A cool vintage hardware hack.

Not a chance. Take a look at the interface schematics for the 13037 (interface) versus the 12821A. There is near-zero doubt that these need totally different drivers, as MAC disks make a good deal of lower-level information available to the controller than CS/80 does. CS/80 drives use a logical block address very much like a modern ATA drive. The MAC interface sees the drive as raw sectors, tracks and surfaces. It may be that by adding the HPIB option to the MAC controller that some firmware translation takes place that tries to make the 'H' series drive look just like a MAC drive, but seems that 'H' series drives were supported on the 12821A, at least by the standard drivers. I guess what we really need to know here, is did HP support 'H' series drives on a 13037 with the same driver as MAC drives. From what I've read of the 'MAC to H-series upgrade' program, this was not the case. I do know that at one point HP wanted all their MAC disk users to 'upgrade' to 'H' series disks, but the user community did not like this 'upgrade' path due to the loss of performance and system reconfiguration issues. HP's response seems to be the adoption of CS/80 and the 12821A which on paper had a slightly higher data transfer rate than MAC disks. I would have expected any drive on a 13037 to look, well, like a 13037 drive, but I'm getting a very different impression from the RTE documentation and user community publications. Hopefully I'm wrong here, I do realize it would make life easier for you if I am. Eric Smith wrote: