The Amazing Disk II Controller Card | Big Mess o' Wires

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The Amazing Disk II Controller Card

November 12th, 2021 | Category: Bit Bucket,Floppy Emu,Yellowstone | Author: Steve

In the world of Apple II disks, there are two major types of disk controller cards: the original Disk II controller (and clones), and everything else. Both have their place. The "everything else" category includes the Apple 3.5 disk controller card, Liron card, SCSI cards, IDE cards, and more. These cards provide a standard API for software to read/write blocks, get drive status, and format the disk, all without requiring the software to know anything about how the disk actually works. These cards have built-in smarts to handle the low-level details. In contrast the original Disk II controller card is dumb as dirt, and forces the software to handle virtually all of the low-level details. And yet it’s an amazing piece of technology for its time.

The first Apple II models had no built-in floppy disk support. The Disk II controller was cleverly designed to add that missing support at a very low cost, and was a major reason why Apple II computers became so popular. This disk controller was simpler, and cheaper, and more flexible, and just all-around better than any of its contemporary competition. It’s the ultimate example of Woz can-do technology.

Floppy Disk 101

A floppy disk is just a plastic circle with a magnetic coating. Loaded into a drive, the disk rotates at about 300 RPM. A stepper motor moves the read/write head linearly from the center of the disk to the outer rim. This arrangement provides for a few dozen concentric rings where a serial stream of 1s and 0s can be stored.

How do you get from these basics to higher-level concepts like bytes, tracks, and sectors? How are logical data bytes encoded into bit patterns on the disk? When reading the disk, how are the bits framed into bytes? How do you find track zero, or the boundaries between sectors? The conventional answer to these questions in the 1970s was extra hardware, and lots of it. This made the disk controllers and the drives themselves complex and expensive, putting them mostly out-of-reach for an inexpensive home computer system.

It was late 1977 when Apple set its sights on finding an alternative to cassette tape data storage, and began looking into options for a floppy drive for the Apple II. They were still a small and unproven company, and the Apple II had only been available for about six months. Woz didn’t know much about the subject of floppy disks, but he agreed to take on the challenge.

Woz’s approach was to remove virtually all of the hardware that controls the disk, and take a software-driven approach akin to bit-banging. Apple went to Shugart, the inventors of the 5.25 inch floppy drive, and requested a stripped-down version of Shugart’s SA400 drive with most of the control electronics removed. It was just a simple mechanism with one motor for spinning the disk and a stepper motor for moving the read/write head. As the legend goes, the entire Disk II hardware design was conceived and built by Woz and Randy Wigginton over a few weeks during Christmas vacation 1977, including writing the first version of DOS, and the working disk drive was demoed at CES in January 1978. Additional help was provided by Apple engineers Cliff Huston and Wendell Sander. 40+ years later I’m amazed by how quickly this small team was able to make everything work.

A few years ago I asked Woz about the Disk II development, and he said this:

I have no idea how I came up with that incredible disk controller. I was good at creating anything in electronics, analog or digital. I had no prior experience of any kind, not even in classes, regarding disk hardware or software. So my thinking had to be from the ground up. I had to sense data coming from the disk and make decisions about 0’s and 1’s based on timing.

I had taken a graduate level course at Berkeley (although an undergrad, I only took grad courses in anything having to do with computers in any university) on state machines and thought of how I could use 2 simple low cost chips as a state machine to do this, sort of a minimal microprocessor hand-built. At the time I just knew that it would read and write data but I assumed that I was leaving out many ingredients of a disk controller due to not knowing what they did. I assumed this because my design took so few parts. But in the end, mine did more in some good ways, especially since it was in the computer and tied to software that could alter how it worked, which eventually led to greater storage and faster speed that would not have been possible using the normal disk. Plus, I took about 20 chips off the drive itself and bypassed them from my own controller, because they were just middlemen that got in the way of things.

The best work I did, over and over, was partly due to not having money and having to learn how to use the fewest parts of anyone, and also due to the...