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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.
> 

I expect that the REAL reason was that DEC wanted to sell pre-formatted 
floppies for $5.00 each when brand-X floppies sold for $0.50 each!