On Thu, 30 Oct 2008, jeff.kaneko at
juno.com wrote:
Whoa, hold the phone here. Okay, I'm trying to
solve a twenty-year-
old mystery. So, you say the media for these drives were made
by Kodak? Did they, per chance, have *triangular* notches in place
of the traditional rectangular ones?
I'm asking, because in 1985 or '86 I was at an electronics scrap
yard in L.A., and saw a *very* large heap of these kinda strange
looking floppy drives. I don't remember too much about them, but
I just remember they looked *weird*. The media was made by Kodak
(something I had never seen before), and the notch on the edge of
the floppy disk was *triangular*. I figured it was some special
media for bio-medical equipment, or for some bizarre photographic
process, or something.
Anyways, I never saw drives (or floppies) like that ever again,
and always wondered about it. They looked brand-new, and the
whole incident sticks out in my mind because I remember the
owner was mad as hell-- apparently he spent a small fortune
on these things, but nobody wanted them because they weren't
'standard'.
The Amlyn drives also had extra/strange notches. They used 5 600 Oersted
5.25" ("1.2M") diskettes in a plastic caddy, and could switch diskettes
under program control. The drive was a little weird.