> From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: *early* Domain OS available?
>
>
> Al Kossow wrote:
>
>>> The floppy drive appeared to be a standard PC style 5 1/4" drive.
>>>
>> It would be a good thing to try Imagedisk on these to try to get the
>> software archived.
>>
>> I've had pretty good luck with reading 5" floppies. 8" is another story...
>>
>
> Hmm, good point - I had 'floppy-based' stuck in my head and completely missed
> that the fax we've got says that they're 8". That suggests it's a pretty early
> Apollo and well before the 3000 or 4000 series.
>
> At least if they're 8" disks then the recording density is pretty low and so
> there's a good chance they're intact. OTOH, I've never tried hooking up an 8"
> drive to a modern machine (i.e. PC) and tried Imagedisk (for example) with it.
I've used a Shugart 801R with Imagedisk, and it works very nicely. I
laid out a small pcb to simplify the connections and could have more
made up if there were any interest.
Dave Dunfield was invaluable in helping me work thru issues getting
single density to work properly. I ended up with an Adaptec ISA scsi
adapter card for the floppy controller which works well (it's a 1522a).
- Gary
Anyone real knowledgeable with these units interested in helping somone out? I know a guy that has a bunch of records on model 16 disks that he can't access. A "consultant" has hosed every copy of the program he used to access them with.
Might be a real problem to fix. The guy is over 80 years old, and a little hard to converse with over the phone.
Kelly
>> Interesting, Al! Will your design work without a head change for 7 track
>> tape? If not, how have you decided to handle 7 track tape?
>
> 7 tracks will require a new head. I have combo 7/9 track heads, and I've
> verified that at least 7 of the 18 tracks of a 3480 stack land in 7 track
> widths. John claims he's read 9 tracks on a 3480 stack, but that may be
> marginal on some tracks, according to my measurements.
The SAXO USB/FPGA board arrived yesterday, and the designer didn't bother to
bring any of the USB chip's unused I/O out to vias, so the analog board will
have to have a PCA9555 16 bit I2C I/O chip on it to control the I2C chip
enables on the TZA1000s. The PCA9555 also provides 7 extra low speed I/Os
for bit fiddling on the analog board.
It occurred to me over the last day or two that it would be simple to also
make this a "USB Catweasel", so when I lay out the analog board, I'll put
buffering on it for a 50 and 34 pin floppy connector and run them over to
some of the unused pins on the FPGA. It might even be possible to take one
of the analog inputs and tap onto the preamp output of a floppy and bypass
the data separator on the drive, capturing analog flux transitions from the
head directly. This may make it possible to recover data from marginal media
that can't get through the drive's data separator.
---------------Original Messages:
From: Henry Ji <ying6926 at ureach.com>
Subject: Look for okidata 9pin dotmatrix printer with rs232 port
I am looking for okidata 9pin dotmatrix printer with rs232 port
or fujitsu equivalent. Any information would be appreciated.
Henry
------------------------------
From: Bert Thomas <bert at brothom.nl>
Subject: Re: Look for okidata 9pin dotmatrix printer with rs232 port
Henry Ji wrote:
> I am looking for okidata 9pin dotmatrix printer with rs232 port
> or fujitsu equivalent. Any information would be appreciated.
I may able to arrange one, or just the serial interface board.
Where are you located?
====================Reply:
I also have some printers & RS232 boards.
OKIs are pretty heavy to ship though; where are you and which
model(s) are you interested in?
mike
A quick question about the Mac G3, if you'll forgive it being not yet
on-topic. Feel free to reply off-list to avoid rampant topic drift...
Does anyone here know about the internals of the G3 line? I have a
motherboard in front of me that I'm attempting to see if it will work.
It came from a machine that had already been stripped, so there's no
guarantee the hardware is functional. With the Apple Reset/NMI board
installed, and RAM, and the Apple-enhanced ATI Rage 128 video card,
I've attempted to see if it works by plugging in a PC ATX power supply
and pressing the "power on" button on the motherboard and on the
Reset/NMI board. I get a brief green flash from several LEDs, but the
PSU doesn't kick on the fan, and the machine does not appear to be
starting.
Do I need an Apple ATX supply to test this? Could this be a battery
problem? (the battery was completely dead and I have no handy
replacement, so the battery compartment is empty)
Do I need to have a keyboard and mouse plugged in to get a response?
Thanks for any tips.
-ethan
> Note that the above drive is able to read 7-track and 9-track tapes
Brian should be able to verify that by looking at the head stack. I'm
skeptical, though.
> Interesting, Al! Will your design work without a head change for 7 track
> tape? If not, how have you decided to handle 7 track tape?
7 tracks will require a new head. I have combo 7/9 track heads, and I've
verified that at least 7 of the 18 tracks of a 3480 stack land in 7 track
widths. John claims he's read 9 tracks on a 3480 stack, but that may be
marginal on some tracks, according to my measurements.
After several years of frustration, here is the initial design document for
a magnetic tape reader with the explicit goal of being a completely open
design.
http://bitsavers.org/tools/USBTapeInterface2006.txt
