disk duplicating machines
Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech. Bill
Do they duplicate copy protected disks? I bought both Catweasel and Kyroflux, but haven't had the time to test. Copy protection and the battle between protectors and pirates was interesting back in the day. An arms race. On Wednesday, August 31, 2016, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
-- Jeff Brace - ark72axow@gmail.com
There has been some extensive reverse engineering work done into Trace brand duplication machines, but tragically the group who did this work refuses to share even one IOTA of information they gleaned, making it completely worthless. The group is SPS, creators of the heavily locked down and licence/usage encumbered Kryoflux floppy imaging device. (you're not allowed to share images you make with the device, except with SPS themselves! read the license! Its complete madness, and goes against every definition of preservation I've ever seen.) On 8/31/2016 1:46 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
-- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu@gmail.com jgevaryahu@hotmail.com
OF the two, the Mountain disk duplicating machine can handle Apple, Tandy, and IBM disks if you have everything set up correctly. I assume you need an Apple drive in the machine to make Apple disks. I never really tried to make it work. I have a system that was geared up to use the copier...
On Aug 31, 2016, at 2:10 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
OF the two, the Mountain disk duplicating machine can handle Apple, Tandy, and IBM disks if you have everything set up correctly. I assume you need an Apple drive in the machine to make Apple disks. I never really tried to make it work. I have a system that was geared up to use the copier...
You shouldn't need an Apple *drive*, if it's just a machine driving the basic floppy mechanism. The difference between Apple (Apple II and Mac SD/DD) disks and PC disks (including Mac HD) is the track encoding, which the drive doesn't care about. The floppy drive's job is to take the 1-bit signal from the floppy controller and deposit it on the disk. It's the controller that knows the difference between GCR (Apple SD/DD) and MFM (All PC, Mac HD) encoding. As a tangential point of interest, USB floppy drives have the controller on board, which is why in general they can't deal with 400/800K Mac disks; their controllers only know MFM. It would be possible to MAKE a USB floppy drive that could read Mac or Apple II disks, and then it would just be up to the operating system to interpret the file system. Of course, formatting is a different matter, as you'd have to have a non-standard mechanism for telling the drive to format MFM or GCR (USB Mass Storage just assumes a disk is a disk and there's only concept of different low-level formats). - Dave
On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 3:06 PM, David Riley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Aug 31, 2016, at 2:10 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
OF the two, the Mountain disk duplicating machine can handle Apple,
Tandy,
and IBM disks if you have everything set up correctly. I assume you need an Apple drive in the machine to make Apple disks. I never really tried to make it work. I have a system that was geared up to use the copier...
You shouldn't need an Apple *drive*, if it's just a machine driving the basic floppy mechanism. The difference between Apple (Apple II and Mac SD/DD) disks and PC disks (including Mac HD) is the track encoding, which the drive doesn't care about. The floppy drive's job is to take the 1-bit signal from the floppy controller and deposit it on the disk. It's the controller that knows the difference between GCR (Apple SD/DD) and MFM (All PC, Mac HD) encoding.
As a tangential point of interest, USB floppy drives have the controller on board, which is why in general they can't deal with 400/800K Mac disks; their controllers only know MFM. It would be possible to MAKE a USB floppy drive that could read Mac or Apple II disks, and then it would just be up to the operating system to interpret the file system. Of course, formatting is a different matter, as you'd have to have a non-standard mechanism for telling the drive to format MFM or GCR (USB Mass Storage just assumes a disk is a disk and there's only concept of different low-level formats).
- Dave
In that case, the drive that is installed appears to be capable of making Tandy, IBM, or Apple disks. There is likely a controller for it, I think maybe it was making Tandy disks in an IBM PC IIRC.
Yeah, do you know of anyone who actually pays attention to that sort of crap? ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA On August 31, 2016 2:03:36 PM Jonathan Gevaryahu via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
There has been some extensive reverse engineering work done into Trace brand duplication machines, but tragically the group who did this work refuses to share even one IOTA of information they gleaned, making it completely worthless.
The group is SPS, creators of the heavily locked down and licence/usage encumbered Kryoflux floppy imaging device. (you're not allowed to share images you make with the device, except with SPS themselves! read the license! Its complete madness, and goes against every definition of preservation I've ever seen.)
