9 Dec
2004
9 Dec
'04
11:42 a.m.
So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy drives these days? Are
they still available at all? I may need one for my old CP/M-80
machine; some meeces made a nice house and toilet in one. B: is
now a single-sided drive, good enough for now, but not later,
as the spindle bearing is VERY NOISY (always was). There may
be a spare DSDD drive in a box of junk and/or I may recover
the one that went weewee.
My brother Gregg will ship the zenith monitor (the box uses a
Solid State Music VB3a for 24x80 video) and parallel keyboard
and boot flops next, then I'll worry about booting.
The CMC Marketing chassis seems fine, powered up OK 10V, 18V,
-18V, (empty of cards of course), there's little tanalums on
the motherboard (for the terminator power supply) I'm running
it empty for a few hours to see what gets hot or loses the
all-important smoke inside. BIG ferroresonant power supply.
I forgot all about the shredded finger callous from extracting
S100 boards that don't have ejectors (all the time we used to
discuss "standardized" board height utterly wasted... never
happened...). Very nasty. Not all memories are pleasant.
The board stack is:
* Cromemco PRI hacked for port 74 (I have no idea why I did this;
will have to RMOFM (*))
* Cromemco TUART hacked, looks like Parallel B pins wired to
Serial B, RS-232 control? RMOFM
* Cromemco 4FDC hacked, Apparat Trash-80 data separator added,
if I remember head-load logic mumble for Shugart-type drives.
* Industrial Microsystems 32K static RAM (no jumpers!)
* Cromemco ZPU hacked, sigh, one jumper, RMOFM
* Seattle Computer Producs SCP-16K 16K static RAM, quantity two.
* SSM VB3a video terminal board, 6x7 fonts, no jumpers
* Homemade EPROM/monitor card.
(*) RMOFM = Read My Own F-ing Manual.
9 Dec
9 Dec
12:10 p.m.
Tom Jennings wrote:
So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy
drives these days? Are
they still available at all?
http://www.cadigital.com/flopdriv.htm
12:31 p.m.
a heads up on California Digital, Although the owner still answers the
phone, the web site is basically bogus in that he sold off most everything
last spring. He still has drives I believe and some few miscellaneous stuff
like cp/m for the xerox 820 - just don't get to excited when you see "all"
the stuff he says he sells.
He just hasn't bothered to get anyone to change the web site.
:10 PM 12/09/2004, Eric Smith wrote:
Tom Jennings wrote:
So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy
drives these days? Are
they still available at all?
http://www.cadigital.com/flopdriv.htm 
5:57 p.m.
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Steve Thatcher wrote:
a heads up on California Digital, Although the owner
still answers the
phone, the web site is basically bogus in that he sold off most everything
last spring. He still has drives I believe and some few miscellaneous stuff
Oh yeah? Who did he sell it to?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
12:33 p.m.
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Eric Smith wrote:
holee ka-rap. OK, I can take a hint. I note that media is
hard to find too, of the DSDD variety. Luckily I have 25 or
so new-unused. I hope all the oxide doesn't fall off!
There does seem to be some 8" SS media on ePay and elsewhere. Has
it typically remained usable, assuming new-in-box?
12:46 p.m.
I have been moving data off 8" disks recently that I have keep in dry
storage for over 25 years. I, for the most part, have had no problem
reading those disks or formatting "new" disks that I have kept for the same
amount of time.
But then again, I have no had mice living in my floppy drives... :)
At 06:33 PM 12/09/2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Eric Smith wrote:
holee ka-rap. OK, I can take a hint. I note that media is
hard to find too, of the DSDD variety. Luckily I have 25 or
so new-unused. I hope all the oxide doesn't fall off!
There does seem to be some 8" SS media on ePay and elsewhere. Has
it typically remained usable, assuming new-in-box?
3 p.m.
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Steve Thatcher wrote:
I have been moving data off 8" disks recently
that I have keep in dry storage
for over 25 years. I, for the most part, have had no problem reading those
disks or formatting "new" disks that I have kept for the same amount of time.
But then again, I have no had mice living in my floppy drives... :)
That's good to hear. The mouse thing was odd; the floppy chassis
spent most of it's time on a desk in a bedroom-turned office.
The mice had to travel a ways to get into the disk cabinet, where
they took up residence in A:, nibbled the stepper leads down to
(repairable) nubs, crapped/peed in a toilet area convenient for
meeses but poor for P.C. board life, left B: alone (I swapped,
etc) and nibbled the edge off the 50-pin ribbon cable. Luckily
only one conductor, for about 4", so I'll repair it. I suppose
being mammals everything they do is oddly ingenious.
If the A: Shugart 851 PC board is ruined it'll make a nice
repair unit, as it's great mechanically, just swap the board.
The floppies (media) are clean and as neat as when they were
stored 20 years ago (unless they went in dirty, and a Magic Elf
took them out and cleaned them) so I anticipate no particular
problems. A couple boxes worth of new DSDD of various brands,
plus I have a new/sealed box of DSDD Verbatim (not Dysan like
I thought, too bad) I bought from a stationary store that was
(big surprise) going out of business.
5:40 p.m.
Tom Jennings wrote:
So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy drives
these days? Are
they still available at all? I may need one for my old CP/M-80
machine; some meeces made a nice house and toilet in one. B: is
now a single-sided drive, good enough for now, but not later,
as the spindle bearing is VERY NOISY (always was). There may
be a spare DSDD drive in a box of junk and/or I may recover
the one that went weewee.
Jerome Fine replies:
DSD (Data System Design) made a DSD 880/30 box
which emulated a DEC RX02. However, the drive
was actually able to handle DSDD 8" floppy media,
so I suspect that it might be able to do what
you need. While there used to be a fair demand
for these drives, I doubt that there still is.
As for the actual media, while SSDD 8" floppy
media had an index hole in a different location,
I became tired of having to punch the extra pair
of holes to allow single sided media to be used
as double sided. I placed a DPDT switch in the
detector circuit and it allowed SSDD media to be
used as DSDD media (after a LLF of course). What
I found curious was that of the dozen or so different
brands of 8" floppy media that I used, I had zero
failures on the second side when they were converted
from SSDD to DSDD - EXCEPT for one brand from DEC
which had originally carried some distributions.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.
7160
days inactive
7160
days old
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
eric＠brouhaha.com -
jhfinexgs2＠compsys.to -
melamy＠earthlink.net -
tomj＠wps.com -
vcf＠siconic.com