The Commodore 8280 is a dual 8" floppy disk drive for

Commodore International Commodore International (other names include Commodore International Limited) was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Mac ...

computers. It uses a wide rectangular steel case form similar to that of the Commodore 4040, and uses the parallel

IEEE-488 IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett-Packard as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and is ...

interface common to Commodore PET/CBM computers. The 8280 replaced the earlier 806x series 8" drives and switched to half-height drives. Like the 8061/62 units, the 8280 supports

IBM 3740 IBM 3740 Data Entry System was a data entry system that was announced by IBM in 1973. It recorded data on an 8" diskette, a new recording medium from IBM, for fast, flexible, efficient data entry to either high-production, centralized operations ...

disks. However, instead of 500k group code recording (GCR) format used by other Commodore drives, it uses MFM as its native disk recording format, the only 8-bit Commodore drive to do so apart from the

1581 1581 ( MDLXXXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) in the Julian calendar, and a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar) of the Proleptic Gregorian calendar. Events Ja ...

. Contrary to the 8061/62, the drive ROM has the capability for formatting disks and verifying them, eliminating the need for external utility disk for these operations. The manual contains also a simple BASIC listing of a program to read sectors from IBM 3470 disks.

References

CBM floppy disk drives {{microcompu-stub