Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC

Marco Scholz

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Mar 28, 2021, 4:23:26 AM3/28/21

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Jozef Bogins blog:
http://boginjr.com/it/hw/8inch-drives/

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Jeff Gaines

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Mar 28, 2021, 5:12:56 AM3/28/21

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On 28/03/2021 in message <s3pedn$jn3$1...@gioia.aioe.org> Marco Scholz wrote:

>Jozef Bogins blog:
>http://boginjr.com/it/hw/8inch-drives/

8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made, can't
remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs I think.

--
Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who do binary and those
who don't.

Jeff Gaines

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Mar 28, 2021, 6:09:48 AM3/28/21

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On 28/03/2021 in message <xn0mvxbx6...@news.individual.net> Jeff

Gaines wrote:

>8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made, can't
>remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs I think.

Found it, Displaywriter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System

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Jeff Gaines Wiltshire UK

Those are my principles – and if you don’t like them, well, I have
others.
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Ahem A Rivet's Shot

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Mar 28, 2021, 6:30:03 AM3/28/21

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On 28 Mar 2021 09:12:54 GMT

"Jeff Gaines" <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> On 28/03/2021 in message <s3pedn$jn3$1...@gioia.aioe.org> Marco Scholz wrote:
>
> >Jozef Bogins blog:
> >http://boginjr.com/it/hw/8inch-drives/
>
> 8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made,
> can't remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs I
> think.

They were also used on a good many CP/M machines up until the early
1980s and at the Altos offices I once saw a homebrew unix machine with four
8" drives, labelled /, /etc, /usr and /home IIRC.

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Marco Scholz

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Mar 28, 2021, 8:40:12 AM3/28/21

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On 2021-03-28, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
> They were also used on a good many CP/M machines up until the early

"Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html

> 1980s and at the Altos offices I once saw a homebrew unix machine with four
> 8" drives, labelled /, /etc, /usr and /home IIRC.

Hilarious. A filesystem spread over four 8" floppy drives.

Charlie Gibbs

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Mar 28, 2021, 12:07:42 PM3/28/21

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On 2021-03-28, Marco Scholz <to...@disroot.org> wrote:

> On 2021-03-28, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>
>> They were also used on a good many CP/M machines up until the early
>
> "Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks"
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
>
>> 1980s and at the Altos offices I once saw a homebrew unix machine with four
>> 8" drives, labelled /, /etc, /usr and /home IIRC.
>
> Hilarious. A filesystem spread over four 8" floppy drives.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

I'll have to take another crack at getting my IMSAI going -
I have a lot of 8-inch disks I'd love to be able to read.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | They don't understand Microsoft
\ / <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> | has stolen their car and parked
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | a taxi in their driveway.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Mayayana

Vir Campestris

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Mar 28, 2021, 4:47:29 PM3/28/21

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On 28/03/2021 11:21, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> They were also used on a good many CP/M machines up until the early
> 1980s and at the Altos offices I once saw a homebrew unix machine with four
> 8" drives, labelled /, /etc, /usr and /home IIRC.

Altos.... that disturbed some dust. Pretty sure many years ago I used an
Altos machine with a hard disc and an 8 inch floppy. It would have been
a commercial machine too, and may have been running Unix. NOT Linux. But
that's a long time ago.

I'm certain however that ICL used them in some devices...

Ah...

<http://www.ampyx.org.uk/vcomp/index.html>

The 7502 comms unit. There was a word processor derivative.

Andy

Peter Flass

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Mar 28, 2021, 6:54:40 PM3/28/21

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Jeff Gaines <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 28/03/2021 in message <s3pedn$jn3$1...@gioia.aioe.org> Marco Scholz wrote:
>
>> Jozef Bogins blog:
>> http://boginjr.com/it/hw/8inch-drives/
>
> 8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made, can't
> remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs I think.
>

Displaywriter, but you’ll probably get lots of replies on this.

--
Pete

Ahem A Rivet's Shot

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Mar 28, 2021, 7:00:02 PM3/28/21

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On Sun, 28 Mar 2021 21:47:27 +0100
Vir Campestris <vir.cam...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 28/03/2021 11:21, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> > They were also used on a good many CP/M machines up until the
> > early 1980s and at the Altos offices I once saw a homebrew unix machine
> > with four 8" drives, labelled /, /etc, /usr and /home IIRC.
>
> Altos.... that disturbed some dust. Pretty sure many years ago I used an
> Altos machine with a hard disc and an 8 inch floppy. It would have been
> a commercial machine too, and may have been running Unix. NOT Linux. But
> that's a long time ago.

