Thoughts on a datascope

Fellow classiccmp'ers, I have an interesting situation here. It's a 12-year old datascope, made by Atlantic Research (their 'Interview 7500'). I had it apart last night to clean the innards and replace a noisy fan, and I was struck by how beautifully made it was. Fully modularized, plasma display up front, dual floppies, and the entire case made out of that heavy resin-style plastic, sprayed on the inside with conductive coat for shielding. 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. Now, I know darn good and well that older hard drives tend to be pretty rugged, especially the lower densities. However, I have no backups, floppy or otherwise, for the unit's OS, and I've not had any luck so far finding boot/run floppies for it. I'm fortunate in that it's still working quite well, but I'm also painfully aware that I might be running on borrowed time. Inrange Technology bought out AR's entire line of datascopes, and I do have an inquiry going with them. However, I'm not holding my breath due to the age of the unit. 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. Any thoughts on how I can back this beastie up? Anyone done anything with this line of datascope? Thanks much. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Bruce Lane, Owner and head honcho, Blue Feather Technologies http://www.bluefeathertech.com // E-mail: kyrrin(a)bluefeathertech.com Amateur Radio: WD6EOS since Dec. '77 (Extra class as of June-2K) "Our science can only describe an object, event, or living thing in our own human terms. It cannot, in any way, define any of them..."