Dual floppy drive Macs - rare?

[AdamAnt316]

Hello everyone. While perusing wares at the flea market this past weekend, I came across a seller offering a variety of compact Macs. They were models I already had examples of, and most of them were badly yellowed, but I ended up buying a Macintosh SE from him because it was an early version with two 800K floppy drives instead of the more commonly seen single floppy drive and hard drive combination. This has made me curious, how common are these dual floppy-equipped Macs in general? I can think of only three (or four) which were produced, being the early Mac SE, the original Macintosh II (possibly the IIx as well, not sure about the other models), and the original Macintosh LC. I almost acquired a dual floppy Mac LC many years back, but wasn't able to do so. One of my Mac IIs has both floppy door slots open, but there's only one floppy drive in place, so I'm guessing the slot cover simply went missing at some point. Anyway, here are some photos:

 

[twolazy]

When I was growing up, these were the machines the library and typing class had. Going with that in mind, almost every machine back then was dual floppy. Maybe it was more popular with schools then end users?

 

[NeXT]

It was probably a very brief period where floppy booting macs were still economical compared to a mac with a floppy drive AND a 20mb hard drive. The other advantage was that your system software floppy could be tweaked how you wanted it if multiple people were going to be using the computer.

With that in mind, a mac with a hard drive and TWO floppy drives made no sense at all.

 

[rmay635703]

It was probably a very brief period where floppy booting macs were still economical compared to a mac with a floppy drive AND a 20mb hard drive. The other advantage was that your system software floppy could be tweaked how you wanted it if multiple people were going to be using the computer.

With that in mind, a mac with a hard drive and TWO floppy drives made no sense at all.

It made the same amount of sense as someone with a Pc with dual 1.44’s and a hd

Only useful if you copy a lot of floppies or have irritating software that requires the disk in drive and you save to a blank
Back in the days of sub 40mb hard drives I would find myself leaving software on disk when it allowed so I didn’t clutter my hd and have to remove something.

Convenient maybe,
Makes sense, nah.

 

[epooch]

With that in mind, a mac with a hard drive and TWO floppy drives made no sense at all.

Ohhh, I loved my Mac SE with a bracket that hung the hard drive off the back of the top disk drive. Best of both worlds... or, nonsense, you choose.

 

[AdamAnt316]

Thanks for the responses.

When I was growing up, these were the machines the library and typing class had. Going with that in mind, almost every machine back then was dual floppy. Maybe it was more popular with schools then end users?

I've heard that the dual floppy drive LCs were mostly, if not exclusively, sold to the educational market. I rather suspect that the option of owning a HD-less Mac made more sense to consumers in 1987 than it did in 1990, hence both the SE and II being available in dual drive form as the base model. Generally, I'd say that dual floppy machines made more sense for longer in the DOS world than the Mac world, at least until Windows and other complex programs became more popular.

It was probably a very brief period where floppy booting macs were still economical compared to a mac with a floppy drive AND a 20mb hard drive. The other advantage was that your system software floppy could be tweaked how you wanted it if multiple people were going to be using the computer.

With that in mind, a mac with a hard drive and TWO floppy drives made no sense at all.

The personalized system disk idea does make some sense in an educational setting. When I attended middle school, there were three computer labs (one in the middle of the school library, then a separate lab on either end of said library) made up of Mac LC IIs (the school opened in 1992), and each student was given a floppy disk to use to store their data. I could see said student disks for an LC-based lab containing a basic System Folder so that they could change settings without messing things up for someone else. Either that, or maybe there'd be a system/application disk for each computer for each different class that used said lab, and then a data disk for each student.

As far as reasons to have two floppy drives and a hard drive, as others stated above, having the need to copy a lot of disks would be the main reason, even if some considered that a Bad Thing. And it's still less ridiculous than this:

 

[vwestlife]

Floppy-only machines were common in schools. Apple also made a dual-floppy version of the Mac LC exclusively for the educational market. IBM did as well with their first-generation PS/1 machines.

