Cool stuff!

From: Joe R. <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Tue May 4 13:32:13 2004

   
    About a month ago I picked up what I thought were a couple of HP-IB
disk drives made by a compnay by the name of IEM of Ft. Collins Colorado. I
searched the net for information about them but didn't find anything
useful. I also posted message here asking about them but didn't get any
replies.

   Last week I got one of my PCs up and running with a HP Hyper Viper card
(a HP 9000 300 computer on a card) in it so I decided to use it to check
out some of the HP-IB drives and such that have been piling up around here.
I found a couple of sites that said what kind of MO disks were supposed to
be used in the IEM MO drive but I didn't have the right ones so I stuck in
a HP MO disk that I had laying round. It worked! The system thinks the
drive is a HP 7935 with 404Mb capacity. Flip the disk over and you've got
another 404Mb to play with. Not bad!

   The 2nd IEM drive turned out to be even stranger. In addition to the
HP-IB port it has what looked like a SCSI port on the back. It has a LCD
display on and it keeps saying off-line. There are also three buttons on it
marked Select, Next and Previous. Pressing the buttons did nothing except
make the display say "Next Pressed" etc. I finally turned it off then held
down the Select button and turned it on and it came up in a demo mode. It
says that it's a "Rewriteable Optical Jukebox Controller"!! It says that
it's compatible with the HP 1000, 3000, 9000, etc etc and that it is CS-80
and plug and play with MPE, HPUX, Pascal BASIC, RTE, etc etc. It also says
that it supports the C1700/C1701 HP Library System. So it's not a drive
after all. (I never opened it up, I just assumed that it was!) That also
explains why it has a SCSI connector on it.

   Anybody here have any experience with optical jukeboxs?

   I've done a lot of searching on the net for IEM but it appears that
they're long gone. I found phone numbers for them but didn't get an answer
on either one. I didn't find ANYTHING about the jukebox controler but found
a couple of sites that gave cross references for disks that can be used in
the MO drive. Of course I'm not using any of those disks but it's working!


   Joe
Received on Tue May 04 2004 - 13:32:13 BST