12 Feb
2015
12 Feb
'15
3:18 p.m.
From: Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 3:16 PM
On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4
at gewt.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2015, Al Kossow wrote:
>> Are they common command set drives?
> Should be. I don't believe CompuServe did
anything too silly.
I don't have any special insight into it, but
wouldn't it have been a
matter of whether Systems Concepts did anything too silly? Surely
Compuserve must have purchased whatever kind of drives SC specified
for use with the SC40, even when Compuserve built the machines
themselves.
SC certainly wasn't a large enough purchaser of
disk drives that any
of the mainstream disk manufacturers would have built anything
particularly special for them. However, there were a lot of standard
SCSI drives that could be formatted with a user-specified block size.
Some allowed arbitrary size within a range, while others only had a
few specific choices.
I don't believe that Stewart ever did anything with SCSI disks. When I
spoke to some of the CompuServe alumni last year, they mentioned that
they had created the SCSI interface for their SC-40 boxes, and did all
the monitor development work for it.
XKL had the same issue in the 1990s. We ended up sourcing Seagate
Barracudas with OEM (that was us) microcode to allow for a 2304 byte
sector size.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/