About to acquire an IBM 5360...

From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com <(Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com)>
Date: Fri Aug 20 06:22:41 1999

>> Finally, as I can seldom resist saying, the 5340 and 5360 have the
>> nicest floppy drive I've ever met. Twenty-three disks all in it at
>> once...
>
> So I have this carthridge I liberated from an abandoned 5360 that holds
> about 10 8" floppies. Does this get loaded into this 23-disk floppy
> drive?


Easy. You put the whole cartridge in. The drive takes two cartridges and three
loose disks. I seem to recall that the OS accepted designations for either
cartridge, both cartridges, any single disk, or all three single disks, and
there may have been a way of specifying a single disk within a cartridge (I can
look this up at home).

In all cases except a single disk specified, when the machine got to the end of
a disk, it would spit the disk back out into the cartridge (or disk slot), move
the disk carriage up one space, and suck another disk into its innards to read
or write it. A sort of jukebox mechanism, I suppose. I also recall it was
pretty speedy, something like 4 cylinders a second, 20 seconds to read or write
a whole diskette.

Philip.
Received on Fri Aug 20 1999 - 06:22:41 BST