Commodore 8050
5¼-inch floppy disk drive
The Commodore 8050, Commodore 8250, and Commodore SFD-1001 are 5¼-inch floppy disk drives manufactured by Commodore International, primarily for its 8-bit CBM and PET series of computers. The drives offered improved storage capacities over previous Commodore drive models.
They are notable for the disk drive having twice the processing power than the connected computer in having two 1MHz 6502 processors sharing operation of communication and disk operation, though only supporting 4k of main memory. The disk operating system is actually contained within the disk drive unit with commands being sent via the 8 bit GPIB interface where the system decodes the message and carries out the requested operation such as formatting a disk without further involvement from the connected computer.
Specifications
All three models utilize 5¼-inch double-density floppy disks with a track spacing of 100 tracks-per-inch, for a total of 77 logical tracks per side. Data is encoded using Commodore's proprietary group coded recording scheme. Soft sectoring is used for track alignment. Like most other Commodore disk drives, these drives utilize zone bit recording to maintain an average bit density across the entire disk. Formatted capacity is approximately 0.5 megabyte per side, or 1 megabyte (1,066,496 bytes) in 4166 blocks total.
The 8050 is a single-sided drive, whereas the 8250 and SFD-1001 are double-sided drives.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Commodore 8050” is 5¼-inch floppy disk drive. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Commodore, 5¼-inch and floppy, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “5¼-inch floppy disk drive” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3684820. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1001.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Commodore 8050”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Commodore 8050 primary sources, Commodore 8050 archive and Commodore research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Commodore 8050”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Commodore 8050” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.