IBM 6360 - Filesystem(ish) info?

[Anders Nelson]

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
>
>
>