What came before 40-pin IDE cables?

[Maximilian]

What came before 40-pin IDE cables?
Also what came before the xx-pin floppy drive cables we have today?

 

[OSX]

Before regular floppy cables, there cables with box connectors. Similar to a molex female socket. I have one laying around, I'll post pics later.

 

[Maximilian]

Kewl. Ive got somthing here, i think its what your talking about. Its got floppy IDE and somthing else, looks like a mini ISA slot actually.

 

[RebateMonger]

Hard drive cables in the IBM PC-compatible world have included:

SASI and SCSI - ca. 1981-1986 still with us, in various cable/pin configurations
MFM - Two cables - one for drive control and one for data - ca. 1983
ESDI - Often used for early PC servers - ca. 1985

IDE was developed around 1984 with cooperation between Compaq and Western Digital.
IDE allowed the old ST506 controller interface to be built into the hard drive itself. It became popular in the 1987-1990 time frame.

 

[Stumps]

I once had an old IBM PS/2 model 70 PC(i386DX20 cpu), it used the MCA(Micro Channel Architecture)bus for the FDD and HDD controller, it had a slot in the middle of the motherboard similar to a P2 cpu slot and a card was fitted to it and the Floppy and Harddisk plugged directly into it...not cables what so ever inside the PC....both drives recieved power from the motherboard....it was a very cool looking setup but wasn't what you would call upgradeable, the harddisk was expensive as hell to replace, even back in 1992 it cost over $4000 for a 60mb drive to suit it.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, MFM and similar drives had a flat cable about the same as today that could go to two drive, but also had a DATA Cable about 12 leads to each drive. Floppys have always been about the same, Cable Select, but with several different Cable select schemes. Also you could have 4 floppies on the cable before there were Hard Drives. Oops! Just told more than I intended. Jim

 

[Maximilian]

Yes, MFM, google image search says its the same as the mini ISA thing i pulled out of this old rig. Awsome, now i know what it is

 

[Ausm]

I had an MFM hard Drive now that brings back memories


Ausm

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, A little more history: MFM started out at 5MB. Soon became RLL which quit sending a sync bit with every byte thus increasing capacity by 50%. Became 7.5 mb, 10, 15 20 and up. My first HDwas a Seagate model 225 which also was the price, $225.00. Jim

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: JimPhelpsMI
Hi, A little more history: MFM started out at 5MB. Soon became RLL which quit sending a sync bit with every byte thus increasing capacity by 50%. Became 7.5 mb, 10, 15 20 and up. My first HDwas a Seagate model 225 which also was the price, $225.00. Jim

My first drive was a 20 meg ESDI drive that cost $2000. It was for my Compaq Deskpro 386/25. Total system cost was $12,000. Thank God my job paid for it! Still works to this day!

My first drive that I bought for my first system build was a 32meg ST-MFM, remember when you had to set the interleave and low-level format? Took hours! Paid 500 bucks for that! Proc was an 8088 that was 10mhz in turbo mode! With EGA! Woohoo! 16 colors!


*EDIT*

Actually, I just remembered. I had a 5 meg HD for my Atari 800 computer. It was external and cost a bloody fortune. Only caveat was it was a write-once HD. Couldnt format it or erase it, but 5 megs for the Atari 800 was an astronomical amount of storage!

 

[rivan]

I had a (?) 20 meg MFM drive back in the day, and I thought I was the shiz when I got 4 megs of RAM on a RLL hard card!

Asus doesn't have anything new with their RAM-drive, whatever it's called... except the addition of a power source that keeps the data live on standby...