Stopped by the scrapper today and found this: IBM 3742
Dual Data Station.
There's not much left of it, so I grabbed the little nametag off it for my
archaic weird stuff to decorate the walls collection, but I'm curious what
it is.
There may not be left of that particular unit, but the IBM 3740 series
(of which the 3742 is a variant) lives on today in every PC clone.
The only thing I could find (in German, no less) was a
mention from
1975 about it having something to do with 8" disks and System/32.
In particular, every PC-clone uses a floppy disk format that's a very
direct descendant of the IBM 3740 format. Change the modulation from
FM to MFM, up the data rate, and that's all. And at least some of the
PC FDC's will read a IBM 3740 format floppy (see the discussions from
the past few years in comp.os.cpm about single-density capable
FDC's).
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
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