This is quite tangential to the subject, but since it relates to 8" floppies, I'll proceed. I have, among many other things, a box from SMS, which originally was an SMS FT400 "floppy terminal" (their nomenclature for a standalone FDC with two drives in a powered enclosure) from which I removed one of two power supplies, this one intended to power the 8X300-controlled 8" drive interface board, capable of both single and double-density, and, though it didn't have them in it, supposedly double-sided drives as well. The box has sat outside and the label has been discolored and faded by the sun for the past 10 years. Nevertheless, it's a solid and convenient package for otherwise unusable (due to the packaging trend which shifted from vertical to horizontal mounting for 8" drives, and resulted in the narrower "-R" type frame for 8" drives) "standard-frame" drives, of which I have a few, having recently aligned and cleaned a whole bunch for distribution to wherever. I'd like opinions, taking into consideration that the labels are faded to an almost unrecognizable state, as to whether it would be more desirable, from the standpoint of a collector, to restore the original power supply and controller board, along with the original model 800-2 drives, to the enclosure and use it with the standard parallel (several of them, and NOT a PC parallel port!) port interface or would it be more sensible to save the effort of reinstalling the controller power supply (the drive supply is still in there!) and the controller, and the interface panel from the back (if I find it), as opposed to simply cleaning it up and replacing the discolored vinyl panels with aluminum ones painted to match the box and maybe using the box to house a single-board computer using the drives in the box. The controller/drive combination in a standalone box was what enabled me, back in '79-'80, with the aid of Wayne Wall to write the drivers, to attach a totally unsupported 6502 system to these drives and run the APEX OS written back then by Peter Boyle for his Digital Group system, which this one emulated to large extent. I find this an attractive prospect, but can't find a sound reason for it, since I don't intend to resurrect the original host system. Maybe I'm overlooking something, though. Any suggestions? Dick -----Original Message----- From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks(a)yahoo.com> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Monday, October 04, 1999 1:09 PM Subject: Re: 8-inch floppy availability no of I disk with