9 Feb
2010
9 Feb
'10
11:46 a.m.
The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley have machines with 8" drives.
IIRC a Research Machines 380Z, for one, and I'm sure there will be others.
They might be interested in a copy of the software for their archives too.
Cheers,
Andrew
On (12:19 09/02/10), Nico de Jong wrote:
From: "Rob" <robert at
irrelevant.com>
Subject: Anyone with 8" drives , UK ?
--
Andrew Back
a at smokebelch.org
Hi All.
Recently, I've been setting up www.viewdata.org.uk to try and remember
and resurrect as much of the old BT Prestel and other period viewdata
systems as I can.
anyway... I've found somebody that has an
archive of their pages from
Prestel, and we'd both liketo get them up on the site. The snag, for
me, is that a lot of it is on 8" discs, from a Technologics(?) system.
The photographs of the discs I have seen show them labelled as 48tpi,
soft sectored.
So. Is there anybody in the UK (Birmingham or Manchester areas)
Would Denmark be ok, "worst case" ?
that
has facilities to read 8" discs and drop the contents (straight sector
by sector image would be fine if it's not in a common format) onto
some more modern media?
Failing all that.. anybody got a spare drive that I might be able to
link up to a machine I do have? (PCs and Acorn machines).
I have some drives, but hooking it up to a modern PC is not easily done.
Ideally, you would find e.g. a '486 and a MicroSolutions IV card.
For the 8" drive (at least the ones I have), you need a +24VDC for the
motor, and the power connectors can be a problem. I have 3 or 4 drives,
and all connectors are different...
If you dare sending the disks by registered mail or courier, I'd be
happy to give it a try.
Nico