1541
Being born in the UK in 1981, my articles about home computers are biased towards that time and place. This is due to both my own personal experience, and also a conscious attempt to provide an alternative UK bias to the predominant US bias amongst English-speaking people my age reminiscing about home computers.
1541 tech specs
1541 (Photo: Evan Amos)
The 1541 was a 5¼″ floppy disk drive made by Commodore. It's compatible with the VIC 20 and C64,[1] although its brown colour scheme suggests it was designed with the latter in mind.
It can format a disk side to 664 blocks (166 KB). Throwing caution to the wind, with the careful use of scissors, you can notch out a write-enabling hole on the second side. You can then write to it by turning the disk over, just as with a cassette tape.
Rather impressively for such a downmarket system, the 1541 drive contains its own microprocessor, ROM, and RAM, making it effectively another microcomputer in its own right. This makes it less like a passive limb that the computer controls, and more like a co-worker it talks to. The upshot of this is that the host computer is free to focus its resources, both memory and processing power, on other tasks.[1][2]
Alas, it had a hefty price tag, usually costing about as much as the computer itself. In the UK, it was a rare C64 owner indeed who had a floppy disk drive. Most people simply had the 1530 tape drive it came with.
On a personal note, in the 1990s I managed to get one of these secondhand. In spite of its notoriety, it served me flawlessly, although that might well have been an example of survivorship bias.
1541-II
1541-II tech specs
Commodore later released the 1541-II. Besides being C64C beige, it also moved the heat-producing electronics to a separate block closer to the mains socket. This made it more compact, and apparently more stable to boot. It looks like a slightly smaller 1571 drive.
Datel Electronics of Action Replay fame could often be found advertising it in Zzap!64, complete with a disk version of the Night Moves / Mind Benders bundle.[3] This would have surely made multiloaders Nightbreed and Sly Spy: Secret Agent much more playable.
References
- "1541 manual" Commodore, 1982, pp. 1—3
- "1541-II manual" Commodore, 1986, p. 1-4
- "Datel Electronics" Datel Electronics (Vendor), Zzap!64, Feb 1991, pp. 60—61
Downloads
Documentation
- "1541 manual" Commodore, 1982
- "1541-II manual" Commodore, 1986
Commodore 64: 1530 | 1541 | Pro-16
