v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS@sri-unix.UUCP (08/06/83)
From: Scott Burris <v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS> Has anyone had any experience with 8 inch drives for the PC? I have a friend who is going to buy 3 of them (PC's that is), and he wants 8 inch floppy disks that can hold 1 meg. (i.e. double sided, double density). Any suggestions, experiences, etc. would be appreciated. Scott... v.burris@UCLA-CS (ARPA) or v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS or ...ucbvax!ucla-vax!burris (UUCP)
BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (08/06/83)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> At ISI and the ARPA office we have 8" drives from Flagstaff Engineering. Flagstaff's strong point is that they make software and hardware that allow you to read just about any format of disk. Our primary goal is to be able to read Displaywriter files. (A Displaywriter is an IBM stand-alone word processor). The Flagstaff software will read display writer files and turn them into Easywriter, Wordstar, or ASCII text files. In addition, we can read just about any format of CP/M, EBCDIC, or whatever disks. These programs are utilities which convert files from the foreign format to normal DOS files. The Flagstaff board is a modified disk controller card. The drive is in an outboard box and uses its own power supply. A ribbon cable connects this box to the modified IBM controller card in the PC. I believe the modifications are exclusively to read and write single density disks so this might not be the route for you. If you are into maximum 8" capacity in DOS format, the Tall Tree JFORMAT program may be the answer. This program will format any 8" drive at various densities. I believe the max is 1.2 MByte. Tall Tree gave us a list of manufacturers but Flagstaff was the only one we contacted due to the Displaywriter capability. As I explained in an earlier INFO-IBMPC, beware of controllers that use digital data separaters! If you are going for double density on 8" disks, the controllers that use digital data separaters may get you into trouble. This is why Flagstaff uses modified IBM controllers. IBM has a custom chip set that does this function in analog logic (analog phase lock loop vs digital phase lock loop).