I recently acquired three of these Xebec XFD-108 dual-drive units along
with three PDP-8/Ms and a PDP-8/E. It looks like I've got one 8/M and drive
fully booting. However, I also seem to have a lot of bad media. Here's an
album of the haul:
http://imgur.com/a/fDVDH
I'm trying to find some more info on the Xebec drive units. They use
Memorex drives, which date to 1974 or so. These use 32 hard sector
floppies, with the sector holes on the outside. I'm currently writing some
software to back up these floppies and will try to integrate it with David
Gesswein's dumprest utility so I can eventually get a handler working in
simh. For now, though, I'm trying to just back up the floppies as to
protect against further data deterioration. The floppies are actually
configured for 10 sectors, oddly enough. This gives 640 256-word blocks per
disk.
Has anyone used these early Xebec drives? In my little bit of
documentation, I seem to be missing the chapter on the device handler for
OS/8. I have a few booting floppies right now, so I should be able to get
the handler from one of those, but just in case... It would also be nice to
have the FORMAT program for this system, which is yet again something else
missing from my docs.
Also, I haven't yet played with it, but I also have a Tennecomp tape drive
that uses radio-station-style 4-track "carts" to store data on serially. I
unfortunately do not have the controller card for it, hence my inability to
do much with it. I do have some tapes for it, however.
Thanks,
Kyle