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Article #525Re: Wiping out floppies (was: User's do the darnedest things)
From: r... Robert Krawitz
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1989 20:19
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1989 20:19
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2252 bytes
I can't speak for the Trash-80, but I remember that the old Exidy Sorcerer drives were pretty flaky (the standard Micropolis ones, which got me to hate Micropolis for quite a while). The other brand of drive that could be used (I think it was Shugart, but I might be wrong) was better. You really had to be careful with the diskettes you used; only the 3M's were reliable. Unlike the Radio Shaft 128K bytes, though, these held 596K. I remember that back in '79 or '80 I thought that was really neat (they were called double side, quad density or double side, double density, 77 track to distinguish them from the standard 38 track floppies). It ran a fairly generic version of CP/M, though, which meant that any disk error was completely irrecoverable. I think that the Exidy BIOS made some attempt to recover, though. I could store about 12 hours of weather data on one of those beasts, though. Useful little sucker. The guy I consulted for bought up the last 100 or so Sorcerers after Exidy went bye-bye and sold them with a variant on this program that ran off a ROM cartridge and used memory to store a circular buffer, with no disk (basically a dedicated machine). Last time I stopped by (a few years back) he was still using a few of them around the office so anyone could call up weather data. -- ames >>>>>>>>> | Robert Krawitz <r...@think.com> 245 First St. bloom-beacon > |think!rlk (postmaster) Cambridge, MA 02142 harvard >>>>>> . Thinking Machines Corp. (617)876-1111
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!dino!ceres!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think!think.com From: r...@think.com (Robert Krawitz) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Wiping out floppies (was: User's do the darnedest things) Message-ID: <32437@news.Think.COM> Date: 26 Dec 89 20:19:38 GMT References: <1820@odin.SGI.COM> <129435@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4675@itivax.iti.org> <21305@unix.cis.pitt.edu> <5940@alvin.mcnc.org> Sender: ne...@Think.COM Reply-To: r...@think.com (Robert Krawitz) Organization: Thinking Machines Corp., Cambridge MA Lines: 27 Posted: Tue Dec 26 21:19:38 1989 In-reply-to: spl@mcnc.org (Steve Lamont) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit