Northstar Horizon (was: confidential info on old harddrives.

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Tue Jun 1 19:09:22 1999

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:

> > > It would be a hassle to reassemble a machine just to check the drives to
> > > make sure that they were all erased properly. So, should I give the ones
> > > that I no longer want to somebody who acknowledges intellectual property
> > > rights and would HELP if I screwed up and made a mistake; or should I let
> > > somebody have them who feels that whatever is on them is now theirs, and
> > > would RUN a self-extracting archive?
> >
> On Sun, 30 May 1999, Don Maslin wrote:
>
> > Your point is well taken as to whom might be suitable recipients, but in
> > reality, it shouldn't take but 20 minutes to cobble together a
> > motherboard with minimal memory, video, and an MFM HDC to do a low level
> > format on each of them. That would rather eliminate the agonizing. For

________O/_______
        O\
 
> You're right that it SHOULDN'T take but 20 minutes. But it does. I go to
> erase a 100M 3.5" ESDI drive, but where's an ESDI controller? There're
> half a dozen composting somewhere here. Stick it back on the shelf, and
> somebody wanting it will just have to wait until someday when I get around
> to it. OR hand it off to somebody who I would TRUST to do the erasing for
> me when they install the drive in their own machine. I DID cobble
> together a temporary machine to erase the 4096s, and did half a dozen of
> them. But that was a while back, and I stupidly didn't do a good job of
> labelling them. And it looks like they've been rearranged, and more added
> to the pile. So, I'd better do it again. I try to erase a 4096, but the
> power supply on that machine just can't handle such a power hog. WOW! How
> much power do those draw?!? So, I change power supply. Now there's enough

4.0 amps of 12vdc on startup and 1.3 amps of 5vdc.

> Yes, it SHOULDN'T take but 20 minutes. But neither should washing the
> dishes, cleaning the leaves out of the gutters, or maybe even cleaning up
> part of my office. I'll get around to it. Sure, I will.

Touche!
 
> In the meantime, a friend just gave me a Northstar Horizon! It has a Z80A
> board, a memory card with 64K of RAM, and disk controller. Now I need to
> look through my diskettes to see if I have a Northstar system disk. My

Let me know if you need one.

> hard-sectored floppies USED TO be separate, until a new assistant
> rearranged them all into alphabetical order by who the disks came from!
> (He didn't last long) And I need to bring up a terminal, or configure
> something to function as a terminal.

A PC with comms software is nice as you can use the logging feature to
save scribbling notes as you bring it up.
 
> Lots of things that I SHOULD get around to doing, but they can wait. And
> people who want drives, whom I can't trust to HELP in the event of a
> mistake on my part, are the lowest priority of all.

Can't argue with that.
 
> Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
  ^^^^^^\
          You really are, aren't you ?:-}

                                                 - don
  
Received on Tue Jun 01 1999 - 19:09:22 BST