"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-04-30, Ivan Vegvary wrote:

"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
Ivan Vegvary wrote:
How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm
talking about.

[ ... ]

I bought my Wang used from an engineering competitor. It had an IBM
selectric input/output, along with a flatbed plotter. Two Memorex floppy
drives were attached. One of the floppies (not the drive) went bad and had
to buy a new disc. $ 800 for an 8" floppy (yes, they were floppy in those
days) that had a capacity of about 160K.

Hmm ... soft sectored or hard sectored?

The 8" floppies which I used on my SWTP systems we

250 K (SSSD)
500 K (SSDD)
1 M (DSDD)

but some systems used the 8" floppies as punched card images, so a 128
byte sector would only usefully hold 80 bytes, so that would take a SSSD
from 250K down to 160 K.

I've seen the Wangs with the single cube and four stations --
and there was a single clamshell punched card reader as part of it.
Deadly slow to read a stack of cards -- but I guess that it didn't have
enough memory to make it worthwhile anyway. :-)


One of the Metrodata computers used a SMS 8" drive system that held
500K per disk. We ran them as master slave, because we could just barely
squeeze everything into 500K and could make a backup every day without
unlocking the CATV headend where the computer was. (The headend was
kept at 65 degrees F, year round) I replaced the master floppy once a
month by moving it from drive 1 to drive 0 and formatting a new disk in
drive 1. Then when the day's backup was made, we archived the old disk
for emergencies. The damn Shugart 801 drives ran 24/7 and wore out in
about two years. Every new drive had a different PC board, so we had to
make several phone calls to get the configuration data every time a
drive failed. The SMS design didn't lift the arm when it wasn't in use,
so the felt pads would wear out. Then the arm would stick to the disk
and destroy the floppy.

Somewhere I should have a pair of Teac 1/2 height 8" DSDD drives that
don't need 120 VAC.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!