On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Phil Guerney wrote:
> Does your count of 2 Aquarius disk drives include the one I have here in
> Brisbane, Australia? We have communicated about several things over the
> years, but I can not remember if the Aquarius came up.
I don't know...where did you get your disk drive from? It doesn't
surprise me a whole lot because that is where I got my Aquarius II from
(by way of a friend). Andrew Davie (now in Tasmania) found two Aquarius
II's for sale in a newspaper ad several years ago. My friend Doug found
the Aquarius disk drive in a local electronics surplus shop in around
1997 or thereabouts. He traded that for an Aquarius II from Andrew plus
some carthridges that enabled a Commodore 1541 to be connected to the
Aquarius. I traded an ASR-33 for the Aquarius II.
Andrew Davie recently sold the disk drive to someone else. I found his
website. I don't think it was you or else I would have recognized the
name.
> What is particularly interesting about the one I have, perhaps, is the
> serial number RH0100001. I know these numbers can be misleading, but it
> certainly looks like a low number!
It looks like the first!
> The disk manual is just a set of photocopied pages. There are a total of 7
> AQ-DOS commands (DIR, INIT, SAVE, LOAD, KILL, WRITE, DISKCOPY). The DOS has
> a MicroSoft copyright. Each side of the 3"(?) floppy holds 51,200 bytes
> which means 102,400 bytes alltogether (which is exactly 100K).
Interesting.
> This was one of my first ever vintage purchases, from a local classified ad,
> and the whole Aquarius kit including the drive cost me $A20. At the time I
> had no idea how rare the floppy drive was, but I soon found out as I started
> to investigate it. I would love to know how it got to this city.
Me too! I wonder if maybe you bought it from the same fellow that Andrew
got the Aquarius II's from? The Aquarius II was never officially
released. The fellow Andrew bought them from was a developer writing some
teletext software for it and so had some pre-release machines for
development. However, they were production models, not prototypes. I
imagine the disk drive went out to several developers as well.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Sun Oct 13 2002 - 13:50:01 BST