On 8/31/2016 1:46 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
-- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu@gmail.com jgevaryahu@hotmail.com
Archive first, ask permission and increase the lawyer's retainer later? ;) Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 31, 2016, at 23:14, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Yeah, do you know of anyone who actually pays attention to that sort of crap? ;)
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On August 31, 2016 2:03:36 PM Jonathan Gevaryahu via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
There has been some extensive reverse engineering work done into Trace brand duplication machines, but tragically the group who did this work refuses to share even one IOTA of information they gleaned, making it completely worthless.
The group is SPS, creators of the heavily locked down and licence/usage encumbered Kryoflux floppy imaging device. (you're not allowed to share images you make with the device, except with SPS themselves! read the license! Its complete madness, and goes against every definition of preservation I've ever seen.)
On 8/31/2016 1:46 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote: Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
-- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu@gmail.com jgevaryahu@hotmail.com
I had a 3.5 PC floppy duplicator for a while. I ended up donating it to the community college I was attending so they could use it to format / check floppies for use in the lower level computer classes. It was easy to set up as the reject slot was on the side of the machine, and could be arranged to spit the disks right into a trash can. -J On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:22 AM, Cory Smelosky via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Archive first, ask permission and increase the lawyer's retainer later? ;)
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 31, 2016, at 23:14, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Yeah, do you know of anyone who actually pays attention to that sort of crap? ;)
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On August 31, 2016 2:03:36 PM Jonathan Gevaryahu via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
There has been some extensive reverse engineering work done into Trace brand duplication machines, but tragically the group who did this work refuses to share even one IOTA of information they gleaned, making it completely worthless.
The group is SPS, creators of the heavily locked down and licence/usage encumbered Kryoflux floppy imaging device. (you're not allowed to share images you make with the device, except with SPS themselves! read the license! Its complete madness, and goes against every definition of preservation I've ever seen.)
On 8/31/2016 1:46 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote: Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
-- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu@gmail.com jgevaryahu@hotmail.com
-- Jason Perkins 313 355 0085
I have a 3 1/2" one (non-standalone) that I figured out the protocol for, and got working. I've never been able to find a 5 1/4" one - I kind of wonder how the disk loading would work, given that 5 1/4" disks are less "sturdy" and vary more than 3 1/2" media. With mine, it will jam if the disks already have labels on them, or if they are cheaper disks made of thinner material and more flexible. Are yours standalone, or do they require an external computer? Mine is basically just an external floppy drive with an RS-232 controlled disk changer attached. I wrote some shell scripts to multipart .tar archives to a stack of floppies. -Ian On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 1:46 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Anyone into vintage disk duplicating machines? Me? I have two; one for 5 1/4 and one for 3.5 disks but I don't use them. Have not powered them on or tested in 10 years. I have never seen anyone demo these at a VCF or elsewhere, but I bet there was a time when these were in use in many businesses before easy software download. A lost piece of tech.
Bill
On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 2:15 PM, Ian Primus via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have a 3 1/2" one (non-standalone) that I figured out the protocol for, and got working. I've never been able to find a 5 1/4" one - I kind of wonder how the disk loading would work, given that 5 1/4" disks are less "sturdy" and vary more than 3 1/2" media. With mine, it will jam if the disks already have labels on them, or if they are cheaper disks made of thinner material and more flexible.
Are yours standalone, or do they require an external computer? Mine is basically just an external floppy drive with an RS-232 controlled disk changer attached. I wrote some shell scripts to multipart .tar archives to a stack of floppies.
-Ian
They're both stand-alone. Might be worth having a workshop at my house some time this fall to try these out and others.. I also have a lot of new things here, some of which I need to poss find new homes for or trade. Lately exploring hardware by Sun, SGI, Next, DEC Rainbow. I have a Comptometer to repair. The list is a mile long. I am very close but not yet done with my DEC 11/40, but I have taken two months off, spending more time outside in the summer weather and a lot of music-related projects. I also have a Visual 1050 on my workbench. Need to re-cap the hard drive controller. Bill
participants (8)
-
Cory Smelosky -
Dave McGuire -
David Riley -
Ian Primus -
Jason Perkins -
Jeffrey Brace -
Jonathan Gevaryahu -
william degnan