Dropped down the comment section to say the same damn thing. During my youth I was under the impression CS would just magically let the drive I want be set to master. Had no clue how it actually worked until now. Haha.
@@Donchikiman Agree.. I thought it was triggering some actual negotiation between the drives, but this does explain why sometimes it wouldn't work (using a cable without the cut!) I also remember taking apart some cables, and finding the cut (missing pin) only within the connector at the end, so that was confusing..
@@mygaffer Relatively speaking, we all are. And if you think you're going to leave an impression, try recalling the name of each of your great grandparents.
@@KurtRichterCISSP my only hope is to write a tesis thats good enough so that people every 40 50 years jump on it and say, hey that adriazola guy was smart.
I think what I like about a lot of these videos is that they answer questions I had about PC building in the pre-internet age, and which I never thought to look up since getting easy access to the answers. Thanks againfor answering the questions I forgot I had!
Back in the day when I asked myself this same question, I simply read the pin-out spec (didn't everybody?), and my curiosity was sated, but you did go a bit deeper here. Good job.
By the time I was getting into PCs, the dual floppy setup was extremely rare. Though I did get my hands on a second one at one point and set it up to copy shareware floppies.
I'm pretty sure I did, too. But it's been a long time, and I had forgotten. And videos tend to contain more information than just answering the question. I didn't know they eventually removed the B: (/dev/fd1) drive from some cables, for example. Nor did I ever think to ask how cable select on IDE drives worked.
I was never able to get 2 IDE drives to function with 'cable select', and thanks to this video, I now know why. I had no idea that the cable needed to have a wire cut. Wish I had seen this a decade ago!
Haha so many things i knew and are placed on a backup medium in my head, as i haven't used this in ages. Floppy drive / ide selection jumpers. Ow the fiddling on those, without taking out the drive (lazy). Darn if you dropped those jumpers somewhere in the case, holding shaking the case to get the jumper out, must have happened once to everyone.
There are still jumpers on modern boards. and luckily basically almost every other connector uses the same 1/10 '' pitch, be it front heads, USB or fans. If the jumpers are too small there are some with a little flag on that helps getting them out.
Thanks for clearing up the reasons behind the twist, I didn't know that was it. Also the gap in the IDE cables one was a mystery for me - I genuinely thought my IDE cable was damaged when i noticed that. I guess i can now safely put it into service note that I know. Still, setting jumpers on the drives is not so bad that I would be complaining about no autoselect capabilities.
Not at all hard to add it with a machine. Imagine a wire feed guide being a round block with a slot for the wire the go through. To twist the wire instead of just pushing it straight down the wire, you thread the outside and push it through a threaded tube so that it wants to screw into the tube and thus spins in a circle.
kirbyswarp well one of the voltage or ground pins wasn't necessary in later designs and thus the cable was probably just not necessary for function at the time saving a few thousand dollars for the company
Depending on how new the board is you could flash from usb. Or start up a DOS from CD to do the flash. Atleast that is what I did when I had no functioning floppy drive.
Nice termination on the 34 pin floppy connector. I deal with so many old EPOS devices day to day and the connector is never the problem no matter how much dust it's accumulated. Design win!
I remember as child I always imagined that mysterious thing called PC must look awesome on the inside -- probably inspired by some SciFi movies. When then I had the first chance of being alone with an old model and a screwdriver I finally looked into one... and was hugely disappointed what a chaotic mess the thing is on the inside... the twist on the cable being only a minor flow as in why is this thing full of cables running amok anyway.
Some old motherboards had the "Swap floppy drives" option in the Bios. I used to just cut the floppy cable after the first plug, then use that option so drive B: is seen as A:
I had a Multi-IO card that expressed it so clearly in the manual: "Use flag distance cable please check pin 1 make correct to connect disk port golden pin. Cable other hand have two 34 pin female disk connector distance cable longer connector is DRIVER A." [sic.]
If you used the 80-wire ATA66+ cables, cable select worked, with the slave usually being in the middle. I standardised on this for many years. As for floppy cables, I used to make my own sometimes to neaten up people's systems... I've had to do a few with two twists. On my first PC, the internal floppy drive had to be set as DS0, and I found a few on which that could not be done, or didn't work. Fortunately the two never coincided, but I could have modified the cable if necessary.
80-wire IDE cables were the best, they reduced cross-talk and interference. They were basically a *must* if you were going to be burning DVD's on PATA. Sadly most people hadn't a clue that some PATA cables had 80 wires while others had 40. I walked into my local PC supply store and asked the guy for an 80-wire ATA cable and he looked at me like I had four heads. He then looked around and found a box of loose wires and said "is it one of these"? I was like "OMG" Dude wasn't even one of those guys from Best Buy or some other box store, but a local PC store for enthusiasts. When I worked IT I'd hoard them as we scrapped older units for spares. Probably pitched a few dozen 40-wires, but I held onto those 80's, they were surprisingly hard to come by.
As a side note when you had 2 drives connected without the twist or had the jumpers set the same strange things happened. The computer would try to use both drives at the same time and mostly would lead to errors but sometimes rarely you could get a setup where it would write to 2 disks at the same time.
