User`s manual

change the disk device number. by "cutting" a line inside the drive unit or
through software.
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 the next couple
are enough for most operations. Getting to 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 bytes
worth of information 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 taking any memory away
from your Commodore 64 or VIC 20 computer. The disk uses a "pipeline"
software system. The "pipeline" makes the disk abot to process commands while
the computer is performing other jobs. This dramatically improves the overall
throughput (input and output) of the system.
Diskettes that you create in this disk drive are read and write compatible
with Commodore 4040 and 2031 disk drives. Therefore, diskettes can be used
interchangeably 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 interface used on Commodore PET computers, except that only one
wire is used to communicate 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.
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