28 Feb
2001
28 Feb
'01
12:19 p.m.
Mark,
thanks for all of the info on the MO disks/drives. It's been
quite a while since I've dealt with them at all, so the info was most
welcome. Has me thinking about trying to put the Pinnacle to good
use, if it is functional. It would be easy enough to use it with my
Mac's, but I wonder how hard it would be to get it working with the
NeXT. I've got an Exabyte 8200 8mm tape drive that I used to use for
my archival backups but it seems that most software no longer
supports it's use. It worked great on my Amiga's though.
(On a kind-of-related note: I understand the sector
layout or servo tracks of
e.g. Zip disks are written at the factory. Does that mean if you degauss a
Zip disk it is then useless, and cannot be reformatted?)
I'm not sure about the ZIP disks, but somewhat related and
on-topic is a drive I used to have for the Atari ST. It was made by
Supra and was basically a 10meg 5-1/4" floppy. The head tracking was
done with pre-recorded servo tracks that were tracked with a laser of
some sort. Otherwise the disks themselves were pretty normal
looking. I believe it plugged directly to the ST's DMA port and it
was about the size of the Atari SH-204 hard disk. It's been quite a
while since I've even seen one of these mentioned and unfortunately,
I no longer have mine. It was produced around 1987.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757