18 Oct
2006
18 Oct
'06
8:10 p.m.
On 10/18/2006 at 10:47 PM Barry Watzman wrote:
Don't know if any of you saw this, but a 5.25"
floppy disk drive just went
for $192 on E-Bay tonight (Wed., 10/18).
It was a "backpack" external parallel port drive, New Old Stock in Box,
still shrink wrapped.
Note that a 3.5" Backpack will support a 5.25' drive--and I believe that a
BP controller can support up to 2 drives.
Hmmm, I've still got a few 3.5' BP drives in original shrinkwrap...
The backpack controller itself is little more than an NS 80277, a bit of
RAM and what looks like a custom-programmed single-chip MPU. Conversation
with it is via a 4-bit data path. The neat thing is that you can program
that 82077 just like the one on an ISA floppy controller.
The amazing thing about MS was their absolute refusal to discuss
programming of th thing--I had to take apart their driver myself to figure
it out so I could write a Win95 VxD for it.
Cheers,
Chuck