Whats the screwiest thing you collect?

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Fri Nov 26 12:51:53 1999

So you've had trouble getting 8" drives, eh . . . I've had trouble getting
RID of most of mine, though I'm about there now. I still have a few DSDD
types which I may use myself in the course of reconstructing my old S-100
boxes.

A goodly share of my life's work has been designing bridge controllers of
various sorts. SCSI<=>MIL STD 1553 is one you won't see often. I had to
cook that one up when it turned out that a fellow contractor had claimed the
had a 1553-interfaced WORM drive, when they really didn't. They did the
full pitch and everything, and to our customer (NASA). They produced
documents, part numbers, etc, yet when I started pressing for details, they
buckled. It turned out that all they had was an objective spec. Our
customer had based a whole chain of requirements on that pitch and the
associated claims and passed them to us as requirements.

My own interest in bridge controllers has been as tools. As you may have
noticed, I have a number of hard/floppy controller bridges, but only a few
different types. My goal is to be able to get hardware running in a hurry
and bridge controllers are only helpful if you don't have to write new
driver software for each application.

The WD100x series was really handy for this, since once I had built a
processor<=>WD100x interface cable adapter, the only thing that changed was
drive parameters and controller address block. One of these days I'll up a
SASI adapter as well, probably based on the code and instruction set for the
XEBEC controller, since their code is published. There's code for an S-100
adapter example published in the ADAPTEC ACB4000 bridge controller series
manual, but I've never tried that one out because I've heard it's compatible
with the ADAPTEC boards but neither SCSI nor SASI.

I guess you might say I tend to collect things that are "nearly" ready to
use, though they seldom see any use.

Is that screwy?

Dick



-----Original Message-----
From: jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com <jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, November 26, 1999 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: Whats the screwiest thing you collect?


>I collect bridge boards.
>I can't help it-- I have a fetish for bridge boards. All makes:
>Emulex, DTC, Xebec, WD, Adaptec, etc. All kinds of configurations:
>Cpu<->MFM (ala wd-1000), SASI<->MFM, SCSI<->ESDI, SASI<->QIC30,
>all kinds.
>
>The SCSI<->SMD configuration still eludes me, however. I know
>they exist (Adaptec ACB-55xx), though I've never seen one. Docs
>are *really* hard to get. Still looking for the docs for the
>Emulex MD-23, possibly the best darned SCSI<->ESDI bridge
>ever made: Handles four drives at up to 24MHz data rate. Smokin'.
>
>8" drives are interesting to me too, but I haven't seen too
>many in this neck of the woods.
>
>On Thu, 25 Nov 1999 23:48:11 -0800 Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
>writes:
>>I am just wondering what some of us collect that we consider the
>>screwiest
>>ourselves. For example, for reasons I can't fathom I have started
>>collecting Apple logo AC power cords, and have a couple dozen of
>>various
>>styles now.
>>
>>
>
>___________________________________________________________________
>Get the Internet just the way you want it.
>Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month!
>Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.
Received on Fri Nov 26 1999 - 12:51:53 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:30 BST