Why did old computers come with dual floppy drives/CDROM drives?

[Mister Woof]

I remember having a Packard Bell with dual CDROM drives. It was pointless, and far as I knew

I understand older PCs also sometimes came with dual floppy drives that we're the same format.

 

What was the point of this? Marketing?

[minibois]

For when you wanted to use some removable storage, if I remember correctly.

I remember I had my save games on a floppy drive, although this was a game that ran on a CD.. But I imagine if it was a floppy disk game, I would need two drives.

[Jurrunio]

Just like USB ports, when something is common you use more of it.

[Mister Woof]

Just now, Minibois said:

For when you wanted to use some removable storage, if I remember correctly.

I remember I had my save games on a floppy drive, although this was a game that ran on a CD.. But I imagine if it was a floppy disk game, I would need two drives.

I remember playing lesiure suit Larry 2 - when you needed to change disks you just swapped it out in the same drive. Didn't seem to be a point with a second drive.

[Mister Woof]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Just like USB ports, when something is common you use more of it.

You could only really use one at a time anyway though. They were the same exact format. There's no actual increase in capacity or capability.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, Plutosaurus said:

I remember having a Packard Bell with dual CDROM drives. It was pointless, and far as I knew

I understand older PCs also sometimes came with dual floppy drives that we're the same format.

 

What was the point of this? Marketing?

Older computers, like the IBM 5150, did not come with a hard drive or even a ROM which housed the OS (the 5150 did have a boot ROM for a BASIC interpreter though). You'd boot to the OS via a floppy disk. But since this OS disk could contain things an application could use but wasn't available in RAM, if you had a single drive system, you'd have to swap your application disk for the OS one, then back again. So you could use another drive to avoid this.

[Zalda_]

So you could copy files from one to the other without copying it to the PC first

[minibois]

Just now, Plutosaurus said:

I remember playing lesiure suit Larry 2 - when you needed to change disks you just swapped it out in the same drive. Didn't seem to be a point with a second drive.

No, I meant like the game is on a floppy disk and the save game was on another disk (as opposed to having it on the PC's hard drive, I guess).

This was just one work case I actually experienced myself.

 

I mean copying files/burning a CD from another floppy disk/CD seems a pretty obvious reason to have two readers too

[Mister Woof]

1 minute ago, Minibois said:

No, I meant like the game is on a floppy disk and the save game was on another disk (as opposed to having it on the PC's hard drive, I guess).

This was just one work case I actually experienced myself.

 

I mean copying files/burning a CD from another floppy disk/CD seems a pretty obvious reason to have two readers too

In the case of the CDROM drives, they were just Rom Drives. So no burning was to be had.

[rcmaehl]

Various reasons

• Computer didn't have a hard drive, so one floppy would run the OS
• One CD reader, One DVD reader
• One CD/DVD Burner, One CD/DVD Reader
• Burning Multiple Disks at once
• Because ejecting storage is for scrubs
• Marketing

 

[Mister Woof]

2 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Various reasons

• Computer didn't have a hard drive, so one floppy would run the OS
• One CD reader, One CD Writer
• One CD/DVD Burner, One CD/DVD Reader
• Because ejecting storage is for scrubs
• Marketing

 

I'm going to go with mostly marketing - 

 

I had a Tandy 1000 with no hard drive but I distinctly remember managing with just the one 3.5" floppy drive.

 

Boot disk -swap in the police quest

 

The amount of time saved from not having to physically swap a disk was nothing compared to the general load times of the era.

 

Minimal benefit

[Pixel5]

most PCs i had back then had one burner and one regular drive so you could clone them or burn a CD and play something from another at the same time.

 

beside this i had one with two normal cd drives, this was good for games that required you to have the disk in the drive to play so you didnt have to swap all the time and could leave your favorite game in the drive.

 

no cd cracks where quite a new thing back then.

[manikyath]

double floppies was a very commonly used thing, because for a VERY long time that was the only way of easily rewritable portable media at an acceptable price.

 

as for the CD/DVD side.. marketing.. my guess (based on what i saw around me back in the day..) would be wether we like it or not: piracy is huge, and at some point in the past "piracy" was mostly people exchanging copied physical media. by putting two drives in a prebuilt system, the companies could appeal to the people in this category.

 

during the peak times of optical media i knew a lot of people with a single optical drive, and i knew a lot of people with two optical drives, and i defenately noticed a difference in "social interactions" between those groups..

i still wonder if that guy that bought two bluray burners has stopped crying yet

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 minutes ago, Plutosaurus said:

I'm going to go with mostly marketing - 

 

I had a Tandy 1000 with no hard drive but I distinctly remember managing with just the one 3.5" floppy drive.

