As 8 the that Read up on parallel ports for PC first, the M8027 WILL NOT be sufficient. Most parallel ports ahve enough bidirectional lines and the 8bit data is bidirectional (only the old XT ports aren't). Look into a m7941 (DRV11) parallel line unit sa that give you lots of bits for parallel IO. Another would be the M7950 DRV-11B general purpose DMA interface (also a parallel IO). The latest one was the DRV-11J (M8049) and that has enough lines to interface anything (32 in and 32 out). The later boards could possibly even be enough to fake the IDE interface directly. Even an old clunky 120mb WD2120 would seem large! Seriously someone has done a Qbus IDE interface adn it's fairly trivial task. Considering that CDroms, IDE ZIPs, Superdisks and even big hard drives all can be found real cheap this has appeal. What makes it mildly hard to do is PDP-11 (Q, U or any) All do a read before write and IDE control registers don't like that. So you have to do like the DL cards were the TX and RX registers are different addresses. I might add that IDE is much faster than ZIP drives, I have a Parallel port IDE disk and a Syquest 270 and both scream compared to ZIP. Allison