26 Aug
2012
26 Aug
'12
7:29 p.m.
On 08/25/2012 04:04 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I am not overly in love wit hthe design of the case. From what I remember
the floppy drives are fixed to the cover, you have to lift it a little
way and then unplug the data and poweer cables to get the case apart. But
I cna tolerate it.
It's the separate grounding strap (at least mine has one) which is the
pain, because it means flipping the whole upper part of the case over to
unscrew it - unplugging power and data can be done (as you say) by just
lifting the case a bit. (I wonder if some releases simply have no strap, or
have a tag screwed to the drive cable that the strap can easily be
unplugged from)
Yes, I figured I wouldn't mess with the positioner unless I had to :)
Well, to put it better, they're impossible (so far) to find within
picking-up distance, which means paying shipping costs for one - I pretty
much am in the middle of nowhere! I'd like one at some stage, but I haven't
quite ruled out one turning up locally[1] yet. One day I may just have to
bite the bullet an pay to have one shipped to me.
[1] oddly, one of the local car parts stores - not long opened, either -
has one, but I couldn't see what model; I can understand a pre-existing
store perhaps having one, but I was a little surprised that for new
businesses there wasn't some more recent alternative.
I did get the HI-80 plotter with mine, but of course with pens that are
long dried up (and a bit of experimenting with engineering alternatives
hasn't found me the right combination of pen body and ink consistency yet).
I suspect that's what I'll do, too; IIRC the fan won't turn around to
change the airflow direction, but I did wonder about adding a filter (and
perhaps even swapping the fan for a different one, if I could do so
non-destructively)
Didn't Torch call it 'CPN' (or was it 'CP/N')?
Hmm, you may be right - I don't have any docs with me in order to check.
I've got a partial list of what floppies I have in UK storage, and it seems
to vary on the disk labels - some are CPN and some CP/N.
cheers
Jules
My favourite CP/M box is, I think, the Epson QX10.
Interesting hardware
at least. A 7220 for graphics, those lovely voice-coil floppy drives, etc.
I have a QX-10 on the desk here beside me; it really is a lovely machine
(despite the plastic case; somehow I always think that 'real' computers should have
metal cases). And yes, those drives are great (although I had
to clean/strip the eject mechanisms on mine; I suspect they're prone to
I stripped mine when I first got the machine, cleaned everything and id a
full alignment. Be warned that strippign the positioner is not recomended sticking with
age). I'm still looking for an Epson dot-matrix printer of
some flavor to complete mine (and some add-on cards would be nice)
I think oyu must be the only person here _not_ to have an Epson dot
matrix printer :-). Theyr are easy to find. Finding HPIB and HPIL
interfacea for them (either is needed for the QX10, of course, but they
do both exist) is rather harder. Did you do
anything to modify the airflow on yours? I think I read
somewhere that they were prone to filling up with dust due to the lack of
filter and fan direction.
No, I don;'t run it enough for that to be a problem. I open it up and
clean it from time to time anyway. Does a non-CP/M box count? The Tatung Einstein? It
runs soemthing called
XtalDOS which is very CP/M-like (I think most of the calls are the same).
I think that was true of Torch CP/N too, wasn't it? Which makes me wonder
how common "almost CP/M" variants were...