Why Amstrad chose the 3" drives

The long-rumoured explanations went something along the lines of Amstrad getting them from a bankruptcy auction and/or salvaging them from a scrapheap after another computer manufacturer abandoned their project when it became clear that 3.5" had become the de facto standard.

Neither of those really made much sense - the choice would have been made about a year before 3.5" became unstoppable, and if there'd been a big computer manufacturer bankruptcy then why not sell off the whole computers rather than just the disk drives?

RP's explanation still hangs on Amstrad's reputation for being cheap'n'cheerful (reusing the ubiquitous 5.25" controllers & drivers definitely will have brought the cost down) but rings a lot more true than those other stories.

I was a 8512 owner so had the fancy-pants DSDD variant as my B: drive. The disks were great - not just more robust than 3.5", but the Amsoft-branded ones came with a jewel case with standardised inlay and labels. Even the soft slip cases you got with the Maxell ones were pretty useful!

I had the Amstrad version of the speccy (+3) (I had a few different speccies over the years all the way back to the rubber keyed one) that took the 3" disks, it overlapped with getting a PC so the writing was already on that particular wall.

The disks worked great, I don't recall one ever failing in use (unlike the 3.5" on the PC), it was night and day compared to faffing with tapes at least.

They where in my opinion the best spectrum made and while Amstrad may have a reputation for cheaping out they were (from what I remember it has been a long time) no worse than the previous speccies (and better than the early ones).

There are some interesting hobby projects to add IDE drives and internet access https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA_YpQ9suJ8

So much nostalgia. The CPC6128 was my first computer back in the mid 80s so I’ve got a lot of love for it - including these discs. The little tab switch on the top I could stuff with paper if I wanted to make an unwritable system disc into something I could use to store that game my cousin had.

They came back to nz from a trip in the uk with a load of games on tape and we didn’t have a tape machine. As a workaround I pulled my sisters ghetto blaster and the amstrad apart so I could hot-wire the two together so I could play Gryzor (Contra). Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.

My first computer was an Amstrad 8256 (also known as the Joyce). It came with a 3" drive. They worked ok but were expensive. After a while I installed a standard 3.5 " drive in the second drive slot. Besides being cheaper and much easier to obtain, they also had twice the capacity, as I recall. Over time I also installed a modem and replaced the 8 bit dot matrix printer with a 16 bit one.

According to Wikipedia, 3-inch disks were not only used in Amstrad and Sinclair home computers, but also by the smaller British home computer makers Oric and Tatung, as well as Sega and Yamaha. However there are no details about which Sega and Yamaha models those might be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#3-inch_%2...

He's referring to the Shugart bus, which was used for almost all floppy disk drives (Apple and Commodore being the great exceptions), regardless of format. That absolutely spoke not against 3.5" floppies, which Sony released quite a number of years earlier.

Funny that he leaves out Atari, which managed to release in spring of '85 a system with 3.5" FDD to a comparable price.

Don't know why he felt the need to justify their decision 40 years later and then still just emit phrases from marketing.

I love the first response, which says that anyone who is interested in computers should know the reason why they chose 3" floppies.

I think, by definition, anybody who is arguing about 3.5" and 3" floppies in 2021 probably knows a fair bit more about computers than the average person. But everything is relative, huh?

Had a pcw8256 . Learned z80 assembly and cp/m. Added line drawing and pixel plotting to locomotive basic. Fun times :)

I remember flipping these disks manually in my CPC drive, to use both sides.

Thx. Didn't know until now that 3" floppies even existed