On Friday, July 13, 2012 2:04:36 PM UTC-3, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 22:49:29 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

>Like you'll find in my 2nd post/follow-up, I did measure it
>and they were pretty large, I'm not sure if anybody still
>makes rectangular LEDs as large.

They don't. I don't have a Commodore 1571 handy to dissect, but as
others have suggested, it's not a packaged LED, but rather a block of
plastic with an LED inserted into a hole in back.

Sorry to contradict you, but I've just dissected my Commodore Amiga 1200 and it had the same kind of large LEDs (evidently Commodore engineers had a thing for large LEDs and I do agree that pulsating large LEDs while Amiga apps were loading from Floppy had a nice hypnotic effect on one's brain .

Those are marked "LED 1" "LED 2" and "LED 3" on a small PCB hooked by 4 wires to the A1200 motherboard. Now, tearing apart and crippling Amiga 1200 computers doesn't sound like my idea of fun to source these large LEDs.

For comparison's sake, I included a US quarter coin on one of the pics.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/88/cbmleds1.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/cbmleds2.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/26/cbmleds3.jpg/

If you look at picture #3, you will see these are not the usual "plastic in front of a led" but actually if there are 2 leds inside, these were manufactured as a single piece, you cannot "detach" the leads from the plastic, and the connection pins appear from between the rectangular plastic block. That leads me to believe these LEDs were mass manufactured...

I could be wrong, of course... but it strikes me as very odd that CBM would go the great length of producing LEDs in-house from standard LED parts.... (or perhaps MOS did?).

FC