[Simh] Fwd: 8-inch floppies

[Edward Berry]

Gregg Levine wrote:
> On 9/30/07, ron Hudson <hudson.ra at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do all sizes of floppies have the same sort of interface? I know the 3
>> 1/2 and the 5 1/4 both use the same signals, but they use different
>> plugs. The adapter is only a plug-socket device with no logic (no
>> active components at all usually)
>>
>> I wonder if your basic USB floppy could be bashed to connect an 8 inch
>> drive....
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> 
> Hello!
> I'm not sure about the status of this one, but the fellow behind E11
> once created a gizmo that would allow an 8-inch device to be used in a
> 51/4 arrangement. Remember I am describing it based on third hand
> information.
> 
> But I am reasonably certain that Stan Q, can help our questioner.
> 
> Also 8-inch hardware frequently surfaces at used equipment meets.
> 

I've been thinking along those lines- Ebay has a couple of of 8-inch drives
associated with S-100 bus machines, going "as-is" because the seller has
no way of testing them. Also some intel and IBM drives, from the picture
the card edge-connector looks somewhat like that on the 51/4 floppy but
I'm not sure. These go for $100-$400 depending on single or double-sided
(I'm not sure which the PDP-11 disks were). So if we bought one of those
and got it to work in an old PC with an ISA bus and floppy-drive card,
installed linux, figured out the right parameters for /etc/fdprm to read
the right number of tracks.sectors, dd'd an image off the floppy and
mounted it on simh pdp-11, we might be able to read it. It would be a
fun project! but I can see several places where the scheme might go
wrong, and it might not be much cheaper than what Stan Quayle could do
for us (but then we'd have the capability in the future if the need arose).
Thanks all,
Ed