18 Aug
2000
18 Aug
'00
3:35 a.m.
Bruce Lane wrote:
And yet, in the midst of all that gorgeous
engineering, there
was one fly
in the ointment. The unit boots and runs off an ancient Kyocera(!) 20 meg
MFM hard drive, run from a dedicated controller port on one of the boards.
[[[ snip ]]]
The core CPU in the unit is a Motorola 68010, so
it's a pretty safe bet
that the OS is not DOS-based. This means the hard drive would likely be
unreadable to a PC if hitched, say, to a WD MFM board.
There is actually some hope here. The disk format used by WD was fairly
widely accepted and lots of people made controllers that were compatible
with WD's format.
There are exceptions, of course. Adaptec did their own thing, so disks
written by a controller built around Adaptec's chips can't be read by a
WD controller. DEC's DECmate II and RQDX1 controllers were hand-built
from lots o' logic, and were also incompatible with
WD's format.
--
Roger Ivie
rivie(a)teraglobal.com
Not speaking for TeraGlobal Communications Corporation