It was fun to learn all of this when I first started building my own computers or before that, swapping out parts. Ever lost a jumper before the days of Amazon and eBay and smartphones? CompUSA wasn't around here.
In the years before IBM had PCs (1970s) most drives were selected by jumpers on the drive as shown, except that a total of four drives were available. This includes bot the 5 1/4" predecessors to 3.5" disks as well as the original 8" floppy drives. The ability to add floppy drives was more cost efficient, even at $500/8" 128KB drives, than $3000 for a 14" 20MB hard drive that would crash if you stared at it too hard. :D Cromemco was actually the first company I saw to use the cable twist idea on their C-10 computer, except they used single drive external units with separate custom cables similar to GPIB connectors. Their system allowed new drives to just be connected to the back of the previous drives' connection.
I love how you're talking about this like it's some ancient history thing. I just barely stopped using my computer that uses these ribbons a few months ago.
I like how his video makes it sound like IDE is the current, state-of-the-art interface for disk drives. It kind of reminds me of CGP Grey's video on the nocebo effect, where he doesn't mention the placebo effect at all (like there's one thing on most viewers' minds that the video refuses to address even though everyone's already thinking it).
Building PCs in the 90's taught me all this pretty early on :) Working on older systems later on I often found myself being the only one who understood the jumpers and cables........ It may be a lot more user friendly building PCs today but it was so much more fun back when it actually required some skill to do. There also wasn't any youtube or google to help you out back then, you figured it out or you paid someone else to fix it.
Wow, years after I drop IDE stuff for SATA, and only now do I realize I didn't have to set those jumpers for IDE Hard disks and CD drives if the cable had that notch for the master/slave detect, I'd still end up at least mastering one drive and then have the other drive select what ever (unless it only provided Master and Slave options)
oh yeah.... never took note before - thanx, you've made me realize I'm not as nerdy as I thought - unless it comes to 70's-00 cars.... yup then I really have no get out of jail free card like this.
I would also like to point out that drives can be assigned by the OS as well. In a DOS 6.22 system with one drive, if you attempt to access the B drive, the Os will ask you to insert a disk into drive B, and when you continued, it would access the single floppy as drive B. Attempting to access drive A again would set the floppy back to drive A.
Ahh I forgot about this but in my defence it's been along time since I've used one, hmmm not since a entire 3.5" would fit your entire ASM(Assembler) course work. God I feel old :)
Goddammit. Wish I had known this 15 years ago. I can remember struggling with drive jumper assignments, and the sometimes unexpected behavior that would result. If I had realized that the twist was an integrated drive select things would have been much easier.
I miss IDE cables, I never had to replace one. On the other hand some SATA cables that I bought in 2012, I had to replace them recently. But it is hard to tell a good quality one from a cheap one just from eyesight.
I was in an electrical engineering college course (Ontario Canada) , that up until 2006 required ALL projects and assignments to be submitted via FLOPPY DISC ! YES, 3.5" floppy discs ! After 2007 everything went to online submissions. Even as early as 2006, many people simply didn't have floppies on their laptops, so they had to copy stuff to a USB drive, then use one of the school's lab room computers to copy their files onto a floppy, and then submit that in for marking. I have a stack of old floppies, and even a package of floppies unopened (a museum piece), as well as 2 external USB floppy drives. Never know when that might come in handy, right? Floppies make good 'COASTERS' for cold drinks on a hot humid day.
Well, I have the answer to your question. Its like this. If you study the gray cover of your cable you will see that your seeing rough covering over a row of circular apertures. And on your board is metal pins. Thats because on the inside of your IDE cable is a group of metal wires. The gray substance seals them together as well as seals the electricity in. They are traditionally SOLD as 1, but the plastic can tear under pressure. The jumper DIP switches are for grounding and the position when reported back to the Motherboard assigns it a DRIVE in the CMOS configuration. You can still overide the drive standard and change drive signing if you wish within managing your CMOS and your JUMPER dip switches there after the standard which becomes necessary sometimes and a pain. But mostly we just change for MASTER and SLAVE drives no more.
The original Shugart interface only had one shared motor enable line for 4 drives, and usually all drives connected to the same cable would spin up simoultaneously when this was activated. By replacing a Drive-Select line with an additional motor-enable, IBM solved that problem as well.
So.. here's the question... If they set up all the drives to be "B", and needed a twist to make them "A"... then why not make them all "A" and needed the twist to make them "B", since more than likely back-in-the-day people were cheap and may not have been able to pay for an extra floppy? (And thus would have probably liked/could have had a cable without a twist at all?
Suhkma Dheek that makes a bit more sense. a drive in the middle would be unintuitive and an a only cable whilst simpler, would be redundant/useless if you needed two drives. (you'd have to buy an additional cable)
I miss floppies, what I liked most about them was that you could stick them in a box and flick through them like cards. They were a really tangible chunk of storage that was easy to manage and organise, now I have three 16GB USB sticks and I couldn't tell you what's on any of them! I want something like floppies again: a similar, flat form factor, a wide range of capacities from a few hundred MB to GB or even TB. I suppose SD cards are pretty close. maybe I just need a better storage solution for them, some kind of larger card I can clip them into and write a little label on to remind me what's on there. Hmm…
The specification for drives originally supported 4 drives. If you look at really old 5.25" drives they have 4 drive select jumpers. Some old Tandy computers (the non-PC based ones) could run 4 drives.
