8" hard sectored floppies - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

4 Jun 2004

...
 From: "Tom Jennings" &lt;tomj(a)wps.com&gt;

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 18:18, Fred Cisin wrote:

   We used
to pay $80 for a box of DSDD Dysan 8" floppies and align the
 disk drives every year with a Dysan alignment diskette and an
 oscilloscope. That's what it took for repeatable reliability. It sucked.  
 ... and yet nobody was buying 8" Dysan alignment diskettes and new
 shrinkwrapped Dysan floppies at $1 per diskette at VCF!  My biggest
 market segment was teachers who each wanted ONE diskette to wave in
 the air when talking to classes about the days of dinosaurs. 
No, and you don't see people wearing onions around their neck anymore to
ward off illness either.

Man, like many others I used to do edits and huge (sic) compiles and
library building and linking, HOONK HOONK HOONK for hours, every day,
for however long an individual floppy lasted. (1.25MB each, seemed like
a lotta space at the time.) THAT ate up floppies and drives! I put
solidstate relays on the big AC motors and let them run down after some
idle period, that helped. 
Hi
 A handy thing to have is a handfull of bearings and a bearing
puller.
Dwight