ecue@ecsvax.UUCP (Eduardo Cue) (08/13/86)
I have now had the Microbotics Hard Disk for about a week. It is only
available to developers right now, but this will change soon. The
price is $1495 and there is a picture of it in AmigaWorld pg. 33.
Now for some facts! It runs only under 1.2 as they said 1.1 had too
many bugs for them support. It hooks up to the parallel port and also
extends the port out. This has not been a problem! I have A_Time clock
card first on the parallel, then the hard disk, and finally the printer.
Everything works fine and I can print and access the hard drive at the
same time. You must still boot the Kickstart and WB from disk. WB
contains the driver (new parallel device,etc.). A copy of WB can be
on the hard disk and after some assigns in the startup-sequence the
WB disk can be put away. It runs everything noticably faster!! (I will
give some times soon). I am very happy with it so far. If anyone has
any questions, post'em>m.
Eddy Cuevanam@pttesac.UUCP (Marnix van Ammers) (08/14/86)
In article <1918@ecsvax.UUCP> ecue@ecsvax.UUCP (Eduardo Cue) writes: > >I have now had the Microbotics Hard Disk for about a week. It is only ... >same time. You must still boot the Kickstart and WB from disk. WB ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This isn't how it's going to be forever is it? I hope to buy a hard disk sometime (maybe next spring). I sure hope that I won't always be forced to load kick start and WB disks. I'd like my system to be able to boot up automatically after a power failure. I normally leave my Amiga on all the time (my old computer has never had a failure and has been on for about 5 years), but I will still need to reboot after a GURU failure. I REALLY DON'T WANT TO BE FORCED FOREVER TO HAVE TO LOAD DISKS TO BRING THE SYSTEM UP! Someone please tell me that this will be fixed by next spring. Hope, hope, hope ... Now that I've thought about this a little more, is it possible (without too much difficulty) to battery back up my kickstart ram/rom/prom/whatever-you-call-it? Also can I battery back up my RAM: disk if it is in my external add-on memory so that I can recover the RAM: disk area after a power failure? These are some features I'd be willing to pay $$ for. I might even forgo a hard disk if I can have that kind of battery backed up RAM: . Marnix
robinson@shadow.Berkeley.EDU (Michael Robinson) (08/15/86)
In article <260@pttesac.UUCP> vanam@pttesac.UUCP (-Root Admin-) writes: >Now that I've thought about this a little more, is it >possible (without too much difficulty) to battery back up >my kickstart ram/rom/prom/whatever-you-call-it? Also can I > >Marnix The way I understand it, if you place ROM's in the designated sockets (tucked away under the drive), the boot ROM's will recognize them and will not prompt you to insert the Kickstart disk. So if you were to burn some EPROM's with the WCS image (somewhat trivial) and plug them in, you would bypass ever having to load Kickstart. Of course, you would have to repeat the process every time a new version of the operating system came out. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Disclaimer: UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories Some assembly required The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is hazardous to your health I was holding it for a friend Product is sold as is with no warranty, either expressed or implied Mike "programmer with a screwdriver" Robinson USENET: ucbvax!ernie!robinson ARPA: robinson@ernie.berkeley.edu
cmcmanis@sun.uucp (Chuck McManis) (08/16/86)
> In article <1918@ecsvax.UUCP> ecue@ecsvax.UUCP (Eduardo Cue) writes: > > > >I have now had the Microbotics Hard Disk for about a week. It is only > ... > >same time. You must still boot the Kickstart and WB from disk. WB > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > This isn't how it's going to be forever is it? I hope to buy a > hard disk sometime (maybe next spring). I sure hope that I won't > always be forced to load kick start and WB disks. I'd like my > system to be able to boot up automatically after a power failure. > I normally leave my Amiga on all the time (my old computer has > never had a failure and has been on for about 5 years), but I > will still need to reboot after a GURU failure. > > I REALLY DON'T WANT TO BE FORCED FOREVER TO HAVE TO LOAD DISKS > TO BRING THE SYSTEM UP! > > Someone please tell me that this will be fixed by next spring. > > Hope, hope, hope ... > > Now that I've thought about this a little more, is it > possible (without too much difficulty) to battery back up > my kickstart ram/rom/prom/whatever-you-call-it? Also can I > battery back up my RAM: disk if it is in my external add-on memory > so that I can recover the RAM: disk area after a power failure? > These are some features I'd be willing to pay $$ for. I might even > forgo a hard disk if I can have that kind of battery backed up RAM: . > > Marnix Well, given how nicely 1.2 runs I would not be suprised to see it available in ROM sometime shortly after its release. The "upgrade" should be a simple matter of removing your WCS board and pluggin in the chips. With that step aside, you need only leave a workbench disk in the drive with the appropriate startup-sequence. If you wanted to get really tricky you could put a photo sensor in the top left corner of the monitor that looked for a blinking red line and feed that as mouse clicks into the system (sort of an auto-guru-reboot) Personally, I would like to see a preferences option to handle auto rebooting for those users who have no interest in tracking down the Guru number. The new message would say "click the left button to Debug, otherwise reboot will occur in the next 5 seconds." --Chuck {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis These are of course my own opinions and not those of Sun
danny@convex.UUCP (08/18/86)
The Microbotics folks came to the SCOPE meeting and showed us their hard disk. They were running 1.2beta and still had to go through Kickstart/Workbench to run a workbench program that installed the Hard Disk as dh0: and a Workbench Icon. The startup-sequence can then 'execute' another file. The icons came up impressively fast but, then, isn't that a feature of 1.2 with icon clumping? I wouldn't buy a hard-disk that didn't auto-configure with 1.2. To run a BBS with the Microbotics, you would need two drives as well, the internal with Kickstart, the External with the Workbench, and, of course, the hard disk. The box esentially converts the parallel port into a SCSI and passed out both a SCSI and a parallel. Pretty nice but I don't know if this means that the Microbotics could be used as a gateway for something big. Also, anybody know anything about those people who advertised in the back of AmigaWorld about NFS, Ethernet, and all this other vaporware?!??!? Now, Microbotics could probably do pretty good just selling the SCSI part. Especially if we could hook up anything - like any Mac Plus drive, and Sun drive, whatever. (Ah fantasy! Vapor-ized fantasy!) Dan Wallach ...!ihnp4!convex!danny