The highest number of connections I ever saw in one of those cables was ten. It might have been a custom cable but it had a drive on every port. I don't think that you could use all of them at the same time. Something cool and strange was the usb transfer cable that you could use to transfer data straight from one pc to another but it needed a special program to work but it was way faster than almost any other type of transfer on the market at the time but it never saw much use outside the server market. I have used them and I know that they were fully functional but if you used it in a way not intended you might damage one or both devices. I also never understood why we didn't switch to USB c and omni sooner. We had the technical capabilities to make them and outside super compact situations they would be more durable and easier to use without damaging the port. If you don't know usb omni has one port that looks like a 3.5mm headphone jack but it would have four or more bands and you could use the normal headphones with it even if it was the version that had five or six bands.
Never used CS for IDE. Also, long ago, reading about the floppy disk interface I was shocked about data being SERIAL and not PARALLEL like in the IDE / ATA interface. I dont recall why but they use more control cables than IDE.
There's a suprising amount of history to serial data transfers, there was quite the back-and-forth. Before the Universal Serial Bus (USB) there was Parallel Port, but before that was the Serial Port. I would not be surprised if there's a common history between the floppy ATA interface and the serial port honestly.
Also, Early Jumpers weren't little plastic thing that covered some pins that moved easily (and got lost easily). The floppies on my Kaypro machines (z80 cp/m machines circa mid 1980's) have what an small dip socket but instead of a chip it would have a piece of plastic with legs and with pieces of metal going across. To open the jumper you pry up on the metal pieces so they don't connect. To Close the jumper you push the pieces of metal back down... With those kinds of jumpers the wire swap is nice.... Also, a Question.. What about the 7 wire twist on MFM and RLL hard drives? was it the same thing?
IBM back in the day was considered the PC standard. Apple and Commodore were small runner ups but that was about it. Hence why the twist became the norm.
One less thing to dream about. I still dont understand why they stopped using the Ready signal tho. I must admit it was indeed a pain building a pc back then having to set IRQ's & DMA's manually with jumpers and make sure they didnt conflict. However being able to set & configure the drives yourself was easy and not a chore and it has only made it harder with time to make em backwards compatible. Something that most retro games has probably figured out by now.
I don't know what the problem was really. It was super easy to configure drives. Using jumpers and flat cables made it simple to cable manage and use the shortest cables. Every twisted/select cable always looked like a rats nest in the with drives in the wrong spots.
Going back to this era of tech.. you touched on the floppy, but how about the same thing on the old MFM/RLL/ESDI hard drives, which shared a control cable, but each had their own DATA cable.. not to mention dealing with terminating resistors! Remember running a confg program to set your drive type? 1=10meg, 2=20 meg, etc..
If I remember corrrectly, that not the full truth. Pre-IBM disk standard (Shugart ?) hat 4 "drive select" wires/pins, but only one "Motor On". So all 4 drives had to rotate simultaneously. IBM not made drives "configurationless" but also had two separate "Motor On" signals for each drive at motherboard/controller card side.
I'm a bit confused by the way ide cable order described in this video. I don't know if it only applies to CS mode only but I'm pretty sure if you fix the drives mode via jumpers, then you need to put the master drive on the outer end, and slave drive in the middle. If you do otherwise performance drops drasticaly. I have lots of old ide cables with markings that say MASTER and SLAVE on the locations that I've mentioned.
Watch the video again. Those cables with the cut wire weren't very common in the long run. The typical configurations you're thinking of didn't have the cut wire configuration thing, that was kind of it's own unique thing. Hence the back asswards setup with such cables. Continuous uncut cables had a missing pin connection in the slave connector to accommodate basically the same thing. Go ahead, break open the back end of the slave connector on one of those old ribbon cables, I'm sure you'll see a missing connection on that same line.
Nostalgia nerd I don't want to put you under pressure but when will you do a game boy video? Because you have been talking about doing it for quite a while .
Which in turn kinda brings up why hard drives, even today. Remains C: and not A: or B: ... Hardware and software was designed for A nd B to be floppy drives and floppy drives only for a long time. For backwards compatibility, the first hard drive partition remains on C:, even when there are no floppy drives nor controllers around at all.
I was always confused about why cable manufacturers didn't have bare pins on that connection and the wires which make up the "twist" be detachable for flipping into the drive A or B specification.
I always knew about the floppy drives but always wondered what cable select on a hard drive was since almost all hard drive cable didn't have the break in the cables.
The short answer: because they control drive access and since the drives are "dumb," they need a different set of pins grounded to tell them what to do (top row instead of bottom).
Ok, so this is actually a good thing. Was trying to mod my Windows 10 pc the other day by adding a floppy drive out of an old computer, but gave up, because I thought I needed a new cable. LOL. Thanks for the tip!