 

Boot disk -swap in the police quest

 

The amount of time saved from not having to physically swap a disk was nothing compared to the general load times of the era.

 

Minimal benefit

I mean, sure, we could go with marketing in that it's convenient to have two drives so you can minimize disk swapping. But this was a convenience that many people wanted considering every other Tandy 1000 model had at least two floppy drives and many computers of the time if they didn't weren't designed to use their boot ROM had two floppy drives. And in some cases, applications may not have needed just one swap per disk, but multiple swaps, such as LGR's case when he reviewed the Apple Macintosh:

 

[Sakkura]

Dual floppy was very useful. Dual optical drives not so much (though it depended on use case, as always).

[aezakmi]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i knew a lot of people with two optical drives

I have 3 combo drives and always use them to read or burn stuff in multiple discs at the same time

 

where I live the 90's are still going, the university I attend for example still has functional PCs with floppy drives professors and students use to make presentations or share text documents

[Mister Woof]

7 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I mean, sure, we could go with marketing in that it's convenient to have two drives so you can minimize disk swapping. But this was a convenience that many people wanted considering every other Tandy 1000 model had at least two floppy drives and many computers of the time if they didn't weren't designed to use their boot ROM had two floppy drives. And in some cases, applications may not have needed just one swap per disk, but multiple swaps, such as LGR's case when he reviewed the Apple Macintosh:

 

Mine had a 3.5 and a 5.25"

 

That at least made sense to me since they were different formats giving you more capability

[manikyath]

Just now, aezakmi said:

I have 3 combo drives and always use them to read or burn stuff in multiple discs at the same time

 

where I live the 90's are still going, the university I attend for example still has functional PCs with floppy drives professors and students use to make presentations or share text documents

in the age of usb sticks we used floppies to save our documents at school, because the school lab computers didnt have front USB.. schools just move at the breakneck pace of "5 years behind"..

[Mister Woof]

6 minutes ago, manikyath said:

in the age of usb sticks we used floppies to save our documents at school, because the school lab computers didnt have front USB.. schools just move at the breakneck pace of "5 years behind"..

 

When I was in high school, we had IBM 8088s with 3.5" floppies. That must have been around 1996 or so. 

[manikyath]

Just now, Plutosaurus said:

 

When I was in high school, we had IBM 8088s with 3.5" floppies. That must have been around 1996 or so. 

i saw one of those in class.. in 2016

[Sakkura]

1 minute ago, Plutosaurus said:

 

When I was in high school, we had IBM 8088s with 3.5" floppies. That must have been around 1996 or so. 

That sounds odd, even if you mean IBM 5150s or XTs (with Intel 8088 CPUs). Those predate 3.5" floppies.

[Mister Woof]

6 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

That sounds odd, even if you mean IBM 5150s or XTs (with Intel 8088 CPUs). Those predate 3.5" floppies.

Probably upgraded with 3.5" floppies.

 

I remember they were all old as shit and thrown together.

 

The teacher made a big deal about his machine being a 286 and our student machinese were 8088s. Maybe he was wrong. Not like I could run cpuz to check it, lol

 

At the time I had a 386 at home.

[jones177]

On an Amiga 500 computer I used a second floppy drive for saved games.  Even when I had a hard drive in a Amiga A2000 I used a second floppy for saving because most games did not support hard drives. That was in the 80s.

When I used 2 CD drives it was for a reader and a read/writer. A lot of CD based games did not like the read/writer so having two made sense until the game industry caught up. 

[Mister Woof]

Just now, jones177 said:

On an Amiga 500 computer I used a second floppy drive for saved games.  Even when I had a hard drive in a Amiga A2000 I used a second floppy for saving because most games did not support hard drives. That was in the 80s.

When I used 2 CD drives it was for a reader and a read/writer. A lot of CD based games did not like the read/writer so having two made sense until the game industry caught up. 

The two floppy drives makes more sense than the optical drives.

 

I distinctly remember the PB wierd cube looking PC that had dual CD ROM drives. It seemed pointless to me then and it seems pointless to me now

[jones177]

45 minutes ago, Plutosaurus said:

The two floppy drives makes more sense than the optical drives.

 

I distinctly remember the PB wierd cube looking PC that had dual CD ROM drives. It seemed pointless to me then and it seems pointless to me now

For me the 2 CD drives was a DRM thing. Some games would not run on the first write drives.  

 

Also when copying CDs you did not have to do the swop with 2 drives. For some reason when write drives first came out it took several disk swops to copy a cd. This was a pain so having 2 made sense.