shaggy computer story

[ffutures]

Found myself telling this story on another conference, thought it might amuse readers here.


I've had nearly every type of drive ever made at one point or another, from 80K floppies in a TRS-80 through the heady heights of 360k in my first IBM PC, 720k, 1.2mb, 1.44mb, etc. etc.

And there was the really weird one...

For a brief while in the early nineties I had what may have been the world's only laptop with an external 8" floppy drive. The original IBM PC had an output for controlling an external floppy on the floppy disk controller card. The first laptop I owned was a Minolta which had 720k 3.5" floppies but duplicated that output, so that it could have an external 5.25" floppy for compatibility with desktop PCs. I had a spare 360k floppy drive, a casing with a power pack (originally intended for the TRS-80 drives), and thought it'd make an interesting computer magazine article - so I borrowed someone else's external drive and traced the cable connections.

It turned out to be a relatively simple connection, provided you had the appropriate plugs, but I couldn't get them anywhere at first. Then I found an external dual 8" drive unit from some sort of CP/M machine in a computer junk shop, which had the right connector, and bought it for about £4 (I think that was about $10 in those days). Of course the rational thing to do at that point would have been to remove the cable and junk the big drives (which weighed about 15lb in their steel chassis case) and build the drive I wanted. But of course I had to see if I could make the 8" floppy work first.

Turned out I could, in the end. Borrowed an 8" floppy disk from work (we still had a CP/M network in those days, though it was being phased out in favour of some non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines based on the 80186 processor - don't ask, it was a mindbogglingly stupid idea and we had dozens of the bloody machines for a while), powered up the drive, and popped in the floppy. And once I'd found the right Bios settings in the laptop I could read the files. They were VERY boring.

Kept it for a week or so before reluctantly deciding that I really didn't need 8" floppies and completing the 5.25" project. And somewhere along the way I lost all interest in writing the article, which is a shame because in those days I could have easily sold it for considerably more than I was earning from RPG writing.

You try telling that to the youth of today and they won't believe you...


Incidentally, I think I ended up selling the 5.25" drive to timill in the end. Still got it, Tim?

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

For a short while, my dad had an early PC-compatible with two 3.5", two 5.25" and two 8" floppy drives. Not a very common combination...

some non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines based on the 80186 processor

Sorry, but I have to ask. The only machines I've ever heard of with that combination were the Swedish school-use Compis machines, but I never heard of those being inflicted on the rest of the world. So what kind of machine was this?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Research Machines. Also used pretty much exclusively in schools, had the distinction of running all of the BBC Model B graphics modes, so it was relatively easy to write educational software for both. There was even a version of BBC Basic for it. Wouldn't surprise me if Compis were RM rebadged; more likely to be that than the other way around, since the BBC compatibility thing was pretty much the big seller for the British market.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

No, that doesn't sound familiar at all. The Compis machines didn't have any graphics at all unless you bought an extra graphics card, and AFAIK they had no Basic interpreter available. They did come with an interpreter for a Danish language called Comal, though. Sort of a bastard child of Basic and Pascal.

So maybe there were at least two kinds of machines that used the 80186 without running MS-DOS.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The RM ran MS-DOS, it just wasn't PC compatible. Lots of differences in the hardware so it had to be compiled separately, all programs etc. were different, etc.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask if they were RM. I remember those with horror from my own schooldays; the greatest triumph of my eighth year of this life was making my teachers realise what insane ripoffs they were even by the standards of the day. (So they bought a weird thing called a Boxer, which I've never heard of since)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I took great pleasure in binning the last one in the school a few years back.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

And a third sort - Apricots had something very like MS-DOS on them that wasn't, quite. But we usually ran CP/M 86 on them instead, unless they were hooked up to a spectrometer or something.

[timill]

Yup - in the garage. Of course, I haven't booted the PC that goes with it (the Hitachi laptop) since about 1993...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Was it as early as that? Must have been about 1990 when I built it then.