--- Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote: No, this particular yutz knows the difference between 5 1/4's and "10's". He told me so. Yeah, I guess an APC is probably the next most common unit. I should have asked him what that thar was (probably wouldn't have remembered). He ought to be e-mailing me any hour now. For fun, how's about we create a list of units that had 8" drives. Off the top of my head: TRS-80/Tandy 2,12,16,6000 NEC APC IBM System/23 Datamaster Canon AS-100 (basically external,but all it's drives were seemingly) Xerox 16/8 (external) ...and I'm tired already. Of course even the much more modern IBM AS/400 had them as an option. IBM Displaywriter If in your area, there are the means to advertise for nothing or close to it, I'd take advantage of it. There's isn't tons of this stuff out there, but there is some available. I've had at least a couple of nice hits thus far. Craigslist, give away buy-n-sell type rags, etc. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html

Chuck Guzis wrote: I don't know if it was 12", but I've seen a disk that's a good bit bigger than 8" and was used on a mainframe. What I *haven't* seen is a drive that takes them. Peace... Sridhar

On 3 Mar 2007 at 10:16, Fred Cisin wrote: I don't know. I *have* seen a diskette that was considerably larger than 8"--probably a 14-incher that worked with some piece of Japanese medical equipment. But I couldn't even venture what the equipment was or even if it employed digital recording. And let's not forget the old Bernoulli drives with the 5 MB carts. Those were about 8"x12". Cheers, Chuck

Fred Cisin wrote: DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 with RX-01 and RX-02. Peace... Sridhar

On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:16:34 -0500, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: As long aw we are building a list :) SD Systems SD-100 SD-200

Are there ANY 30 year old computer companies that didn't? (not counting "consumer electronics" companies :)

On 3 Mar 2007 at 14:08, Fred Cisin wrote: Now, that's a trick question, Fred! How many computer companies that were around in 1977 are still around today? How about Apple? While I believe one could buy a third-party 8" adapter, the company itself didn't offer an 8" drive option, did they? The SA-400 was about 1976, IIRC. Cheers, Chuck

On 3 Mar 2007 at 15:35, Fred Cisin wrote: A few--very few--companies skipped the 8" drive phase. We never bothered at Durango (started 1976). As a result, rather than use the SA-400, we opted to go with Micropolis and started out with the SS 100 tpi 5.25" (1015?). It wasn't a lot of fun--you'd think that 5.25" drives would have all of the problems ironed out from 8" drive experience, but that wasn't the case. Our first systems were delivered in 1978, I think. The Micropolis drive wasn't built on a casting, but used a fairly heavy (1/8") steel plate as the base. Back then, there were also several different clamping arrangements-- and connection was via a single-in-line header instead of the 34- conductor edge connector. I think the early Sony 3.5" drives used a 26-pin header arrangement to answer someone else's question. Cheers, Chuck

--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Dopey question I guess, but was there anything in the way of a standard alloy used for drives? Was it more aluminum or more zinc? ____________________________________________________________________________________ No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started. http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail

--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: There are innumerable ways of alloying metals, with minute differences yielding materials of astoundingly different properties then you'd be led to believe. On the off chance they were more or less cast from a standard "pile" off stuph is the reason I asked. Some dude casted pieces of a homemade lathe from floppy casings, which I was led to believe were primarily zamac or something similar (zinc based). Which was surprising because the plans he used called for aluminum. http://www.dm.net/~lughaid/barry.htm. Whoops, actually he used the casings from scrapped hard drives, but what would be the difference? ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html

--- dwight elvey <dkelvey at hotmail.com> wrote: Yep, pot metal (i.e zinc alloys) will do that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_metal. Contamination is likely (I've heard of problems with other metals too, lead...tin...I'm drawing a blank currently). I've heard mention that electricity could do that too, but I think it was an erroneous statement (a dude I used to know sold old model trains, and some of the frames would blow apart as mentioned, and he figured it was due to the current running through it). And I don't think that aluminum doesn't alloy well, but rather it's particular in how it alloys. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com

Fred Cisin wrote: I'm reasonably certain that by the time the Lisa was being worked on, 5.25" drives had exceeded the capacity of 8" drives, and would definitely have been cheaper. Of course all this happened while I was still at school and a resolute Sinclair user, so I could be talking rubbish. Witchy would probably know. Gordon

On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Chris M wrote: external Did the earliest prototypes of the PC, and later AT, that Microsoft got to work with have cases?

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Chris M wrote: not rhetorical (Don't you hate rhetorical questions?) There don't seem to be pictures, and the people are getting scarcer. I had a friend who worked at Microsoft in those days (and before, when you could ask for somebody on the phone by first name), but he died a few years ago.

On 3 Mar 2007 at 10:05, Fred Cisin wrote: Future Data Qyx AES Lanier Wang CPT Varityper Artec National Semiconductor Intel Zilog Motorola ... Cheers, Chuck

There must have been hundreds of machines that used 8" drives... PERQ 1, 1A, 2T1, 2T2, 2T4 Intellec MDS8000 Genrad Futuredate development system (I forget the model number) Philips P851, P854 (and doubtless others) FTS-88 DEC RX01, RX02 (used on PPD8, PDP11 machines) HP9885 drive unit (used, normally, on the HP9825/HP9835/HP9845 machines. Could also be used on the HP9000/200 machines) And that's just the ones I can see without getting up :-) I think HP alsom made a thing called a 9895, which was an 8" drive with an HPIB interface, but I don't have one. -tony

I'm going through and archiving 3.5" disks onto my PC, I've run across a box of disks marked: QB Format and I am unable to read them with some of the disk utils I have, is anyone familiar with this format and know what system it belongs too? I was thinking Amiga perhaps, but I haven't been able to find any reference to Amiga and QB format. Curt

On 3 Mar 2007 at 23:03, Tony Duell wrote: Not to mention the HP-125 model 20. It's interesting that HP considered the Model 20 to be a "step up" from the 5.25" floppy Model 10... Cheers, Chuck

At 10:31 AM 3/3/2007, Mr Ian Primus wrote: Yeah, those guys are always claiming that 5 1/4" == 10 inches. - John