[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <xi2Dl.24047$Ws1.19815 at nlpi064.nbdc.sbc.com>,
	Michael Austin <maustin at firstdbasource.com> writes:
> yyyc186 wrote:
>> Oh, I forgot.  Someone has to have a lot of extra cash lying around if
>> we ever want to see the DEC Professional content on-line.
>> 
>> http://www.acquirecontent.com/titles/dec-professional
>> 
>> Nice little site here:
>> http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Digital/index.php
>> 
>> click on the Rainbow 100 link near the bottom to see some pictures
>> that bring back memories.
>> 
>> How many people on this thread can remember that grinding sound made
>> by the floppy drives?
> 
> 
> as a former field service engineer for PC's, terminals and Printers 
> (including the DECMate series) I do recall the need to buy the 
> DEC-branded floppies (sold a ton of them...)  AND the $2K hard drives.

You people talk like this was unique to DEC.  I also remember things like
The instruction to only use "Terak" branded diskettes in the Terak Work-
stations we used.  Hmmm....  Let's see, it was an LSI-11/02 and used
RX01 and later RX02 formated disks.  And Terak was a dinky little company
in Scotsdale who was certainly not manufacturing 8" floppies.  Their
drives were vanilla Shugarts.  And yet, we were supposed to believe that
anything but a "Terak" branded diskette was not going to work reliably.
That was called marketing.  :-)

As for the hard disks.  the DEC branded ones actually went thru some
verification process and some of them even had custom firmware which
was why you couldn't just take any disk and format it with XXDP.

I was always led to believe that the reason DEC didn't provide formating
software was because their early disks, like the RX01 and RX50 hardware
was not capable of reliably formating them.  I certainly had no problem
formating disks on third party controllers using Shugart and Tandon
drives.

bill
 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>