Documentation for Xebec Owl (a 1984 SASI-disk-drive)

[Martin Peters]

Anyone here, owning a Xebec Owl and/or its documentation?

The Owl is a SASI-disk-drive from 1984. One could say that it's mostly a
Xebec S1410A mounted on a drive, thus eliminating the ST-506-interface.
The one I had my hands on seems to be a late version, called the Owl II
(20MB instead of 10MB). It shiped with a PC-SASI-controller for the
8-bit-ISA-bus (TTL) and 4KB Boot-ROM (in a 2764-EPROM).

The firmware of the Owl II itself seems to be more advanced and bigger
than that of the well-known Xebec-bridge-boards: The Owl has 16KB
(27128) of firmware, compared to the 4/8KB (2732/64) of a S1410/10A/20.
A lot of its commands are explained in the documentation of the S1420
controller, but it seems there are some commands missing, e.g. the
command 0x0C.

The drive is not compatible with later SCSI equippment. The owner
reported, he did not manage to run it with a "modern" PC-SCSI-Controller
and I'm not surprised about this: Some commands and codes are
incompatible to SCSI/CCS, so the SENSE codes. There is also a command
collision with the INQUIRY command, uhhhh :(

Does someone own the/some/any documentation for the Owl?

It doesn't seem there's much more out there than this brochure:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xebec/brochures/Xebec_Owl_Datasheet_198410xx.pdf

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