On 2008-06-02, Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> In <g1ohe4$g3s$1@anubis.demon.co.uk> Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:
>
>>On 2008-05-29, AGT <usenetpersongerryt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>>>>>I suspect few people now are going to be using floppies in Suns.
>>>
>>> Ditto - although I have a couple still on OLD SPARCs
>
>>The only floppies I have are 8" ones....
>
> AFAICT, the Intel Chip and the Solaris driver are still quite capable of
> handling shuch floppies, if you can find a suitable drive for them.

Interesting. I've still got a couple of DSDD 8" floppy drives.
Aside from needing an external housing (which I have), you would also
need to play games with the cables, because the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies
use a 34-pin connector, while the 8" ones use a 50-pin connector. A bit
of digging for the pinouts, replace the smartcard "drive" with a plate
carrying a connector, and there you are.

Of course -- from my first unix box (a Cosmos CMS-16/UNX -- v7
unix on MC68000 (8MHz) in Intel Multibus) I still have the controller
for the 10 MB 8" Shugart hard drive and the 8" floppy -- adapting both
to SCSI, so I could probably just hang that on a system without needing
the metalwork.

Next question is "why"? :-) Do I have anything which I might
still need to read on 8" floppies? And if I do -- a lot of it will be
on the SSB (Smoke Signal Broadcasting) DOS-68 and DOS-69 formats. I
think that I remember enough about that format to write something which
would process an image of the disk and extract files. An interesting
system -- instead of being something like a FAT, it was built on
doubly linked lists. Each file used the last four bytes contained
track and sector for the next sector and track and sector for the
previous sector. The directory was similarly structured, so it could be
expanded at need. All free sectors were yet another linked list, with
the most recently deleted file tacked onto the tail of the list so you
had the maximum chance to recover it before it was overwritten.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
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In <slrng48o4h.4cd.dnichols@Katana.d-and-d.com> "DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@d-and-d.com> writes:

>>>The only floppies I have are 8" ones....
>>
>> AFAICT, the Intel Chip and the Solaris driver are still quite capable of
>> handling shuch floppies, if you can find a suitable drive for them.

> Interesting. I've still got a couple of DSDD 8" floppy drives.
>Aside from needing an external housing (which I have), you would also
>need to play games with the cables, because the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies
>use a 34-pin connector, while the 8" ones use a 50-pin connector. A bit
>of digging for the pinouts, replace the smartcard "drive" with a plate
>carrying a connector, and there you are.

Hmmm! Maybe I was being a bit too optimistic. But for sure a 5.25" drive
would be no problem.

--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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