>I've found someone who has the entire collection of disks from USUS,
>the UCSD Pascal User Group, and he's cheerfully coaxed his Linux
>box's disk parameters into reading the 800K 5 1/4 Pinnacle Systems
>disks he had. I hope to decipher the .SVOL "disk volume in a file"
>method they were stored in, and post them to my web page soon.
Cool. I *highly* recommend that someone, somewhere, store the raw
disk images for future use. If someone wants to "pull files" out of
the images, that's fine, but the exact image should be kept as the
"master reference".
>He also mentioned he has source code on 8 inch disks from an
>Ohio Scientific, Inc. machine. He thought hed have more trouble
>finding a way to read those because of its scheme of using an
>6820 parallel port controller and a 6850 serial port controller
>to access floppies. Is that true?
Yep. Serial data (I think async, with start and stop bits) goes
through a modulator and onto disk. Reverse the process to recover
data.
> Should the normal scheme for
>connecting a Shugart-y drive to an old AT-era WD controller
>work to read these old disks?
Nope, the format is *nothing* like IBM3740, which is all a standard
PC-clone FDC will do. (Admittedly, there are a lot of variants of
IBM3740 that a 765-type FDC *will* do.)
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa_at_trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Received on Fri Oct 29 1999 - 17:18:50 BST