The real nightmare with these were in the dark ages, when MFM was the norm. Each drive then had 2 cables. A controller cable like the floppy but with the twist at the other end, then a smaller data cable, one for each drive. 2 floppy and 2 hard drives back then, 4 cables.
I thought you meant the cables were twisted like rope, down the whole length. Forgot about that little twist in the FDD cable. As far as the wires for fans being twisted like rope, I found that the fan wire on my old Dell had a twisted wire for the case fan, and I thought it looked cool so I've been doing it ever since. Makes it a pain in the royal ass whenever you have to trace a wire though.
Ahhh, so that's why our primary drive partition is always the C: drive. Drives A and B fought such a battle for placement, that we still can't recover from.
i remember the first time i ran into an ide cable with that missing wire section. took me hours to figure out why i couldn't get my drives to work properly...
Hello, can You make a video to explain the diffefences betwen (ata100) and (ata133) or Uata133 and there was one more this with the ide cables (40 pin ide, 44pin ide and 80pin ide) i remember back in the (Pentium) time that my PC can recognize the cable that i was using like ide40 or ide 80 and i'm curious what îs the difference betwen them. Thank You :)
For some reason this made me remember something I was pondering ages ago. Quite a few years back I got a USB floppy drive to use with an old ultraslim laptop that didn't have a FDD built in. If I plugged this into a PC that already had a floppy drive it would start up with drive letter "B". I often wondered what windows would call the USB FDD if I plugged it into a PC that already had two floppy drives installed, But I never got around to trying it to see....... Did anyone here ever try this?
The Floppy standard was overly complicated from day one. A simple non serial system could have used between 6 and 8 wires and each drive should have had its own motherboard connector that could have been used for internal or external drives. A binary mode controlled system could have been done with as little as 3 wires, but 4 would have been better.
![Why Intel Stopped Using Processor Numbers [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JoU5_SJagYI/mqdefault.jpg)
Praised be SATA, who liberated all the slave drives.
Now we are all masters!!
Jack Kraken
you cant be master without a slave
You can be a master of your own destiny.
Abraham Lincoln likes this element.
let my people go, man!
I remember those days... and ribbon cables are one thing I don't miss about them. "Cable management" and "airflow" were a bit different then...
Round cables.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Indeed. Made life just that little bit easier.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Or DIY square cables by carefully segmenting and stacking. ;)
Cable management? What cable management?
back then no one cared about air flow back then it was all about the it was all about radiation shielding
1985: My first PC
2019: So THAT'S how Cable Select works!
Dropped down the comment section to say the same damn thing. During my youth I was under the impression CS would just magically let the drive I want be set to master. Had no clue how it actually worked until now. Haha.
@@Donchikiman Agree.. I thought it was triggering some actual negotiation between the drives, but this does explain why sometimes it wouldn't work (using a cable without the cut!) I also remember taking apart some cables, and finding the cut (missing pin) only within the connector at the end, so that was confusing..
Same here in 2020!
This video makes me feel every bit of my 38 years.
User He probably still has some 50 years left.
@@mygaffer Relatively speaking, we all are. And if you think you're going to leave an impression, try recalling the name of each of your great grandparents.
@@KurtRichterCISSP my only hope is to write a tesis thats good enough so that people every 40 50 years jump on it and say, hey that adriazola guy was smart.
@@ivanadriazola1991 Just make sure you have an editor for spelling and grammar. Lol
Simply Sherbert oh... No worries... I’m 13 and i own my own usb floppy disk and floppy drive... Actually store some stuff on em’... (￣▽￣ v)
I think what I like about a lot of these videos is that they answer questions I had about PC building in the pre-internet age, and which I never thought to look up since getting easy access to the answers.
Thanks againfor answering the questions I forgot I had!
Back in the day when I asked myself this same question, I simply read the pin-out spec (didn't everybody?), and my curiosity was sated, but you did go a bit deeper here. Good job.
By the time I was getting into PCs, the dual floppy setup was extremely rare. Though I did get my hands on a second one at one point and set it up to copy shareware floppies.
copy "shareware" floppies, oh of course, say no more sir
I see we are becoming quite the merry thread of people who know the fun and joy of using a belt punch tool on specific sectors on floppies.
Eurotrash RC
look up
"don't copy that floppy" on youtube
I'm pretty sure I did, too. But it's been a long time, and I had forgotten. And videos tend to contain more information than just answering the question.
I didn't know they eventually removed the B: (/dev/fd1) drive from some cables, for example. Nor did I ever think to ask how cable select on IDE drives worked.
I was never able to get 2 IDE drives to function with 'cable select', and thanks to this video, I now know why. I had no idea that the cable needed to have a wire cut.
Wish I had seen this a decade ago!
me too, now that I know. I think we took the right decision of using the jumpers, it was easy enough to use the master and slave jumpers.
I had a cable with that cut only once. Only one cable in 34 years. That's how rare those were.
Now the question is, does it matter which drive you set for master when you configure yourself?
