16 Apr
2008
16 Apr
'08
8:05 a.m.
I have seen them working. In the day, I worked for a store which sold
them, so I saw quite a few working ones. We also added touch screens
(with s stylus) to quite a few of them.
I remember discovering that the index detector on the floppy drives was
not connected, like on an apple 2. The formating was completly soft
sectored, which did not rely on a index pulse from the disk.
I got in an argument with a Victor rep once about this. He was telling a
story about an "idiot" customer, who was using 10 sectored hard sectored
floppies (ala Northstar), and he told the customer that this was the
problem. After some discussion with him, I opened a unit up, unplugged
the wires from the index photosensor, and the unit still worked. He still
didn't want to believe me.
It also seems like the floppy used different speeds (rpm) on different
tracks, running slower on the inside tracks and faster on the outside
tracks to keep the same bit density at all places on the disk. There were
more sectors on the outside tracks than the inside tracks. This would
seem to preclude using a standard floppy drive.
16 Apr
16 Apr
11:18 p.m.
les at frii.com wrote about the Victor 9000:
It also seems like the floppy used different speeds
(rpm) on different
tracks, running slower on the inside tracks and faster on the outside
tracks to keep the same bit density at all places on the disk. There were
more sectors on the outside tracks than the inside tracks.
As was the case on the "twiggy" drives in the Lisa (officially known
as "FileWare"), and the 400K and 800K 3.5" drives used on the Macintosh
and Apple II.
This would seem to preclude using a standard floppy
drive.
Depending on the range of speeds the Victor used, it might be possible
to replace the motor control circuit on a standard floppy drive.
Eric
17 Apr
17 Apr
2:55 p.m.
This would
seem to preclude using a standard floppy drive.
Depending on the range of speeds the Victor used, it might be possible
to replace the motor control circuit on a standard floppy drive.
6094
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ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
les＠frii.com