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From: finley@snuffy.lerc.nasa.gov (Brian Finley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:optical drives on Apollos
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.182351.11016@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov>
Date: 11 Feb 91 18:23:51 GMT
Sender: news@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov
Reply-To: finley@snuffy.lerc.nasa.gov (Brian Finley)
Organization: NASA/Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio  USA
Lines: 25


>Does anybody have any experience using optical r/w drives on Apollo's?
>I'm told that we cannot connect them to our DN3500/4500/10k's as while
>these machines do have SCSI interfaces there is no software support
>for SCSI based optical drives.

You can connect SCSI optical drives to a DN4500.  We have 3 of them connected
to ours.  It is correct that there is no software written for them or 
supported by Apollo.  You must purchase the GPIO product from Apollo.
This software contains all the low level SCSI calls needed to develop
a SCSI driver.  We have had to write all of our own software using GPIO.
The drives we are using are OPTOTECH 5984 WORM drives which are 200Mb 
per side.  I would not recommend them for several reasons, one is that 
OPTOTECH is no longer in business and the company which took over the
product MT. OPTECH doesn't seem to offer much support and may not be
long for this world.  If you find an optical drive manufacturer who
has software for the Apollo I would be interested in hearing about it.

supports his
not recommend them
--
----------------
Brian Finley  /  To err is human-and to blame it on a computer is even more so
Internet: finley@snuffy.lerc.nasa.gov
Phone: +1 216-891-2975