1 Sep
1999
1 Sep
'99
3:49 p.m.
On 01-Sep-99, allisonp(a)world.std.com wrote:
> How common are 16-sector hard sectored disks?
Not very common.
Well, at least I can make some more from soft sectored disks once I find
my mother's miniature hole punch. :)
> I found some disks for my AES 7100, and that's
what they are (17
> holes!).
Yep, index plus 16 sector holes. The 17th one is oddly
positioned to
the rest so the system can tell it's at the start/end of the media.
Yup, I noticed that. Before I had seen a hard sectored disk I didn't
know how that would be accomplished. I thought that maybe the sector
holes would be at a different distance from the centre of the disk, with
another hole in the jacket. I prefer the solution that was used in the
real world - less wasted disk surface! :)
Oh, 10 sector (NS*) have 11 holes (if you want to be
picky 12... theres
that big one dead center<grin>).
I have ONE 10-sector disk that was sent to me by a member of this list a
while back, in an attempt to get this AES box to do something. But not
even the drive light would turn on with that disk.
It likes the 16-sector ones, though. The lights come on, the head
moves, and then an error message comes up on the screen. :)
> Unfortunately, the only Software disk I found only
boots part way.
> The other disks are Data disks, and they give me an error when I
> try to boot from them. <s>
No idea on the system used, likely unique to them.
Yes, I'm afraid so. And the flaky software disk I have even has the
name of the company it was registered to stamped on it. I doubt I'll be
finding much WaR3Z for this machine. :)
It's an 'office system'. It's primarily a word processor, but it can
join a network, and can do some number crunching and database functions
with the standard software. I found the disks inside some pockets
behind the front cover of a manual I found. Unfortunately, I didn't get
the full set of disks. And the back cover of the manual was missing,
possibly with the rest of the disks.
Its software is disk-based, though, so if I could a) dump the bootstrap
to disk and b) access the disks on some other machine, I could
conceivably write my own OS for it.
Apparently there was a version of CP/M for some AES boxes floating about
out there.
Allison
--
Doug Spence Hrothgar's Cool Old Junk Page:
hrothgar(a)total.net http://www.total.net/~hrothgar/museum/