Similarly, it always bothered me a little that the floppy disk interface was designed for 4 drives, but the PC standard came up with the clever hack of putting the twist in the cable, so they didn't need to adjust drive jumpers, which also reduced it to 2 drives.
On the TRS-80, they just ordered all the drives jumped with all 4 positions, then pulled out the other 3 unused pins in the connector on the cable.
The twist as a "cute" solution that made it mostly plug-and-play; the biggest upgrade on some of those older machines was adding a second floppy, and the twist made it simple and foolproof.
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Similarly, it always bothered me a little that the floppy disk interface was designed for 4 drives, but the PC standard came up with the clever hack of putting the twist in the cable, so they didn't need to adjust drive jumpers, which also reduced it to 2 drives.
On the TRS-80, they just ordered all the drives jumped with all 4 positions, then pulled out the other 3 unused pins in the connector on the cable.
The twist as a "cute" solution that made it mostly plug-and-play; the biggest upgrade on some of those older machines was adding a second floppy, and the twist made it simple and foolproof.
Unless you had an IBM ps/2... those non standard floppy drives were horrid to deal with.