+Snetmot Nosrorb Windows would not boot from a slave drive if I remember correct.
+DecibelAlex Probably right. But I was thinking more in terms of performance.
Haha so many things i knew and are placed on a backup medium in my head, as i haven't used this in ages. Floppy drive / ide selection jumpers. Ow the fiddling on those, without taking out the drive (lazy). Darn if you dropped those jumpers somewhere in the case, holding shaking the case to get the jumper out, must have happened once to everyone.
There are still jumpers on modern boards. and luckily basically almost every other connector uses the same 1/10 '' pitch, be it front heads, USB or fans.
If the jumpers are too small there are some with a little flag on that helps getting them out.
Thanks for clearing up the reasons behind the twist, I didn't know that was it. Also the gap in the IDE cables one was a mystery for me - I genuinely thought my IDE cable was damaged when i noticed that. I guess i can now safely put it into service note that I know. Still, setting jumpers on the drives is not so bad that I would be complaining about no autoselect capabilities.
I've wondered about this for 17 years and never thought to google it. Thank you!
Were these twists added by hand? I'd imagine it would be quite complicated to get a machine to do it.
Larry Bundy Jr, nice seeing you here!!!!
"top 10 hardware hacks added to consoles by by hand"
You sir are everywhere lol. STOP STALKING ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love ya Larry
many computer components and other electronics are assembled by hand.
Not at all hard to add it with a machine. Imagine a wire feed guide being a round block with a slot for the wire the go through. To twist the wire instead of just pushing it straight down the wire, you thread the outside and push it through a threaded tube so that it wants to screw into the tube and thus spins in a circle.
I didn't know i needed to know this, but now that I know it im totally intrigued.
Wow, this is relevant. I just bought one on ebay the other day realizing that all I had was IDE cables.
I had a cable that was missing pin 3 (as is the floppy drive), but the motherboard had all the pins. Do you know why that is?
kirbyswarp well one of the voltage or ground pins wasn't necessary in later designs and thus the cable was probably just not necessary for function at the time saving a few thousand dollars for the company
Well, I hope it works because I don't have another floppy drive. And I kind of need to flash the bios.
Depending on how new the board is you could flash from usb.
Or start up a DOS from CD to do the flash. Atleast that is what I did when I had no functioning floppy drive.
It's a pentium 3. No USB port on the motherboard, as far as I could tell floppy is the only way.
Nice termination on the 34 pin floppy connector. I deal with so many old EPOS devices day to day and the connector is never the problem no matter how much dust it's accumulated. Design win!
I remember as child I always imagined that mysterious thing called PC must look awesome on the inside -- probably inspired by some SciFi movies. When then I had the first chance of being alone with an old model and a screwdriver I finally looked into one... and was hugely disappointed what a chaotic mess the thing is on the inside... the twist on the cable being only a minor flow as in why is this thing full of cables running amok anyway.
Kids could watch this and not know the perils of the slaves and masters.
Proof once more that the best answer is often the simplest one. Amazing work.
Some old motherboards had the "Swap floppy drives" option in the Bios.
I used to just cut the floppy cable after the first plug, then use that option so drive B: is seen as A:
I had a Multi-IO card that expressed it so clearly in the manual: "Use flag distance cable please check pin 1 make correct to connect disk port golden pin. Cable other hand have two 34 pin female disk connector distance cable longer connector is DRIVER A." [sic.]
That sounds like a present day Facebook comment.
And now we get something of that old-time magic with Chinese products with their instructions put through Google Translate.
I love Chinglish.
If you used the 80-wire ATA66+ cables, cable select worked, with the slave usually being in the middle. I standardised on this for many years. As for floppy cables, I used to make my own sometimes to neaten up people's systems... I've had to do a few with two twists. On my first PC, the internal floppy drive had to be set as DS0, and I found a few on which that could not be done, or didn't work. Fortunately the two never coincided, but I could have modified the cable if necessary.
Actually have two froppy drives around that differ, one has the jumper puins the other misses them, but then they are in different ssystems anyway.
80-wire IDE cables were the best, they reduced cross-talk and interference. They were basically a *must* if you were going to be burning DVD's on PATA.
Sadly most people hadn't a clue that some PATA cables had 80 wires while others had 40. I walked into my local PC supply store and asked the guy for an 80-wire ATA cable and he looked at me like I had four heads. He then looked around and found a box of loose wires and said "is it one of these"? I was like "OMG" Dude wasn't even one of those guys from Best Buy or some other box store, but a local PC store for enthusiasts.
When I worked IT I'd hoard them as we scrapped older units for spares. Probably pitched a few dozen 40-wires, but I held onto those 80's, they were surprisingly hard to come by.
As a side note when you had 2 drives connected without the twist or had the jumpers set the same strange things happened. The computer would try to use both drives at the same time and mostly would lead to errors but sometimes rarely you could get a setup where it would write to 2 disks at the same time.
I wish I knew this 15 years ago, when I was still using IDE cables.
It was fun to learn all of this when I first started building my own computers or before that, swapping out parts. Ever lost a jumper before the days of Amazon and eBay and smartphones? CompUSA wasn't around here.
