Talk:Atari 810

A fact from Atari 810 appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 15 December 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the first drive available for the Atari 8-bit family, the Atari 810 floppy disk drive (pictured), was described as "noisy, slow and inefficient", with "notoriously poor speed regulation"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Atari 810.

Did you know nomination[edit]

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 10:23, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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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).[reply]

"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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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[reply]

Of the era[edit]

@Stepho: I am going to agree with the quote in the article and disagree with your post visible above (at the time of writing). If you have citable references for its "good reputation throughout the 1980s", by all means, add them! But I didn't find a single one that thought the drive was very good, and found many negative comments even from long-time well-known pro-Atari authors. Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:04, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Aw crap! This is the very first DYK on the main page, mentions only negatives with no positives at all and makes it seem like it was the worst possible disk drive of the period. Stepho talk 09:24, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]