DRIVE SERIES SPECIFICATIONS
"MicroDisk"-Series of external S-100 bus rigid-disk-drive enclosures
| Model |
1 Platter |
2 Platters |
3 Platters |
| Internal disk |
1201-1 |
1202-1 |
1203-1 |
| Capacity |
6.2MB (9MB) |
18.7MB (27MB) |
31.2MB (45MB) |
Overview
Introduced in October 1979, the
Micropolis MicroDisk™ is an external storage subsystem for S-100 bus computers based either on
Intel's 8080 or Zilog's Z80 microprocessor. Upon market introduction, it was priced slightly below USD 5000 and offered users ample storage at a moderate
price point. In a bundle, the system came with Micropolis' own
multiuser multitasking operating system (OSM) and
the "intelligent" Micropolis S-100 bus drive-controller card. As with later MicroDisk storage enclosures, the subsystem was available in varying capacities,
depending on which hard-disk variant was installed. The actual internal HDDs, also named MicroDisk, were available with one to three platters, resulting
in system capacities of 6MB to 31MB when formatted.
MicroDisk series
Micropolis used the "MicroDisk™" model name on a number of products over the years. In 1979, the early 1200 series 8-inch hard-disk drives were
sometimes called MicroDisk, but later the same year the name was mainly used for the external storage subsystem described here that incorporated these
HDDs. Then, during the early 1990s,
a series of simple external SCSI storage subsystems inherited the
MicroDisk name. When the Raidion series of stackable SCSI subsystems was introduced shortly after, an early production run was also labeled MicroDisk.