Specifications - Commodore 1541 User Manual

Remember, you don't really need to learn everything in this book all at once. The
first four chapters are enough to get you going, and tne next couple are enough for
most operations. Getting ta know your disk drive will reward you in many ways —
speed of operation, reliability, and much more flexibility in your data processing
capabilities.
SPECIFICATIONS
This disk drive allows you to store up to 144 different programs and/or data files
on a single mini-floppy diskette, for a maximum of over 174,000 byics worth of infor
mation storage.
Included in the drive is circuitry for both the disk controller and a complete disk
operating system, a total of 16K of ROM and 2K of RAM memory. This circuitry
makes your Commodore 1541 disk drive an "intelligent" device. This means it does its
own processing without talcing any memory away from your Commodore 54 or VIC 20
computer. The disk uses a "pipeline" software system. The "pipeline" makes the disk
able to process commands while the computer is performing other jobs. This
dramatically improves the overall throughput (input and outpu*) of the system.
Diskettes that you create in this disk drive arc read and write compatible with
Commodore 4040 and 2031 disk drives, Therefore, diskettes can be used inter
changeably on any of these systems. In addition, this drive can read programs created
on the older Commodore 2040 drives.
The 1541 disk drive contains a dual "serial bus" interface. This bus was specially
created by Commodore. The signals of this bus resemble the parallel IEEE-488 inter
face used on Commodore PET computers, except that only one wire is used to com
municate data instead of eight. The two ports at the rear of the drive allows more than
one device to share the serial bus at the same time. This is accomplished by "daisy-
chaining" the devices together, each plugged into the next. Up to five disk drives and
one printer can share the bus simultaneously.