Parallel drive (was: USB 5.25" floppy drive - do it

From: Steven Canning <cannings_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Fri Jun 11 13:56:25 2004

I've been looking into this for some time. The parallel port lacks the
"through-put" to take the data on and off the floppy as serial data (as it
comes off the drive "raw") but if you added some hardware (like a Western
Digital FD controller) it will separate the data and convert it to
"parallel" data which the parallel port can support. The inverse is also
true (parallel data back to serial to fed the drive). The FDC can handle the
Single density issue. Processing power of the computer is not an issue
unless you have a painfully slow machine. I wish I had more time to work on
this project. Anyone have the Kilobaud article were someone connected a FDD
to a Heathkit ET-3400 ?

Best regards, Steven

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 2:55 PM
Subject: Parallel drive (was: USB 5.25" floppy drive - do it


> On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
> > Not sure if such as a PC parallel port is fast enough to cope with the
> > data rate of a floppy drive and leave enough time for the CPU to do the
> > processing though... but that'd be nice; little more than a cable and a
> > bit of glue logic hooked up to a parallel port that could be quickly
> > swapped between machines.
>
> MicroSolutions (DeKalb IL) in their "BackPack" line, made parallel port
> floppy drives. I have a 2.8M 3.5" from them, but they also made a lot of
> other models.
>
Received on Fri Jun 11 2004 - 13:56:25 BST