🚀 go-pugleaf

To: coco@pucc.princeton.edu
Reply-To: m.j.knudsen@att.com

>Scott McGee: These drives currently go for $300 mail order and the cassettes
>             are about $15.  The non-parallel port versions are about $250.

Just about exactly the prices for a 21-MB Floptical disk drive
and its media.  Is Mark Griffith still selling these?
And they're RBF, not SBF, meaning (1) no new OS9 module needed,
and (2) random access just like a hard disk at floppy speeds.
I have one, not hooked up yet.

Paul Jerkins: I plan to fake around the lack of SBF by writing an SCF driver
>              but doing all the communication with GETSTT/SETSTT calls to
>              bypass the file manager.  Unless, of course, there is a
>              public domain SBF floating around out there ... or someone
>
>              would rather have it work and be ugly than shell out kilobucks
>              for SBF.

I think the MM/1 OSK package included SBF, so you'd only need to
do this for the Coco.

>Knudsen from Hell: Point taken.  I can see using a QIC tape system to backup
>                   the memory of a ROM based system (like a computer-
>                   controlled milling machine).

Actually I was thinking of the firmware developers backing up
their sources and such, not the final embedded code, but what the hey.
But a QIC tape might be used to *load* new jobs into that milling machine,
tho these days a floppy would be cheaper.