I always enjoy your videos. Keep up the good work!
Many thanks sir!
In the years before IBM had PCs (1970s) most drives were selected by jumpers on the drive as shown, except that a total of four drives were available. This includes bot the 5 1/4" predecessors to 3.5" disks as well as the original 8" floppy drives. The ability to add floppy drives was more cost efficient, even at $500/8" 128KB drives, than $3000 for a 14" 20MB hard drive that would crash if you stared at it too hard. :D
Cromemco was actually the first company I saw to use the cable twist idea on their C-10 computer, except they used single drive external units with separate custom cables similar to GPIB connectors. Their system allowed new drives to just be connected to the back of the previous drives' connection.
Thank you for an informative video without a bunch of extra crap.
I remember those fiddly jumpers on hard drives. I used to set them to cable select and just use that. It worked a treat.
I love how you're talking about this like it's some ancient history thing. I just barely stopped using my computer that uses these ribbons a few months ago.
yes but how long has it been since you actually used the floppy drive?
Wow. Makes a lot more sense than I was expecting.
O damn... these jumpers! I really hated them. Ironicly my new motherboard has alot of jumpers to switch some important features on or off.
i personally would prefer dip-switches over jumpers.
I always wondered about that. Thanks to you, now I know.
I quickly learned to hold on to all jumper connectors I could, as they would quickly get lost, and I think I still have some in my screw box.
I wondered about this too. And we still need floppies to update our motherboard firmware.
I like how his video makes it sound like IDE is the current, state-of-the-art interface for disk drives. It kind of reminds me of CGP Grey's video on the nocebo effect, where he doesn't mention the placebo effect at all (like there's one thing on most viewers' minds that the video refuses to address even though everyone's already thinking it).
Building PCs in the 90's taught me all this pretty early on :) Working on older systems later on I often found myself being the only one who understood the jumpers and cables........
It may be a lot more user friendly building PCs today but it was so much more fun back when it actually required some skill to do. There also wasn't any youtube or google to help you out back then, you figured it out or you paid someone else to fix it.
Wow, years after I drop IDE stuff for SATA, and only now do I realize I didn't have to set those jumpers for IDE Hard disks and CD drives if the cable had that notch for the master/slave detect, I'd still end up at least mastering one drive and then have the other drive select what ever (unless it only provided Master and Slave options)
oh yeah.... never took note before - thanx, you've made me realize I'm not as nerdy as I thought - unless it comes to 70's-00 cars.... yup then I really have no get out of jail free card like this.
I would also like to point out that drives can be assigned by the OS as well. In a DOS 6.22 system with one drive, if you attempt to access the B drive, the Os will ask you to insert a disk into drive B, and when you continued, it would access the single floppy as drive B. Attempting to access drive A again would set the floppy back to drive A.
Ahh I forgot about this but in my defence it's been along time since I've used one, hmmm not since a entire 3.5" would fit your entire ASM(Assembler) course work. God I feel old :)
That's not an A drive, that's an AWESOME drive!!..
Goddammit. Wish I had known this 15 years ago. I can remember struggling with drive jumper assignments, and the sometimes unexpected behavior that would result. If I had realized that the twist was an integrated drive select things would have been much easier.
That ProLinea at 2:28... I have one just like it... it's my favourite retro machine!
I miss IDE cables, I never had to replace one. On the other hand some SATA cables that I bought in 2012, I had to replace them recently. But it is hard to tell a good quality one from a cheap one just from eyesight.
I was in an electrical engineering college course (Ontario Canada) , that up until 2006 required ALL projects and assignments to be submitted via FLOPPY DISC ! YES, 3.5" floppy discs ! After 2007 everything went to online submissions. Even as early as 2006, many people simply didn't have floppies on their laptops, so they had to copy stuff to a USB drive, then use one of the school's lab room computers to copy their files onto a floppy, and then submit that in for marking. I have a stack of old floppies, and even a package of floppies unopened (a museum piece), as well as 2 external USB floppy drives. Never know when that might come in handy, right? Floppies make good 'COASTERS' for cold drinks on a hot humid day.
I still have an odd sony singlespeed atapi cdrom drive hooked up to an isa atapi adapter in my 80286 retro system.
Is retro nerd a language in google translate these days??? :P
Synthusiast Gnarly dude
Do you run it off the board, of a controlelr card or off the soundcard?
AT keyboard? Or one of those new fangled ATX sockets?
Well, I have the answer to your question. Its like this. If you study the gray cover of your cable you will see that your seeing rough covering over a row of circular apertures. And on your board is metal pins. Thats because on the inside of your IDE cable is a group of metal wires. The gray substance seals them together as well as seals the electricity in. They are traditionally SOLD as 1, but the plastic can tear under pressure. The jumper DIP switches are for grounding and the position when reported back to the Motherboard assigns it a DRIVE in the CMOS configuration. You can still overide the drive standard and change drive signing if you wish within managing your CMOS and your JUMPER dip switches there after the standard which becomes necessary sometimes and a pain. But mostly we just change for MASTER and SLAVE drives no more.
