9 May
2008
9 May
'08
4:38 a.m.
On May 8, 2008, at 8:07 PM, William Maddox wrote:
--- "Marden P. Marshall" <mardy at
voysys.com> wrote:
Yes, they are Calcomp 142M drives (http://web.mac.com/mardy/iWeb/floppy_front.jpg
). I'm not a DEC guy, so I don't know if it is the same as the RX01.
If anyone knows a source for these drives I would love to know. As
far as I have been able to determine, they're as scarce as hens teeth.
-Mardy
How's this for a horror story? A few months
back, I bought a really
nice IMSAI dual 8" floppy drive system from someone on eBay. It set
me back $2000.00. A couple of weeks later, it shows up at my
doorstep
via FedEx ground in a disturbingly small box. I quickly open it up
to
find that, other than a sheet of bubble wrap thrown on top, there was
no packing at all. And as a result, the drive had taken quite a
beating in transit, resulting in one of the drive doors being crushed
beyond repair (http://web.mac.com/mardy/iWeb/floppy.jpg). An
irreplaceable piece of computing history destroyed because someone
was
too lazy to properly pack it.
From what I can see of it, the doors look a lot
like the doors on the
Calcomp disk drives used by DEC for the RX01. If you send
me a
better
picture of it, or check the labelling on the drives, I might be able
to
verify this. There is a fellow in town who quite likely has a scrap
drive -- I've seen a lot of the later RX02s that have been scrapped
for
motors and heads in his shop.
--Bill
