New user asking for help

[Keith]

I acquired an old Cromemco PFD dual 8-inch floppy drive in a wooden
case, from a government auction a couple of years ago (for $1). I am
trying to interface this drive with a more modern PC, specifically a
Raspberry Pi.

I'd like to ask your group for wisdom regarding this effort, whether
it is possible to interface this drive to a modern PC. The PFD has two
DB25 connectors (one for each drive I presume) but I'd be naive to
assume it is a serial interface.

My goal is not to read / write to the disks, but only to engage the
drive so it appears to be reading. I intend to make use of the empty
space in this box to place the raspberry Pi inside, along with a small
hard drive, to create a high-capacity Network Attached Storage device
that appears to read/write to an 8 inch disk when transferring files
to/from the machine. I want to make a piece of history into a
practical modern piece of equipment and add some novelty to it at the
same time.

The Raspberry Pi has an assortment of GPIO (General Purpose I/O) pins
that can be tuned, through software, to perform signalling in any
manner you can imagine, and I imagine it can be used to send read or
write commands to the PFD.

co...@whitesell.name