Thank you for answering a question I've had since the early nineties.
The original Shugart interface only had one shared motor enable line for 4 drives, and usually all drives connected to the same cable would spin up simoultaneously when this was activated. By replacing a Drive-Select line with an additional motor-enable, IBM solved that problem as well.
I often wondered about that back in the late 90s when fiddled around with building system
So.. here's the question... If they set up all the drives to be "B", and needed a twist to make them "A"... then why not make them all "A" and needed the twist to make them "B", since more than likely back-in-the-day people were cheap and may not have been able to pay for an extra floppy? (And thus would have probably liked/could have had a cable without a twist at all?
Jonathan Herr Back in the day, people had no harddrive, but two floppy drives. Harddrives were very expensive in the eighties.
Suhkma Dheek that makes a bit more sense. a drive in the middle would be unintuitive and an a only cable whilst simpler, would be redundant/useless if you needed two drives. (you'd have to buy an additional cable)
The pinout on the actual drives and the connectors was decided before the whole twist thing became a thing. It's a workaround to a legacy thing.
Even though it's dead technology, this was actually very interesting!
I miss floppies, what I liked most about them was that you could stick them in a box and flick through them like cards. They were a really tangible chunk of storage that was easy to manage and organise, now I have three 16GB USB sticks and I couldn't tell you what's on any of them!
I want something like floppies again: a similar, flat form factor, a wide range of capacities from a few hundred MB to GB or even TB.
I suppose SD cards are pretty close. maybe I just need a better storage solution for them, some kind of larger card I can clip them into and write a little label on to remind me what's on there. Hmm…
I had assumed Cable-Select used something like echoes in the wire to define the position (a single ping meant tip, two pings meant middle)
The specification for drives originally supported 4 drives. If you look at really old 5.25" drives they have 4 drive select jumpers. Some old Tandy computers (the non-PC based ones) could run 4 drives.
The highest number of connections I ever saw in one of those cables was ten. It might have been a custom cable but it had a drive on every port. I don't think that you could use all of them at the same time. Something cool and strange was the usb transfer cable that you could use to transfer data straight from one pc to another but it needed a special program to work but it was way faster than almost any other type of transfer on the market at the time but it never saw much use outside the server market. I have used them and I know that they were fully functional but if you used it in a way not intended you might damage one or both devices. I also never understood why we didn't switch to USB c and omni sooner. We had the technical capabilities to make them and outside super compact situations they would be more durable and easier to use without damaging the port. If you don't know usb omni has one port that looks like a 3.5mm headphone jack but it would have four or more bands and you could use the normal headphones with it even if it was the version that had five or six bands.
It got even more tricky in the days when MFM/RLL drives were the standard. And used a similar cable. But the twist was pins 25-29.
what a twist
th-cam.com/video/ag1vabERNn0/w-d-xo.html
This is very cool and I don't think I would have ever looked it up on my own.
Thanks for this interesting video.
Never used CS for IDE. Also, long ago, reading about the floppy disk interface I was shocked about data being SERIAL and not PARALLEL like in the IDE / ATA interface. I dont recall why but they use more control cables than IDE.
There's a suprising amount of history to serial data transfers, there was quite the back-and-forth. Before the Universal Serial Bus (USB) there was Parallel Port, but before that was the Serial Port.
I would not be surprised if there's a common history between the floppy ATA interface and the serial port honestly.
Also, Early Jumpers weren't little plastic thing that covered some pins that moved easily (and got lost easily). The floppies on my Kaypro machines (z80 cp/m machines circa mid 1980's) have what an small dip socket but instead of a chip it would have a piece of plastic with legs and with pieces of metal going across. To open the jumper you pry up on the metal pieces so they don't connect. To Close the jumper you push the pieces of metal back down... With those kinds of jumpers the wire swap is nice.... Also, a Question.. What about the 7 wire twist on MFM and RLL hard drives? was it the same thing?
holly crap, I remember asking myself that 30(?) years ago and forgot .... thanks for bringing this subject up
IBM back in the day was considered the PC standard.
Apple and Commodore were small runner ups but that was about it.
Hence why the twist became the norm.
One less thing to dream about. I still dont understand why they stopped using the Ready signal tho. I must admit it was indeed a pain building a pc back then having to set IRQ's & DMA's manually with jumpers and make sure they didnt conflict. However being able to set & configure the drives yourself was easy and not a chore and it has only made it harder with time to make em backwards compatible. Something that most retro games has probably figured out by now.
I knew all this already, but I still had to watch it because it's a Nostalgia Nerd video. lol
Didn't see that flop twist coming!
If only there was youbook in the 90's, when this would be helpful to know. :)
What is that map of in the poster seen at 0:44?
I don't know what the problem was really. It was super easy to configure drives. Using jumpers and flat cables made it simple to cable manage and use the shortest cables. Every twisted/select cable always looked like a rats nest in the with drives in the wrong spots.
Going back to this era of tech.. you touched on the floppy, but how about the same thing on the old MFM/RLL/ESDI hard drives, which shared a control cable, but each had their own DATA cable.. not to mention dealing with terminating resistors! Remember running a confg program to set your drive type? 1=10meg, 2=20 meg, etc..
