Message: 17 Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:08:20 +0100 Jos Dreesen / Marian Capel <jos.mar at bluewin.ch> Wrote: I've heard this doom and gloom talk about "when all the drives are dead" and "when nothing is left to read $MEDIA" - and while I admit that these things are likely to happen eventually, I also don't believe it's a problem for any of us. be true for the common formats, but there are drives out there were the number of functioning units is approaching zero. Arrg... Yes, I know all about those drives, and I have one that it is "semi-operational". I worked on these in 1979 and had them connected to a 6800 system. While they worked most of the time, they were a bit picky. They needed 36 volt power supplies as well as others. The controller provided actually did work. The early drives had a secondary board that eventually was replaced with an LSI chip. Their main problem was that they were a bit (well actually more than that) temperamental. The drives themselves were only 10Mbyte goodies, and used embedded servos with on-track sparing. The disks themselves were "cut-down" from 14 inch media (like 2315's). Thankfully I eventually replaced these with SMD drives, then 5 1/4 drives with the Xebec 1410 controller (SASI). All on a 6800! Fun in the early 80's