11 Mar
2022
11 Mar
'22
8:12 p.m.
On 3/11/22 19:57, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
There was a time about 30 years ago, . . .
a couple different companies took tiny single boards, such as Ampro
Little Board, stuck them in a box with a floppy drive, and custom
software that included communication through serial port, and marketed
them as things such as "MACINTOSH drive for PC, AND OTHER, disks"!
I've got a little FAX-to-printer box (passthrough from PC) has a 3.5"
floppy integrated and a NEC V40 CPU running the thing. On a lark, I
ported CP/M-86 to the thing for yucks (has a serial port for debugging).
Let's also not forget the Micro Solutions Backpack drive, which
interfaced to a PC printer port and came in both 3.5" and 5.25" flavors.
Had a 16KB DRAM buffer, an 8051 MCU and a DP8473 FDC with about 256
bytes of NVRAM for configuration. Using the printer port, you could
send controls to the FDC and send and receive data from the buffer RAM.
It could even handle 8" single-density floppies, if you had the right
cable. We sold a couple hundred of those things modified for Japanese
CNC use.
--Chuck