DB25 #4 — bridge to nowhere

A Long-time reader noted that about one post in three has the word “floppy” in it somewhere. That sounds about right. There are a lot of stories about computing history that pass through the floppy disk. Our last installment in the 25 x DB25 for 2025 series was about multiplexing a floppy disk connector onto the same DB25 connector used for the parallel printer.

Alas, the floppy disk drives for those ports have been mostly lost over the years. Better to have lugged, loved, and lost than never to have loved at all though. Where is that more true than with the external floppy port on the rare Apple /// Plus ? The /// Plus was a beleagured successor to a cursed machine. One weird footnote in its history was the DB25 connector for an external floppy drive that nobody ever built. Both the Apple /// and the Plus featured an internal 5.25” drive but two drives were already typical for serious users of the Apple ][. The earlier Apple /// machine was rolled out together with the companion external Disk ///. The Disk /// device wound up a mostly cosmetic rebadge of the earlier Disk ][. Through a series of adapters, the DB25 port on the Plus could be connected to the reliable drive from the older Apple ][ family. There was no set of adapters able to turn the temperamental /// into a reliable and compatible member of the older ][ family.

Why did Apple bother to make this change? Partly because the FCC was getting serious with Apple about RF leakage and partly because it was the end of the age of wide, fragile, ribbon cables draping across a desk to lash together the bits of a computer system.

Maybe the most important thing about expansion ports is the idea of expansion itself. The idea in computing that there could be more was practically more itself, evaluated lazily. Does expansion still matter? Sure, but my iPad has more WiFi bandwidth than the original version of PCI. I think a new age of daisy-chained peripherals makes as little sense as annexing Greenland.