Sellam Ismail wrote: OK, questions: 1) Any sign of any additional drive boards within the case or anything that might be ROM on the drive PCBs themselves? 2) Does the disk keep spinning forever when you put it in, or just do a few revolutions and stop? 3) When you put a disk in, do the heads step at all? Or does it just sit on track 0 all the time? And some initial guesses: 1) Homebrew case which someone just never got around to finishing and adding a data connector to. 2) Commercial prototype for testing various aspects (PSU heat dissipation, drive mounting, power socket mounting, case paint etc.) 3) Tester for a *floppy disk* manufacturer (i.e. does my product foul a stock drive mechanism, does it fall apart in the heat of a typical enclosure etc.) 4) Degausser (as you say) or other form of disk eraser 5) TV / movie prop I'm quite liking the first and last ones - although the last one's probably only credible if the disk keeps spinning forever when you put it in. Some form of eraser might be possible if the thing's just wired to write junk; even if the heads don't move I suppose someone could have built a "poor man's eraser" which just trashes track 0 :-) Commercial 'pre-production' type products (2 and 3 above) do seem less likely - not because they wouldn't have existed, but because I'm surprised someone would bother to save them and/or they wouldn't have had a data connector added later to make a fully functioning unit. Can you take the route of asking the person you got it from - and if they weren't the original owner, following the chain back to the person who was? cheers Jules

Sellam Ismail <sellam at vintagetech.com> wrote: What you describe sounds very normal for a "generic" floppy drive cabinet from the S-100 days. Well, most of the folks I worked with made theirs out of plywood and 2x4's, but for those who wanted to buy something metal and already made there were generic metal cabinets with holes in the right places. It was always nice if there was a slot for the ribbon cable, but many ribbon cables were regularly abused by slamming a cable on top of them :-) Find a late 70's BYTE and look in the ads in the back. Pinning down the exact era would be easier if you told us the exact floppy drive (e.g. "SA-400"). Date codes on the semiconductors in the power supply might also pin down the era. It is likely that somebody here might recognize the drive jumpering! A drive could indeed be hotwired to always have the write gate always on, but you'd need something else (possibly a small daughterboard with a few TTL chips and/or timers) to get them to go to cylinder 0 and then step over the surface and act as an eraser. Tim.

It was thus said that the Great Sellam Ismail once stated: Perhaps it was used to duplicate disks? While I don't recall the exact details, I do remember seeing something like that, where you put a disk in. If it was formatted, it would read the contents and store it in memory; placing an unformatted disk in would cause it to format the disk and write whatever it has in memory. I saw it at a software company. -spc (Although the one I saw had a hopper for disks and would automatically feed them in for unattended operation)