On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
The oddest 'floppy' drive that I ever saw
was a dictaphone machine that
recorded by cutting helical audio tracks like a phonograph record on a
thin 'floppy' plastic disk. Ooops, it wasn't digital (unless you held
it in your fingers).
... that would be (or describes) the Gray 'Audograph', made by Northern
Electric (at least in Canada, perhaps by Western Electric in the US).
Somewhere I have a similar dictating machine made by (badged?) Olympia
IIRC. I've not got any disks for it, but it's obviuos from the design,
that the disk had a groove in it to guide the magnetic head.
There's a slot in the front where you slide the disk in. It goes onto a
turntable. There's an arm, a bit like the tone arm of a record player
that carries the head, and which can be moved by a lever on the front.
When it's locked in the rest position, it lifts the disk clamp off the
turntable so that the disk can be inserted or removed.
A couple of solenoids engagee either a slow forward drive (record/play)
or a fast reverse drive ('rewind'). A button on the front engages the
fast drive and lowers a magnet onto the disk for 'bulk erase'.
Most of the functions are remote cotnroller. The microphone has a 4
postion slide switch (record, stop, play, rewind in that order IIRC).
Playback is either through the (moving coil) microphone transducer or via
a little speaker in the unit. There was also a footswitch that had pedals
for rewind and play, presumably for transcribing the recoridng on a
typewriter. You could also obviously connect headphones, I don't have
them.
One odd feature is that the 2-valve amplifier has a tone control. I can't
really see the point...
-tony
