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From: BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Interfacing 8" Disks
Message-ID: <11975@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Sep-83 16:19:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.11975
Posted: Thu Sep 22 16:19:00 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Sep-83 03:08:22 EDT
Lines: 24

From:  Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB>

As I have mentioned in several articles in INFO-IBMPC at ISI we have a
modified disk adaptor card from Flagstaff Engineering, and an 8" drive
in a seperate cabinet with it's own power supply.  The hardware for
all this is very good.  The hardware modifications to the standard
board are necessary in order to use single density only.

Vista and Maynard electronics also make boards to drive 8" drives as
well as the standard drives, but I assume your question involved using
using the standard board.  Flagstaff will give you a refund when you
send your board back to them as they must buy their boards from IBM
for the same price as you and I.

The software is another matter.  They have conversion utilities for
just about every form of 8" system imaginable.  I suppose if you are a
real CPM hacker you might know what track your directories are on and
what a skew factor is.  All this is a bit beyond me and I find the
utilities a bit hard to use.  We have been waiting nearly 6 months for
a Displaywriter utility.

The Tall Tree JFORMAT program supports everybody's 8" drive system but
only allows DOS format files.  Vista also has software similar to Tall
Tree and probably works better with their board.