IBM 6360 - Filesystem(ish) info?

Anders Nelson anders.k.nelson at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 13:12:03 CST 2019


Hi again,

Is there a description of the DW filesystem somewhere I can look at?

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 2:11 PM Anders Nelson <anders.k.nelson at gmail.com
wrote:

> Ali - you bet I will! =P
>
> Chuck - thanks for the notes. I have no idea what it actually came from
> but I imagine it did come with a Display writer system. No problem with the
> format in which the data is stored, I can always present a more reasonable
> storage interface to the user via FTP or something. EBCDIC conversion or
> simply writing arbitrary bits is fine with me.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 1:54 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
>> On 2/19/19 8:48 AM, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote:
>> > Hi friends,
>> >
>> > Now that I have my glorious disk toaster (2D model I think, says "2D" on
>> > the drive levers), I want to build a controller for it. I found pinouts
>> and
>> > some description of the media organization here:
>> >
>> >
>> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/6580_Displaywriter/S241-6248-3_Displaywriter_6360_6580_Product_Support_Manual_Feb1983.pdf
>> >
>> > I'd like to actually store data to these disks in the same manner the
>> > original systems did, and I'm proficient in hardware/firmware. Has
>> anyone
>> > made a controller for this already? How about emulating the filesystem?
>> >
>> > Any help is appreciated, and I'd open-source whatever I make (PCBs,
>> > firmware, etc.).
>>
>> Are you talking about the disk unit for the Displaywriter (6580)?
>>
>> Those don't use what you'd call a general-purpose filesystem in their
>> native mode (although there was a version of CP/M 86).  The DW
>> filesystem is very specific to that word-processing application and
>> probably not useful for general-purpose applications.  And, of course,
>> the character code used is EBCDIC.
>>
>> --Chuck
>>
>>
>>


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