[HN Gopher] Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC
___________________________________________________________________
Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC
Author : Cocktail
Score : 14 points
Date : 2021-03-26 10:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (boginjr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boginjr.com)
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I had four 8" drives. Two (DSDD) were connected to my IMSAI
| (modified with CompuPro S-100 boards). The other two (SSDD) were
| connected to my Ferguson Big Board. I never tried using the 8"
| drives on systems that would normally interface to 5-1/4" drives,
| but I always assumed it would be a simple matter of adapting the
| 50-pin edge connector used for the 8" drives to the 34-pin edge
| connecter used for the 5-1/4" drives.
|
| At one time I had a calibration disk and an "exerciser board" for
| 8" drives that could be used (along with an oscilloscope) to
| adjust the track positions and gain settings on the drive.
|
| I gave away all of those old goodies after I purchased at 25MHz
| 386 PC clone that could emulate CP/M faster than the native Z-80
| hardware.
|
| It was fun tinkering with computer hardware in that era, but it
| was also frustrating because of the limitations of the
| technology. It's hard to believe that processors of today run
| three orders of magnitude faster, and have six+ orders of
| magnitude more RAM, with six orders of magnitude more disk
| storage with about five orders of magnitude faster disk I/O.
|
| I don't miss the old days so much.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I seriously got into computing in 1979, working for the
| Microbiology Department at Queen Elizabeth College, University of
| London, using Research Machines 380Zs, equipped with both 8 and
| 5.25 inch floppy drives. Here are a few of my observations on the
| beasts:
|
| - They required quite a lot of strength to open and particularly
| to close - some of our students were scared they were going to
| break them (and the cost a lot back then) because of the force
| needed.
|
| - One student did the classic "remove disk from envelope" thing
| where they took the actual mylar disc out of the floppy
| container. He may have been taking the piss, but if so he lost
| out, as we made students pay for the disks.
|
| - Somewhat unrelated - when I was working in the Netherlands in
| the 90s, I noticed that supermarkets in Utrecht, a big university
| town, had floppy disk dispensers in supermarkets - students put
| in a guilder or whatever, and got a 3.5 inch floppy they could
| submit their coursework on.
|
| - They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like
| mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which
| I mostly was.
|
| - They were horribly unreliable - we used to have to keep sending
| ours back to RML in Oxford to get them recalibrated or replaced
| every few months.
|
| Still, all in all they were a million times better than my own
| personal computer at the time - a Dragon32 with a cassette deck
| for storage!
| paulsutter wrote:
| Embarrassed to be old enough to remember: 8" floppies were
| actually called disks, and the smaller 5.25" floppy drives were
| called diskettes because they were so compact
| louwrentius wrote:
| In Dutch, we always talked about 'diskettes', when talking
| about the rigid 3.5" disks. The large 5.25" were called
| floppies. Diskettes were called floppies too sometimes, but
| never the other way around.
|
| I'm from the time frame in which I never saw 8 inch floppies.
|
| The 5.25" were on the way out, many PCs had both 1.44 and 1.2
| MB drives for a while.
|
| /rambling
| unixhero wrote:
| It was/is the same rule in English also. Cheers.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I'm also old enough, and we called both 8 and 5.25 disks,
| disks. Diskettes came around later, and that nomenclature was
| far from universal.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-27 23:00 UTC)