bosse@erix.UUCP (Bosse Sandholm) (08/21/85)
Summarary: I am looking for device drivers for the IOMEGA "Bernoullibox". We have computer club called PD68 here in Sweden. We are using Motorola 680x and 680xx processors with FLEX,OS9 and IDRIS. 80 of us have a 68k SBC (Designed in Norway) that supports 512k memory, serie and parallell I/O, 2 floppys and a SCSI interface. We are using the IDRIS OS from Whitesmiths. We have found it difficult to use IDRIS with only 2 floppys. After a small market research here in Sweden we have found that the cheapest way to get additional secondary storage is to use a 10Mb "Bernoullibox". What we want to know is Have anyone out there used a "Bernoullibox" with a UNIX like OS? (We have seen the 5Mb box for MAC.) We have heard that the IOMEGA has a SASI interface, is it possible to use it with the SCSI port. What kind of controller did you use? (We have the capacity to produce layout and cards if we can get a shematic diagram.) Can anyone help us with a driver (source) for the Bernoullibox.? Thank you for your attention. bosse@erix.UUCP ...mcvax!enea!erix!bosse Bo-Erik Sandholm LM Ericsson S-126 25 Stockholm Sweden
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (08/23/85)
> After a small market research here in Sweden we have found that > the cheapest way to get additional secondary storage is to use > a 10Mb "Bernoullibox". I would not suggest it. First, you can get cheaper hard disk drives these days. The IOMEGA is SLOW! Real SLOW! Almost the same as floppies. It was unbearable running a UNIX file system on it. It would take forever to read the entire disk. Second, the media is not cheap, around 80 dollars per cartridge. > > What we want to know is > > Have anyone out there used a "Bernoullibox" with a UNIX like OS? > (We have seen the 5Mb box for MAC.) Yes, I wrote a driver for XENIX for the INTEL 310 (a multibus box) using a 80286. The drive was a two 10mb drives on the single controller. > > We have heard that the IOMEGA has a SASI interface, is it possible to use it > with the SCSI port. > No, it uses a SCSI interface. It is however, only minimally compliant with the SCSI standard. > What kind of controller did you use? > (We have the capacity to produce layout and cards > if we can get a shematic diagram.) I used an EMULEX HA01 host adapter. The thing was really preliminary. Both the first and second manuals I got were terrible. They sucked. It took a long time to fix the boards to work despite the grossly wrong switch settings, and then to get the driver to work with all the misinformation in the manuals. Fortunately, EMULEX customer support gave me a lot of good help over the phone. The Host Adapter is not my favorite design. It is extremely minimalistic and you have to do a lot in your driver software to make it work. The problem is that there just aren't any decent MULTIBUS host adapters. The only other one currently on the market (DTC) does not do parallel multibus arbitration. > > Can anyone help us with a driver (source) for the Bernoullibox.? > No, the company I wrote it for has a vested interest in recovering the money they gave me for writing the code.
wcs@ho95e.UUCP (x0705) (08/24/85)
> I am looking for device drivers for the IOMEGA "Bernoullibox". > Have anyone out there used a "Bernoullibox" with a UNIX like OS? > (We have seen the 5Mb box for MAC.) > > We have heard that the IOMEGA has a SASI interface, is it possible to use it > with the SCSI port. > bosse@erix.UUCP > ...mcvax!enea!erix!bosse > > Bo-Erik Sandholm > LM Ericsson > S-126 25 Stockholm > Sweden I called IOMEGA last week, and they told me the Bernoulli Box can't handle Xenix right now, but they're working on a controller board that will do both Xenix and DOS. Should be about 2 months, and be available as upgrade as well as new equipment. -- ## Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (09/04/85)
> I called IOMEGA last week, and they told me the Bernoulli Box can't handle > Xenix right now, but they're working on a controller board that will do both > Xenix and DOS. Should be about 2 months, and be available as upgrade as well > as new equipment. > -- Eh? The Bernoulli box can't handle XENIX? This is assinine. The IOMEGA uses a brain damaged version of the SCSI standard and the main problem I had in implementing it under XENIX 286 was that the SCSI Host Adapters on the Market today all bite the big one. It took me forever to get through several broken cards and cryptic (and sometimes blatently wrong) manuals. There exists XENIX device drivers for the IOMEGA, although I do not have it anymore. None of this is the fault of IOMEGA, the box works to spec, but I have already enumerated the problems inherent to it's operation. =Ron