and formally, streams are ''codata'' (potentially unlimited), not data (which is finite). Functions that operate on a stream, producing another stream, are known as filters, and can be connected in pipelines, analogously to function composition. Filters may operate on one item of a stream at a time, or may base an item of output on multiple items of input, such as a moving average. Examples The term "stream" is used in a number of similar ways: * "Stream editing", as with sed, awk, and perl. Stream editing processes a file or files, in-place, without having to load the file(s) into a user interface. One example of such use is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore 1581
The Commodore 1581 is a 3½-inch double-sided double-density floppy disk drive that was released by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1987, primarily for its C64 and C128 home/personal computers. The drive stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM encoding but formats different from the MS-DOS (720 kB), Amiga (880 kB), and Mac Plus (800 kB) formats. With special software it's possible to read C1581 disks on an x86 PC system, and likewise, read MS-DOS and other formats of disks in the C1581 (using Big Blue Reader), provided that the PC or other floppy handles the size format. This capability was most frequently used to read MS-DOS disks. The drive was released in the summer of 1987 and quickly became popular with bulletin board system (BBS) operators and other users. Like the 1541 and 1571, the 1581 has an onboard MOS Technology 6502 CPU with its own ROM and RAM, and uses a serial version of the IEEE-488 interface. Inexplicably, the drive's ROM contains commands for parallel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore 1571
The Commodore 1571 is Commodore's high-end 5¼" floppy disk drive, announced in the summer of 1985. With its double-sided drive mechanism, it has the ability to use double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) floppy disks, storing a total of 360 kB per floppy. It also implemented a "burst mode" that doubled transfer speeds, helping address the very slow performance of previous Commodore drives. Earlier Commodore drives used a custom group coded recording format that stored 170 kB per side of a disk. This made it fairly competitive in terms of storage, but limited it to only reading and writing disks from other Commodore machines. The 1571 was designed to partner with the new Commodore 128 (C128), which introduced support for CP/M. Adding double-density MFM encoding allowed the drive to read and write contemporary CP/M disks (and many others). In contrast to its single-sided predecessors, the 1541 and the briefly-available 1570, the 1571 can use both sides of the disk at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore 1570
The Commodore 1570 is a 5¼" floppy disk drive for the Commodore 128 home/personal computer. It is a single-sided, 170 kB version of the Commodore 1571, released as a stopgap measure when Commodore International was unable to provide sufficient quantities of 1571s due to a shortage of double-sided drive mechanisms (which were supplied by an outside manufacturer). Like the 1571, it can read and write both GCR and MFM disk formats. The 1570 utilizes a 1571 logic board in a cream-colored original-1541-like case with a drive mechanism similar to the 1541's except that it was equipped with track-zero detection. Like the 1571, its built-in DOS provides a data burst mode for transferring data to the C128 computer at a faster speed than a 1541 can. Its ROM also contains some DOS bug fixes that didn't appear in the 1571 until much later. The 1570 can read and write all single-sided CP/M-format disks that the 1571 can access. Although the 1570 is compatible with the Commodore 64, the C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore 1541
The Commodore 1541 (also known as the CBM 1541 and VIC-1541) is a floppy disk drive which was made by Commodore International for the Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore's most popular home computer. The best-known floppy disk drive for the C64, the 1541 is a single-sided 170-kilobyte drive for 5¼" disks. The 1541 directly followed the Commodore 1540 (meant for the VIC-20). The disk drive uses group coded recording (GCR) and contains a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, doubling as a disk controller and on-board disk operating system (DOS) processor. The number of sectors per track varies from 17 to 21 (an early implementation of zone bit recording). The drive's built-in disk operating system is CBM DOS 2.6. History Introduction The 1541 was priced at under at its introduction. A C64 plus a 1541 cost about $900, while an Apple II with no disk drive cost $1,295. The first 1541 drives produced in 1982 have a label on the front reading VIC-1541 and have an off-white case to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floppy Disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of . Subsequently, the 5¼-inch and then the 3½-inch became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks. Floppy disk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birmingham Sound Reproducers
Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) was a 20th-century British manufacturer of record player turntables, and, for a time, housewares. History Early years Daniel McLean McDonald (1905–1991) founded Birmingham Sound Reproducers as a private company in 1932 in the West Midlands of England. By 1947, the company chiefly manufactured communications sets (intercoms), laboratory test equipment, and sound recording and reproducing instruments including phonographs. Record turntables and related products In the early 1950s, Samuel Margolin began buying auto-changing turntables from BSR, using them as the basis of his Dansette record player. Over the next twenty years, Margolin manufactured more than a million of these players, and "Dansette" became a household word in Britain. In 1957, BSR, also known by the name BSR McDonald, became a public company which by 1961 had grown to employ 2,600. It supplied turntables and autochangers to many of the world’s record player manufactu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rotronics Wafadrive
Wafadrive packaging Rotronics Wafadrive shown with two Wafa tapes, a blank 64 kB and software release tape Front and back of a Rotronics 64 kB Wafa tape The Rotronics Wafadrive is a magnetic tape storage peripheral launched in late 1984 for the ZX Spectrum home computer. Each tape is a continuous loop, unlike cassette tape. It was intended to compete with Sinclair's ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive. The Wafadrive comprises two continuous loop stringy floppy tape drives, an RS-232 interface and Centronics Centronics Data Computer Corporation was an American manufacturer of computer printers, now remembered primarily for the parallel interface that bears its name, the Centronics connector. History Foundations Centronics began as a division ... parallel port. The drives can run at two speeds: High speed (for seeking) and low speed (for reading/writing, which was significantly slower than that of Microdrives). The cartridges (or "wafers"), the same as tho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore Datasette
The third, most common version of the 1530 C2N Datassette The Commodore 1530 (C2N) Datasette, later also Datassette (a portmanteau of ''data'' and ''cassette''), is Commodore's dedicated magnetic tape data storage device. Using compact cassettes as the storage medium, it provides inexpensive storage to Commodore's 8-bit home/personal computers, notably the PET, VIC-20, and C64. A physically similar model, Commodore 1531, was made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 series computers. Features Typical compact cassette interfaces of the late 1970s use a small controller in the computer to convert digital data to and from analog tones. The interface is then connected to the cassette deck using normal audio cables like RCA jacks or 3.5mm phone jacks. This sort of system was used on the Apple II and TRS-80 Color Computer, as well as many S-100 bus systems, and allow them to be used with any cassette player with suitable connections. left, The Datasette loading process In the D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ZX Microdrive
ZX Microdrive unit The ZX Microdrive is a magnetic-tape data storage system launched in July 1983 by Sinclair Research for its ZX Spectrum home computer. It was proposed as a faster-loading alternative to the cassette and cheaper than a floppy disk, but it suffered from poor reliability and lower speed. Microdrives used tiny cartridges containing a endless loop of magnetic tape, which held a minimum of 85 kB and performed a complete circuit in approximately eight seconds. The Microdrive technology was later also used in the Sinclair QL and ICL One Per Desk personal computers. Development Microdrive cartridge with case It is claimed the Microdrive concept was originally suggested by Andrew Grillet at an interview with Sinclair Research in 1974. Grillet proposed "a version of the Learjet Stereo 8 system, modified to allow two 64k core images per track for roll-out roll-in swapping using the KUTS protocol". Grillet was offered a better-paying job at Xerox, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
