Double sided 8" floppy in SA800 drive

>>>> >>>>I agree with your recommendation. These days, I doubt if anyone >>>>uses a 1 MB DSDD 8" floppy to archive files, so the exercise is >>>> >>>That depends on the machine. I certainly use them on PERQs and PDP's >>> >>By the time I was able to acquire my first Maxtor ESDI drive at 600 MB, >>a 1 MB DSDD 8" floppy was neither cost effective nor very convenient. >> >I beleive ESDI interfces existed for the Unibus, but they are not common. >I have never seen one for the Omnibus (I did say 'PDP's' not PDP11's >:-)). And if you can design an ESDI interface for the PERQ you knwo a lot >more about that machine than I do... > > I was ONLY attempting to suggest that a floppy drive was extremely important to me as my primary (and only) backup at one point. Later when I used tape backup and especially when I finally used magneto optical as a backup, floppy media stopped being used except for the occasional recovery. The reference to ESDI was only with respect to the capacity of the drive, not to the hardware interface. I think I remember someone else stating that the rest of the hardware and firmware in the DEC RX02 (other than the actual floppy drives) did support double sided operation. Certainly, the DEC controller had the ability to assert the second head on the floppy drive. Whether or not it would have actually worked is a mute point. But maybe in house, DEC did test a floppy drive with a double sided head in their RX02 configuration. If Megan Gentry were still here on the list, she might have remembered. Jerome Fine