Datic 2000 / Ampex 844 Documentation ?

[Eric Smith]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 2:37 PM, jos via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> First time I have seen a 14" drive on a CP/M system....
>

There were some versions of CP/M on the Intel MDS development system (the
_original_ CP/M machine) with support for the Intel MDS 740 hard disk
system, which was an Intel SBC 206 controller with a CDC 9427H Hawk 14-inch
fixed/removable drive, with IBM 5440 style media.  I'm not sure whether the
CP/M support was provided by Digital Research, or required a third-party
BIOS.

Starting in 1979, IMSAI sold the CDC Hawk, with support in IMDOS II (a
licensed and modified CP/M 1.33).

Ohio Scientific offered hard disk systems fairly early on, using 14-inch
drives. They supported them in the OS-65U operating system, I suspect that
they had CP/M support for them on their systems that included a Z80
processor.

The first time I personally used a hard disk with CP/M was in 1981. It was
earliest model Corvus disk system that used an IMI 7710 8-inch drive
(smoked-plastic enclosure), connected to an Apple II, the latter containing
a Microsoft Z80 Softcard.

At one point I had to do a low-level format of the drive. You had to get
the formatter program from Corvus, and add a jumper to the drive backplane
to enable formatting.