Template:Did you know nominations/Atari 810

Atari 810

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Atari 810 floppy disk drive

• ... that although it was widely used, the Atari 810 floppy disk drive was described as "noisy, slow and inefficient" and had notoriously poor speed regulation? Source: first quote from dewitt in info world, second from moriarty in analog

• Comment: QPQ Bidar Alam
• Comment: Not so sure about the first bit of the statement prior to the comma... suggestions? It was only widely used because it was the only drive available for a couple of years (Percom was 1982). Perhaps:

ALT1 ... that the only drive available for the Atari 8-bit family, the Atari 810 floppy disk drive, was described as "noisy, slow and inefficient" and had notoriously poor speed regulation? Source: first quote from dewitt in info world, second from moriarty in analog

Created by Maury Markowitz (talk). Self-nominated at 15:12, 25 November 2021 (UTC).

• "The original Atari 810 was noisy, slow and inefficient by today's standards". The reference is a magazine article from 1982 introducing a newer product, so of course it tries to make the older product sound bad in comparison. The early 80s was a time when progress was rapid and a couple of years would show enormous advances. Back in the day, the 810 was about the same order of reliability as the drives for the Apple II and the C64 - all of which were bad by the standards of the mid 1980's, let alone the standards of the 21st century. The 810 had about the same read speed as the drives on other platforms. However, it was notorious for being roughly twice as slow on writes. This was for the very good reason that every write was followed by a read to verify that the data was written correctly. Other platforms typically did a write without a verification read and were therefore twice as fast but also tended to have more disk errors. 810 drives had a lot less disk errors than the other platforms. There was also an option to turn off the verification read, making it just as fast (and also just as error prone) as the rest. The 810 had a good reputation throughout the 1980s and had aftermarket kits to increase its throughput and to increase its capacity to true double density using the same physical mechanism.  Stepho  talk  22:13, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Useful comments for the article talk page, as they concern content of the article, but not of concern for the DYK nom process. Maury Markowitz (talk) 16:09, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing:
• Neutral:
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing: - I'm having trouble getting Earwig to work at the moment. I did some manual spot-checking of sources, enough that I'm comfortable A'ing G F, but I'm leaving a note of it in case someone else wants to run Earwig.

Hook eligibility:

• Cited: - "Widely used" in ALT0 isn't as supported as I'd like.
• Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: ALT1 approved! ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 00:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC) ALT1 to T:DYK/P1