Sweet! you learn something new every day!
If I remember corrrectly, that not the full truth. Pre-IBM disk standard (Shugart ?) hat 4 "drive select" wires/pins, but only one "Motor On". So all 4 drives had to rotate simultaneously.
IBM not made drives "configurationless" but also had two separate "Motor On" signals for each drive at motherboard/controller card side.
I'm a bit confused by the way ide cable order described in this video. I don't know if it only applies to CS mode only but I'm pretty sure if you fix the drives mode via jumpers, then you need to put the master drive on the outer end, and slave drive in the middle. If you do otherwise performance drops drasticaly. I have lots of old ide cables with markings that say MASTER and SLAVE on the locations that I've mentioned.
Watch the video again. Those cables with the cut wire weren't very common in the long run. The typical configurations you're thinking of didn't have the cut wire configuration thing, that was kind of it's own unique thing. Hence the back asswards setup with such cables.
Continuous uncut cables had a missing pin connection in the slave connector to accommodate basically the same thing.
Go ahead, break open the back end of the slave connector on one of those old ribbon cables, I'm sure you'll see a missing connection on that same line.
@@southernflatland that's interesting info, will do when I have the time!
Nostalgia nerd I don't want to put you under pressure but when will you do a game boy video? Because you have been talking about doing it for quite a while .
That twist, thing that used to make me pretty mad. Such barbaric imperfection of what could be nice smooth flat cable.
Great info.
Those floppy drives are upside down, so the floppies are the wrong way up.
Which in turn kinda brings up why hard drives, even today. Remains C: and not A: or B: ... Hardware and software was designed for A nd B to be floppy drives and floppy drives only for a long time. For backwards compatibility, the first hard drive partition remains on C:, even when there are no floppy drives nor controllers around at all.
That is genius IBM. Thx for the vid
I was always confused about why cable manufacturers didn't have bare pins on that connection and the wires which make up the "twist" be detachable for flipping into the drive A or B specification.
Childhood refreshed!!!
I always knew about the floppy drives but always wondered what cable select on a hard drive was since almost all hard drive cable didn't have the break in the cables.
The short answer: because they control drive access and since the drives are "dumb," they need a different set of pins grounded to tell them what to do (top row instead of bottom).
Verry good. Now I know, thats for cable select on floppy controllers.
OMG I remember how much shit had to deal with using ide cables. Or realizing I don't have a ide cable for a hdd
2019: these hacks are still standard procedures in many environments.
Ok, so this is actually a good thing. Was trying to mod my Windows 10 pc the other day by adding a floppy drive out of an old computer, but gave up, because I thought I needed a new cable. LOL. Thanks for the tip!
I never knew this when I started PC gaming but always wondered. I just plugged stuff in until it worked.
clear and concise! thank you!
The real nightmare with these were in the dark ages, when MFM was the norm.
Each drive then had 2 cables. A controller cable like the floppy but with the twist at the other end, then a smaller data cable, one for each drive.
2 floppy and 2 hard drives back then, 4 cables.
I thought you meant the cables were twisted like rope, down the whole length. Forgot about that little twist in the FDD cable.
As far as the wires for fans being twisted like rope, I found that the fan wire on my old Dell had a twisted wire for the case fan, and I thought it looked cool so I've been doing it ever since. Makes it a pain in the royal ass whenever you have to trace a wire though.
Ahhh, so that's why our primary drive partition is always the C: drive.
Drives A and B fought such a battle for placement, that we still can't recover from.
i remember the first time i ran into an ide cable with that missing wire section. took me hours to figure out why i couldn't get my drives to work properly...
Hello, can You make a video to explain the diffefences betwen (ata100) and (ata133) or Uata133 and there was one more this with the ide cables (40 pin ide, 44pin ide and 80pin ide) i remember back in the (Pentium) time that my PC can recognize the cable that i was using like ide40 or ide 80 and i'm curious what îs the difference betwen them. Thank You :)
Excellent video, very informative.
They're twisted cause they're crazy!
I saw cable select, and ribbons with that missing part, but never know why. I guess I got lucky plugging things in the right way :)
Floppies were still used in the early 2000's for dealing with school work. Better networks and USB thumb drives made them irrelevant.
Wish i had known this 20 years ago :|
i waiting for this answer about 20 years :D
For some reason this made me remember something I was pondering ages ago. Quite a few years back I got a USB floppy drive to use with an old ultraslim laptop that didn't have a FDD built in. If I plugged this into a PC that already had a floppy drive it would start up with drive letter "B". I often wondered what windows would call the USB FDD if I plugged it into a PC that already had two floppy drives installed, But I never got around to trying it to see....... Did anyone here ever try this?
The Floppy standard was overly complicated from day one. A simple non serial system could have used between 6 and 8 wires and each drive should have had its own motherboard connector that could have been used for internal or external drives. A binary mode controlled system could have been done with as little as 3 wires, but 4 would have been better.
I think you just invented the USB