On 5/18/21 11:16 AM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Those are the earlier ones, 8" disks 10MB and 20MB. Looking at that board on eBay the memories are starting to come back. ;) There are a few different interfaces; the one you referenced above is the better one, with some buffering. Any of them should work I think. I remember that I used several different models on the 8" drives over the years.
Ah I never saw the 8" ones, jsut the ones that were probably like 5.25" or so.
"More of the same", except the cartridges were rectangular. They came in 10MB and 20MB varieties. They worked great, and were surprisingly reliable.
Incidentally, I currently use a pair of 44MB SCSI Bernoulli drives on my personal PDP-11/34 (here at home, not at LSSM) interfaced via a Unibus SCSI host adapter. I run RT-11, RSTS/E, and RSX-11M that way. Works a treat, and it's very handy for healing the soul when something stresses me out.
Awesome! The 44Mb (and maybe 88Mb?) ones I dealt with were as a young lad working at a government contractor on a Navy base. The command there used them for the secure messaging computers. They would toss the classified ones in the safe and have me fix the unclass one, write down what I did then do the same on the classified ones.
Neat! At work we had a few 20MB 8" drives, and a rather vast number (hundreds) of 44MB 5.25" drives, all over the place. The FSO had shelves in the vault that held nothing but 5.25" Bernoulli disks...thousands of them.
When I was young DOS kid I always thought the removable cart "hard drives" seemed better than a normal hard drive because ou could expand it. Didn't know about access times. Later had a zip drive, they were cool.
Very cool.
I still have a few Zip drives and a Jaz drive somewhere, freebs picked up along the way years later.
Great stuff, those Zip drives. The Jaz drives are garbage. I never had any, but all of my friends did, and they all hated them.
I did have a SCSI 100Mb zip in a music sampler box that click of deathed on me when I needed it the most.
I must be the only heavy use of Zip disks that never had that happen. With over a dozen drives at one point, and hundreds of disks. On Macs, PeeCees, PDP-11s...I've had a few disks that never worked (formatting errors) but, by and large, if they worked, they worked forever. And the only time I ever lost a drive is when it got rained on.
Young and dumber (maybe) I had sampled a few clips from the movie "Contact" of the little girl saying like "CQ CQ this is blablabal" and what not. On the EMU sampler you didn't need midi device to drive it, there was 10 number buttons on the front you could assign it to. So I assigned these girl-on-the-ham-radio samples to the buttons, threw it in the car with something programmed to xmit on the hamfest repeater freq and an inverter... with the idea I would toy with the hamfest hams and give them some excitement. Arrive to the Virginia Beach hamfest and sure enough the zip drive click of deaths on me. It was never ment to be.
Probably because it knew you were trying to mess with people. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA