Uses for old floppy discs?

supplied

..te he....I chucked out a box of 8" floppies for the old Shuggart

800/801 drives in the recent move preparations - anyone remember those !

AWEM

The computer museum at Bletchley Park might like them.

At least they took some boxes of 8" floppies and an old mini computer off my hands recently.

Alan

coasters ? ;)

igmc

Dave

Ah yes, I remember them well...

A year ot two back a mate of mine got well over £1k on ebay for a PDP8 which cost him (I think) £50 from work when he (and it) retired. That one didn't even have floppies when we bought it, just paper tape. Subsequently upgraded at great expense with a 32k hard drive. He also memorised the RIM loader: something like 40 or 50 twelve-bit words which you toggled in by hand every time you crashed it. This let load a basic OS from paper tape and then it would come to life.

Don't think I'd recommend hanging on to your media though....

We had a little job the other day, reading some of the 5.25" floppies for a guy who didn't have the drives any more.

Still have some old records on 5.25" floppies, recorded on an old Philips P2000C luggable, which had a co-processor board that let you run MS-DOS 3.2 and it would also write a huge range of disc formats, very useful at the time....

Also have a couple of Osbornes lurking somewhere, 360K discs IIRC and a strange little bit of ribbon cable and plug that lets you drive an external EGA monitor.

Happy days.... :-))

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

Well one of the things I 'outed' on eBay prior to move packing was an old Teletype KSR33. I'd saved it from the skip 20 years ago at work as it only had about 7 hours on the clock. I was amazed at the interest, and it went eventually to a museum in the west country that was setting up an exhibit of early computing. They were bowled over when they came to collect and I unloaded half a dozen boxes of 1" paper tape, the tape re-winder, a tape splicer complete with the perforated sticky holes, and a load of related paraphernalia I was glad not to have to pack up !

AWEM

If it had the tape reader/punch built in then it would have been an ASR33.

When I built my first computer in about 1975 I bought an ex BOAC KSR35 which was the heavy duty version without paper tape. I also managed to get hold of a very comprehensive maintenance manual for it which had lots of instructions to "Refine the adjustment" which I found puzzling: eventually I twigged that it meant "when the official method doesn't work, belt the bloody thing until it does"

I became quite a refined person.

Bob

Yes please (for the BBC micros ...)

Thx,

Peter Fairbrother.

interest,

paper

perforated

method

he he and a co-incidence. I too first got a KSR 35 with the hunt and peck type box from BOAC !!! I ended up converting the current loop interface into rs232 using a home made opto-isolator consisting of an OC71 transistor with the paint scraped off inside the same pice of rubber sleeving as an led. Mine came out of WLAT (West London Air Terminal) when it was closing.

AWEM

I found one of those a couple days ago in a control panel for an Okuma CNC lathe. I wonder if it is readable 23 years later?

Wes

Not quite as bad as that - actually only 16 words had to be toggled in (see

for a PDP-8 anorak's webpage). After you've toggled the sequence in a couple of hundred times you remember it really easily. I'm sorry to say that even after 30 years it looks horribly familiar ;-)

The great thing with the early '8s was that they had real magnetic core RAM, which was non-volatile - if you had your software loaded in memory you could move it to another machine simply by unplugging the memory cards (three cards roughly A4 size for each 8K block!) from one and plugging them into the other.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

Regards, Tony

Send me your snailmail address, unless you can collect from the Warrington area.

Speaking of obsolete but not old media, I've got a few QIC-W backup tapes heading for the bin unless anyone shouts.

Tim

Grrrr! IBM2305830s aka DEC RX01? They're getting scarce, now. I still use 8"floppies. DECtapes, too!

Regards,

David P,

I did find a use for an old cdrom a few years ago. Went home to mum's place for christmas party, small problem, bog wouldn't flush. Well, it tried, spat out a bit of water for every pull but no "avalanche" like wot it says on the tin. Knackered plastic non-return valve under the displacer in the cistern. Guess what?? Same size as a cdrom to within a gnat's c*ck. Not quite as flexible, but it did its job until the sheds reopened after the holiday.

Regards,

David P.

6032,6031,5357,6036,7106,7006 etc. If you want a nostalgia fix I've an 8m here (Long Eaton) to play with.

The first ones I used had only 4k per stack. One of each in my machine, just enough to run TECO.

Regards,

David P.

What, B&Q shut on Christmas day?, Thats hard to believe

Regards Kevin

I used 8" floppies on a PDP8e - we got them on a scrap one from Harwell, it was a geat leap forward from the old DecTapes - the thing booted in only minutes.

Of course if you talk about 24 bit computers these days, people don't even realise they existed.

Steve

Yep, I could just about enter the RIM loader from memory myself, but then ours booted from DecTapes after I ran it (but only if every bit was perfect).

I bet I entered that code a hundred times, but in a way it was very informative. The PDP8e had lights on the front so you could see each instruction as you put it in, and watch a number of other registers. This is no doubt the visual image that lead to many Sci-Fi flashing lights - but with the PDP8 they really meant something. Good stuff too, made in Ireland mostly.

They also used heaps of power and could be used as a psychadelic room heater if anyone wanted to.

Computer have come a long way since then.

Steve

In article , Tim Leech writes

-the shutters on diskettes are a useful source of stainless shim-