That sounds like quite an early Altos box, probably the 8086/Z80
based series in which case it would probably have been running XENIX III,
by the time they got to 80286/80186 based boxes the floppy had been
replaced by a quarter inch tape cartridge (aka QIC) drive, they also went
to a System V variant on the later machines.

Dave Garland

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Mar 29, 2021, 2:04:40 AM3/29/21

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On 3/28/2021 5:09 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:
> On 28/03/2021 in message <xn0mvxbx6...@news.individual.net> Jeff
> Gaines wrote:
>
>> 8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made,
>> can't remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs
>> I think.
>
> Found it, Displaywriter:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System

Hey, I got one (or maybe two) of those in the attic. But the
capacitors are probably gone bad by now.

Vir Campestris

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Mar 29, 2021, 4:30:05 PM3/29/21

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On 28/03/2021 23:44, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> That sounds like quite an early Altos box, probably the 8086/Z80
> based series in which case it would probably have been running XENIX III,

More dust disturbed.

I have a feeling we were looking into a source for a project that ended
up using a Rair Black Box much modded to become the ICL PC. Which was
not an IBM clone.

Andy

Ahem A Rivet's Shot

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Mar 29, 2021, 7:30:02 PM3/29/21

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On Mon, 29 Mar 2021 21:30:03 +0100
Vir Campestris <vir.cam...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Rair Black Box

Now there's a name I've not heard in a *long* time.

Questor

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Mar 31, 2021, 2:40:23 AM3/31/21

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On 28 Mar 2021 10:09:46 GMT, "Jeff Gaines" <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>On 28/03/2021 in message <xn0mvxbx6...@news.individual.net> Jeff
>Gaines wrote:
>>8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM made, can't
>>remember what it was called now but used before they made PCs I think.
>
>Found it, Displaywriter:
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System

IBM later used the name Displaywriter for their PC-based word processing
software.

Dave Garland

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Mar 31, 2021, 2:55:48 AM3/31/21

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Indeed. That program was a nice try, but wasn't very good It may have
been hobbled by the inability to generate the special screen
characters of the original for a CGA-compatible program (CGA was
horrid,, the poor resolution caused typists to claw their eyes out),
or maybe the lack of the dedicated keyboard keys. I don't remember why
I thought it was crap, but in those years worked as a D'wr typist and
PC consultant.

Questor

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Mar 31, 2021, 4:20:38 PM3/31/21

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On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 01:55:43 -0500, Dave Garland <dave.g...@wizinfo.com>
wrote:

Displaywriter, Wordstar, Multimate, and two or three other names that I can't
remember now... all were wiped off the map by WordPerfect 5.1 around 1990.

Kerr-Mudd,John

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Apr 1, 2021, 5:49:02 AM4/1/21

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On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 20:22:14 GMT, use...@only.tnx (Questor) wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 01:55:43 -0500, Dave Garland
> <dave.g...@wizinfo.com> wrote:
>>On 3/31/2021 1:41 AM, Questor wrote:
>>> On 28 Mar 2021 10:09:46 GMT, "Jeff Gaines"
>>> <jgaines...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 28/03/2021 in message <xn0mvxbx6...@news.individual.net>
>>>> Jeff Gaines wrote:
>>>>> 8" floppies were used on the dedicated word processor that IBM
>>>>> made, can't remember what it was called now but used before they
>>>>> made PCs I think.
>>>>
>>>> Found it, Displaywriter:
>>>>
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System
>>>
>>> IBM later used the name Displaywriter for their PC-based word
>>> processing software.
>>>

No it was DisplayWrite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DisplayWrite

I hacked together a naive asm converter program from EBCDIC to ASCII [to
extract info from lost edits].

>>Indeed. That program was a nice try, but wasn't very good It may have
>>been hobbled by the inability to generate the special screen
>>characters of the original for a CGA-compatible program (CGA was
>>horrid,, the poor resolution caused typists to claw their eyes out),
>>or maybe the lack of the dedicated keyboard keys. I don't remember why
>>I thought it was crap, but in those years worked as a D'wr typist and
>>PC consultant.
>
> Displaywriter, Wordstar, Multimate, and two or three other names that
> I can't remember now... all were wiped off the map by WordPerfect 5.1
> around 1990.
>
>

--
Bah, and indeed, Humbug.