BillyHW Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 Surely they didn't write to each disk with a drive. Just curious. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 (edited) Not with a standard floppy drive as you know it. no. But multi-disk machines working at higher speed. the disks are whipped around and the head writes the stuff. In smaller operations out of mom's basement, regular drives were used. shit like this - http://www.copystation.com/ Edited March 3, 2012 by Keatah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyHW Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 So many moving parts to fail! Seriously, how could they crank out all those copies of Windows 3.1??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 3, 2012 Share Posted March 3, 2012 (edited) yep. All those moving parts to fail. Some machines are simplified and blank floppies are recorded assembly-line style. Matter of seconds.. 20 tops maybe?? Edited March 3, 2012 by Keatah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyHW Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 How long would it take to write a whole disk vs. a home computer drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 My understanding is that they had robotic disk stacker feeders to load disks into the drives. Just start it going and come back later to a hundred recorded discs. I'll bet if you saw the setup for recording Apple II disks, there would be a genuine Disk ][ down in there. I'm sure it depended on whether it was Apple, Commodore, or any standard FM/MFM format. The former would normally only be recordable on the same brand equipment. As for the actual copying, if they had any brains, the copying software would do track writes. I'm sure copy protection slowed things down a bit. It's possible there would be a picture somewhere in the back page Byte ads of the early '80s. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TMR Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 My understanding is that they had robotic disk stacker feeders to load disks into the drives. Just start it going and come back later to a hundred recorded discs. I'll bet if you saw the setup for recording Apple II disks, there would be a genuine Disk ][ down in there. I'm sure it depended on whether it was Apple, Commodore, or any standard FM/MFM format. The former would normally only be recordable on the same brand equipment. Most industrial copiers were capable of just about anything from what i gather, but they were huge, expensive beasties so most smaller publishers never owned their own gear and had to pay specialist duplication firms. It's tape rather than disk but you can see a commercial duplicator working in at around the 26:50 mark As for the actual copying, if they had any brains, the copying software would do track writes. I'm sure copy protection slowed things down a bit. Sometimes it'd stop things completely, i once met one of the developers of Venom Wing on the Amiga at a trade show because he'd come over to the UK to get a master copy ready for duplication and had been stuck there for a week because the protection had been so hairy that the commercial duplicator couldn't deal with it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Fairly sure a place I worked at 25 years ago had an 8" floppy mastering system with a hopper you just loaded the blanks into. Then you just let it do it's thing and kept topping it up. In theory you could have a floppy drive with multiple heads per surface and write an entire disk in a few seconds, no idea if anyone ever bothered to do it though. Most duplication systems seem to just rely on a brute force approach with lots of drives and a bit of automation. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyHW Posted March 7, 2012 Author Share Posted March 7, 2012 My understanding is that they had robotic disk stacker feeders to load disks into the drives. Just start it going and come back later to a hundred recorded discs. I'll bet if you saw the setup for recording Apple II disks, there would be a genuine Disk ][ down in there. I'm sure it depended on whether it was Apple, Commodore, or any standard FM/MFM format. The former would normally only be recordable on the same brand equipment. Most industrial copiers were capable of just about anything from what i gather, but they were huge, expensive beasties so most smaller publishers never owned their own gear and had to pay specialist duplication firms. It's tape rather than disk but you can see a commercial duplicator working in at around the 26:50 mark As for the actual copying, if they had any brains, the copying software would do track writes. I'm sure copy protection slowed things down a bit. Sometimes it'd stop things completely, i once met one of the developers of Venom Wing on the Amiga at a trade show because he'd come over to the UK to get a master copy ready for duplication and had been stuck there for a week because the protection had been so hairy that the commercial duplicator couldn't deal with it! What did the copy protection consist of? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TMR Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 What did the copy protection consist of? i don't know unfortunately, much of the more devious stuff was apparently stripped for Venom Wing's final release and it was a very long time ago when i met him and my memory was poor even then! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 What did the copy protection consist of? A load of XORing . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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