Tag Archives: 1980

Commodore 8050 (Micropolis)

Commodore 8050 dual drive floppy disk (1980)

A few years ago, I experienced a water leak in my basement after several consecutive days of heavy rain. To prevent the moisture from damaging them, I brought a couple of items home. One of these items was the 8050 drive, which is the subject of this article and was given to me by my friend Lorenzo in 2011.

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Commodore 4040 dual drive floppy disk (1980)

Commodore 4040 - Front

This is one of the floppy drive models marketed by Commodore for its business line of computers. Before turning it on I made a thorough cleaning, but when I tested it, it didn’t work properly. For example, the command to list the content of a floppy disk showed the wrong characters and after a few attempts nothing was displayed at all. I started to try all the socketed ICs on other drives to search for the fault, but they were all working; then I re-connected the drive to a PET and it functioned perfectly. Probably a few IC pins were oxidized. Continue reading