Shugart 850 drives

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Dec 9 16:42:54 2004

So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy drives these days? Are
they still available at all? I may need one for my old CP/M-80
machine; some meeces made a nice house and toilet in one. B: is
now a single-sided drive, good enough for now, but not later,
as the spindle bearing is VERY NOISY (always was). There may
be a spare DSDD drive in a box of junk and/or I may recover
the one that went weewee.

My brother Gregg will ship the zenith monitor (the box uses a
Solid State Music VB3a for 24x80 video) and parallel keyboard
and boot flops next, then I'll worry about booting.

The CMC Marketing chassis seems fine, powered up OK 10V, 18V,
-18V, (empty of cards of course), there's little tanalums on
the motherboard (for the terminator power supply) I'm running
it empty for a few hours to see what gets hot or loses the
all-important smoke inside. BIG ferroresonant power supply.

I forgot all about the shredded finger callous from extracting
S100 boards that don't have ejectors (all the time we used to
discuss "standardized" board height utterly wasted... never
happened...). Very nasty. Not all memories are pleasant.

The board stack is:
* Cromemco PRI hacked for port 74 (I have no idea why I did this;
  will have to RMOFM (*))
* Cromemco TUART hacked, looks like Parallel B pins wired to
  Serial B, RS-232 control? RMOFM
* Cromemco 4FDC hacked, Apparat Trash-80 data separator added,
  if I remember head-load logic mumble for Shugart-type drives.
* Industrial Microsystems 32K static RAM (no jumpers!)
* Cromemco ZPU hacked, sigh, one jumper, RMOFM
* Seattle Computer Producs SCP-16K 16K static RAM, quantity two.
* SSM VB3a video terminal board, 6x7 fonts, no jumpers
* Homemade EPROM/monitor card.

(*) RMOFM = Read My Own F-ing Manual.
Received on Thu Dec 09 2004 - 16:42:54 GMT