31 Oct
2008
31 Oct
'08
4:06 a.m.
On 30 Oct 2008 at 12:21, jim s wrote:
I think the main thing that I recall was that they
used a screw jack
type seek mechanism rather than the usual method of a servo motor, and
one would be reminded of a small PerSci drive when you watched it go.
My specimens are too well buried to look any time soon.
No servos, but two stepper motors. The first drives the main head
leadscrew through a slip coupling and provides "coarse" positioning.
The second stepper drives a fine-pitch leadscrew that works one end
of a fulcrum, the other end of which is attached to the slip coupling
on the leadscrew and provides "fine" positioning. Very clever--it's
fun to watch the drive working.
I talked to Kodak around 1988 and they swore that media had to be
factory-formatted (although you could format 360K media normally).
I've got the OEM manual for the 3.3MB drive and it's completely
silent about user formatting.
I'd love some details (or even some software) on formatting of the
3.3/6.6 media if anyone has any. It might be fun getting the old
things going again.
Cheers,
Chuck
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 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'.
>
>
>
>