30 Oct
2008
30 Oct
'08
1:21 p.m.
Drivetec was located somewhere around Orange county because a lot of
their engineering parts ended up at
ACP in Santa Ana. I got a few of their prototype drives that functioned
and a lot of castings and other stuff
that is in a box somewhere in my pile.
I don't recall that the diskettes had a notch. The ones I had did not
have the usual notch, which was compatable
with AT drives, etc. They could be inserted in regular drives and not
be writable because there was material
where the usual write protect was located for other floppy media. I
thin there was a sort of small notch on
the leading edge that was the write protect, but I don't recall a
triangular shape to it.
I had the 3.3mb media, which was eventually scaled up when Kodak tried
to keep the technology going. I
had a program to write the format and a special controller as well. I
thought that later versions could
reformat the media, but I could be wrong. There are or were others here
with more experience with
the Drivetec / Kodak drives.
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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'.