10 Jan
2023
10 Jan
'23
10:19 p.m.
The "Tandy Portable Disk Drive" was a strange beast. At one time, some
folk wrote software to run on PC to operate it.
Otherwise, it's another flux transition project.
OTOH, RS also had an external 5.25" box ("Disk/Video Interface"), which
has a very simple MFM format, with the Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC file
system (much like certain models of NEC machines) with some slight
resemblance to the file system on the Coco.
On Tue, 10 Jan 2023, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
Speaking of reading old floppies, I got my Model 100
and Tandy Portable
Disk Drive down from the shelf to read some old floppies I found from
the 1980's. 3.5 inch disks with a whopping 100k capacity each!
Problem was drive was saying the disks were "not formatted". Took it
apart, found that the belt had literally turned to black goo and wrapped
itself around the capstain. Cleaned it off (took forever), then put on a
new modern belt that I use for TU58 Dectape II tapes. Fit, bit tight but
fit.
Drive works great! And some of the stuff I wrote in the 1980's.... Old
posts to compuserve's pdp11 forum, ancient bitnet messages, stuff about
getting the pdp8/L and passing up other stuff... Could have bought a
Vax730 with R80/RL02 for 3k but didn't have the money.
All in all a fun trip down memory lane. And I kept thinking "Was I
really that naive?
C