This will take those of us old enough to remember back in time

[Mike Watterson]

Curiously I used an Intel MDS with ISIS II and the "cake carrier" winchester drive like a small filing cabinet in 1983. We did most of the dev on an ACT Sirius 1 and I had a Jupiter Ace at home with a 1K pacman. We bought a Jupiter Ace in work as a controller for a test system. Forth was OK if you'd used an old HP calculator.

The next place had a VAX, Cromenco with 68000 & Z80 and Cromix, and Apricot PCs with the too small mono screens. We got one PC with colour SVGA or XGA for CAD/CAE running FutureNet the next year, IMO better than OrCAD or Eagle or KiCad, though DOS, because it was hierarchical with "hypertext" style links to expand a block symbol to a new drawing showing all the i/O to start with. I implemented a DFD programming language on it where the final "ICs" could be code. Then the parts list, net list and part descriptions exported and "compiled" for a custom round-robin multi-tasking system implemented on a Z80. The Alternate Register bank used for the scheduler code. The net-list was used to generate an I/O table for the OS where each routine got its inputs and saved its output. So actually the system could be modified today for a high end PIC as they really only have a stack for an interrupt, no procedure call stack.

I gave away an 8″ drive a few years ago. Anyone got a working 5.25″ 1.2M MS-DOS compatible drive (Likely soft sectored)? I set one up last week to see if some floppies have anything important, but though it spins, the LED doesn't light. I don't think it seeks either.
The Apple II floppies were very primitive.

I was also testing old 3.5" HD drives last week and junked 11 of them. USB floppy drives are no use for other than standard 3.25″ HD MS-DOS FAT12. I still have a few old mobos with floppy controller and port, though one seems to only support 1 drive in BIOS. You used to be able to connect four. Maybe no PCs with ISA, though I must check what the two slim desktops buried in shed are.

[ppppenguin]

I still routinely use a Dell 266MHz P2 with W98 on my bench. Many years ago it was my main PC - very good in its day. It has an old digital video analyser in one of the ISA slots. There are also parallel ports. One supports an old EPROM programmer which still gets used occasionally. Another is for a "bit banger" debug system that I've used for many years. Quick Basic 4.5 writes directly to the debug system hardware, something you can't do in W2K and later.

I have a spare motherboard and other spare parts just in case.

I'm not much of a software person so a friend helped me network it to my my new(ish) main Linux PC. The main trick was to enable SMBv1 in the smb.conf file. SMB1 is now deprecated as insecure but that's not a problem on my home network.

[DrStrangelove]

The only MDS 80 winchester I ever saw in the flesh was knackered: it was an 8" drive IIRC and was taken to bits.

The General Automation had an assortment of programs written to read IBM format 8" diskettes (the datalogger used that format for compatibility with other systems).

The GA also had a utility that read ISIS II diskettes.

I wrote a check disk utility for the ISIS diskettes after we suffered corruption problems.

There was a thing called a Blue Thunder card (ISA PC card) that had a Z80H on it that used utilities to run the ISIS assembler/linker/locator etc. on IBM PC to relieve a code production bottle neck.

There's an XT upstairs, the floppy disk controller has a 37 way connector that connects to an external floppy drive.

Purely by coincidence I bought one of those external drives in the late 80s but have never got around to making up the cable.

[Mike Watterson]

There's an XT upstairs, the floppy disk controller has a 37 way connector that connects to an external floppy drive.

Purely by coincidence I bought one of those external drives in the late 80s but have never got around to making up the cable.

I made a cable from regular MoBo floppy port to 37 way on ext 8″ floppy drive. The extra pins are not needed. Similarly I made adaptors to put a 3.5″ SD drive on an Amstrad PCW256/512 and made a adaptors for 3″ on PC. The extra PC pins don't seem to be needed on the Mobo or the 3.5″ drive. Strangely the Amstrad PCW 3″ drive doesn't use the same pinout for the +12 0 0 +5 power connector. When I went to check the 3″ drives a year or so ago I found that the drive belts had completely disintegrated. You can still buy them. Not as bad as the high end cassette deck where the belts had turned into goo and very hard to clean off. Sadly someone banjaxed the main head mount and I'll have to fabricate a new one. Oddly a half dozen poly foil caps had failed on the rec/play amp board.

The actual PCW doesn't go, but I compiled Joyce for Linux (with difficulty) and have a pre-baked one on XP. I was able to read some 3.5″ PCW CP/M floppies in "Joyce", though currently (several Linux updates later) the drive is only readable in Linux wit DOS disks, and inaccessible to "Joyce" and not writeable. Mysterious permissions on /dev/fd0 and more so on /mnt/dev I think my Kernel isn't yet the version with direct floppy access disabled or depreciated. Maybe using NICE22 on DOS7 would be better.

[Mike Watterson]

SMB1 is now deprecated as insecure but that's not a problem on my home network.

As long as no PC on the LAN gets any of the malware that exploits SMB1. That can be delivered by advert scripts. I don't deliberately block adverts, but I block ALL 3 party scripts by default (I can enable on a case by case & site by site). Websites that block you entirely if they detect this are managed by fools. I won't enable all their scummy 3rd party scripts. I just won't use them.

[Nick]

Spent my life in cutting edge s/w, hardware and security. Still run a large digital publishing business...

i designed and made (wire wrapped) my first real computer, a PDP11 clone, from AMD2900 series bit slice chips. It ran RT11.

My first bit slice (AMD 2900-series) design with a 6800 front end/console and serial terminal (300 or 1200baud)... FWIW, I got the 1980 IBM UK prize for the best undergraduate computer project for this! All assembly code for the 6800. Nice thing about bit-slice processors is that you design your own instruction set...Recently, I found a copy of my thesis when clearing out the loft. Scary.

Subsequently, I designed and built the synthesised PDP11 (without the FP instruction set) out of stacked AMD2900-series 4-bit devices... DEC also used these chips in later PDP11s and early VAXen. Not surprisingly, I turned down the job offer from IBM that came with the prize (all blue shirts and grey "slacks") and was hired by DEC

When at DEC I worked for central engineering in Geneva, Ferney Voltaire, Annecy, Sophia Antipolis, Reading ("Special Systems Group") and Maynard. Designed a few PDP and VAX peripheral controllers plus the OpenVMS drivers for them, plus some special stuff for military & government - still a load of VMS freeware out there with my name on it.

I recall getting one of the first VAX750s in Europe - building VMS from source took all day.

FWIW, my earliest Google cached post to the Internet (actually Usenet) is from1989. How the world has changed...

           

[DrStrangelove]

The connector on the external 5.25" floppy disk enclosure is a 37 way D.

Now if only I could be bothered to get a 37W D male & female & find some IDC cable that's wide enough I could connect it all up & see if it works.


I know the drive works (or worked) when it was connected to a Tatung Einstein via a 34 way IDC cable.

Amazingly enough I didn't butcher the existing 37W cabling whilst doing so.

I've quite happily spent my entire career in the trailing edge of almost everything. :D

[Mike Watterson]

I've quite happily spent my entire career in the trailing edge of almost everything. :D

Often more relaxing than the bleeding edge!