My high school had a programming lab full of floppy-only PCs as late as 1997. By then they were mostly Dell Pentium MMX machines with unused CD-ROM drives, as well as some older 386s and 486s. Each student would bring in and use their own diskette with the MS-DOS boot files and a copy of QBASIC or Turbo Pascal on it.

 

[rmay635703]

Eduquest were available as floppy only as well but were typically wired up to Ethernet to get software or access the library database

 

[olePigeon]

@AdamAnt316 You pretty much covered all the models save for the Portable. Machines that I think were configurable with two internal floppy drives (either at purchase or changed by a user) are the Portable, SE, II, IIx, IIfx, and LC. The Macintosh SE and Macintosh Portable are exceptional in the fact that they're the only two Macintosh computers that can have three floppy drives.

Technically an LC with a IIe card could accommodate an additional three floppy drives (two unidisk 5.25" drives and one unidisk 3.5" drive), but I don't know if that counts. It was a build-to-order option, though.

 

[olePigeon]

Ohhh, I loved my Mac SE with a bracket that hung the hard drive off the back of the top disk drive. Best of both worlds... or, nonsense, you choose.

My LC utilizes both floppy locations, except one of them is a 230MB magneto optical drive. I use some SCSI cable origami and a 2.5" laptop SCSI drive with plastic standoffs for the HDD.

 

[Unknown_K]

I snagged a LC I just to have an OS 6.x capable machine with dual floppies. An original SE would do the same thing.

 

[AdamAnt316]

Floppy-only machines were common in schools. Apple also made a dual-floppy version of the Mac LC exclusively for the educational market. IBM did as well with their first-generation PS/1 machines.

My high school had a programming lab full of floppy-only PCs as late as 1997. By then they were mostly Dell Pentium MMX machines with unused CD-ROM drives, as well as some older 386s and 486s. Each student would bring in and use their own diskette with the MS-DOS boot files and a copy of QBASIC or Turbo Pascal on it.

As I mentioned above, I'm aware of (and almost owned an example of) the dual-floppy LC. Apart from the Apple IIes I encountered in elementary school, pretty much every computer I saw while attending school had a hard drive in it. When I attended high school, most of the PCs were either 486s or Pentiums, all with hard drives, while the Macs they had in the so-called "Mac lab" were mostly Classics and Classic IIs, with a few hard drive-equipped SEs here and there. Not sure about the PC lab, which was equipped with what I've heard referred to as "Head Start" all-in-ones, but I suspect they had hard drives as well.

@AdamAnt316 You pretty much covered all the models save for the Portable. Machines that I think were configurable with two internal floppy drives (either at purchase or changed by a user) are the Portable, SE, II, IIx, IIfx, and LC. The Macintosh SE and Macintosh Portable are exceptional in the fact that they're the only two Macintosh computers that can have three floppy drives.

Technically an LC with a IIe card could accommodate an additional three floppy drives (two unidisk 5.25" drives and one unidisk 3.5" drive), but I don't know if that counts. It was a build-to-order option, though.

Interesting. None of the info I've found on the Portable directly suggested that it was available with dual floppy drives, though it makes more sense than with the SE or II given the need to save power while on battery. At least one person has attempted to convert a conventional FD+HD Portable into a dual floppy model, but doesn't seem to have finished it. At the least, he posted a couple of links to a site which featured photos of the rare upper floppy drive bezel, as well as the bracket which would've held the upper drive above the lower one. Here are a few photos borrowed from those pages for reference:

 

[KennyPowers]

I have an SE that came to me with two 1.4MB floppy drives in it as well as a hard drive on an aftermarket bracket (and an 030 accelerator with 4 SIMM slots and an external video adapter...was kinda cramped in there ). I've since replaced the hard drive with a BlueSCSI.

 

[3lectr1c]

Dual floppy SEs were very common, as were dual floppy Mac IIs, which I believe had two as standard? That may be wrong. The dual floppy LCs are pretty uncommon, as are the dual floppy portables. One fun thing you can do with an original LC though - you can just barely squeeze one of the modern solid state hard drive replacements in with both floppy drives installed, so yeah, you can get the best of both worlds on that one too.