Another potential disaster using XP Pro

Well, to be fair, at 156K (?) per 8" floppy, you can _see_ the individual bits at that size...

Media migrations are a pain. But if you don't do 'em, you've got 10 years,

20 tops, before they're very very difficult indeed. Paper & stone tablets aren't all that bad, in that context.

Are you sure you aren't thinking of 5.25" floppies? Even single sided single density floppies were 250K per floppy (26 sectors, 128 bytes per sector, and by that time I was running double sided double density (1 MB per floppy).

Some of my migrations involved re-writing the programs, such as from the original random disk BASIC (SSB's DOS 68) to Pascal (6809 OS9), and from Pascal to C to my first unix box. Once in unix, it went from

8" floppies to 9-track tapes, and from there to a Sun platform, and to the QIC-150 tapes.

When it came time for the Migration to the Windows package, all I had to do was convert the C structures to a plain ASCII format, and document it, so the other poor sucker could try to port it into his selected Windows database program. (My programs were always hand coded in whatever was the best language for the task available to me on the current system.)

I've still got the source and the database -- last properly run on a 68020 based Sun3, and it would take some work to re-tune it for the current Ultra-SPARC machines.

Enjoy, DoN.

I don't remember 8" disks being 250K, but maybe the later ones were. At least I got in after "hard sectoring", but they still did need the timing hole.

I _loved_ OS9 on the 6809. Got my Unix experience started early, more or less.

Want a drive? Nice Sun shoe-box enclosure, with those damn hidden latches on the side?

Our paths keep crossing, Don.

I've finally got it figured out. The earliest thing that had

8" floppies which I dealt with was an IBM drive (very slow step rate, with Geneva gears driving the leadscrew). That one was 77 tracks, 26 sectors per track, 128 bytes per sector -- but it was being used for storing punched card images, so there were only 80 bytes stored in that 128 byte sector -- taking the *effective* capacity down to your 156k.

Yep -- I've dealt with some hard sectored ones as well -- and they held more, because without the soft sectoring overhead, they got 32

128 byte sectors per track.

Even the 3.5" floppies use a timing hole -- it is just on the hub in the drive, which is keyed to the floppy.

But most of my use of the 8" floppies was either at 500K (Double Sided, Single Density) or at 1MB (DSDD).

So did I. It gave me enough experience so when a friend at the next building at work got a pair of unix boxen to administer (for e-mail), I was able to show him some tricks, and that resulted in him talking his boss into giving me a free account, so I could do things like port net based utilities to the (rather weird) BBN C70 (10-bit bytes, 20-bit words, 40-bit longs. :-)

The common compress program (LZW algorithm) would work fine on text files, but blow up spectacularly on binaries. However, there was a compress program from the OS-9 UGL which had tuning parameters for

10-bit bytes, and that one worked beautifully. It saved his rear a few times while doing backups.

I'm trying to remember what OS-9 used for a pipe symbol, instead of the '|' now. :-)

Oh -- you mean the sandwichbox ones -- half the height of the LX and several others of the small square box computers. I've already got several drives, including one QIC-150 in the Solbourne box (a semi-clone of the SS2 boxen, but faster and neater). From here, I can see four of the sandwichbox enclosures -- one disk, and three CD-ROMs, one of the "lunchbox" enclosures with a 1GB 5.25" full height in it) and two of the later unipack enclosures -- one SCA disk, and one Exabyte

8505XL tape, and below those two, a 6-drive MultiPack (one of three of those that I have).

:-)

Enjoy, DoN.