chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim Dworkin) (09/28/89)
I've been using Pro-350s since around 1983 and swearing at what a stupid computer it is up until the past few months. I recently upgraded to P/OS 3.1 and from reading this newsgroup am gaining a new appreciation of what appears to be a very sluggish computer with a weird OS. I have been told that DEC didn't want it to compete with the PDP11 so they put lots of wait states in the operating system. I don't know if that's true but it looks slow enough to have at least a few thousand wait states to me :^) Anyway, one thing which has always bothered me is that there is no format program which will allow you to take a generic 96tpi disk and initialize it on the Pro. You are locked in to buying RX50s. Over the summer I made an interesting discovery. If you buy a generic 96 tpi diskette and format it in a Rainbow using the FORMAT /i command, it will create a formatted diskette which can then be put into a Pro-350 and initialized. Has anyone tried this? Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something safe or am I liable to find lost data sometime in the future??? Chaim
warner@twg.com (M. Warner Losh) (09/30/89)
In article <14810@netnews.upenn.edu>, chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim Dworkin) writes... >I've been using Pro-350s since around 1983 and swearing at what a stupid [...] >made an interesting discovery. If you buy a generic 96 tpi diskette >and format it in a Rainbow using the FORMAT /i command, it will create a >formatted diskette which can then be put into a Pro-350 and initialized. > >Has anyone tried this? Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something safe >or am I liable to find lost data sometime in the future??? Tried it? Hell, the company that I worked for in High School RELIED on it. In fact, they used to use the Rainbow to make distributions for them. At the time the rainbow wasn't good for much else. That was before the days of LCTERM, EMACS, MS-DOS and 100B's. It is a well know fact that the Rainbow is one of the few computers around that can format RX50 floppies. At one point, I don't even think that VAXen could do it, but I'm SURE that has had to have changed by now. [[Side note: How do you format RX50's on a VAX (microvax II)?]] So, to answer your question, yes, it is cool to do this. I know that the disks that I formatted on a rainbow Seven years ago are still being used (once in a blue moon) on a PRO 350 with no problems at all. (Gee, has it really been seven years? Have I had my rainbow for five? Gee, I suddenly feel Old.....) :-) -- Warner Losh warner@twg.com ...!amdahl!twg-ap!warner ..but at night I'm a junk food junkie, good Lord have pity on me... My spelling and views are my own. Only the letters have been changed...