🚀 go-pugleaf

In a recent Delphi digest, HSTARR asks for info about the
Quantum Q280.  As luck would have it, I've got one running
on a Mac Plus here at Wang.

The Q280 is a 5-1/4" half-height drive with embedded SCSI 
controller.  Nominal drive capacity is 80 megabytes.  The
SCSI support is pretty standard but:  I could not get the
drive to run with any of the Apple SCSI manager read/write
routines.  Neither normal reads/writes nor blind ones were
reliable.  The drive would *sometimes* boot, *sometimes*
run for a while, then bomb unpredictably.  The frustrating
part was that simple sequential access was perfectly
reliable, so simple test programs to check disk integrity
gave it a clean bill of health.  It only croaked on random
accesses.  The fix was to substitute my own fully synchronized
read/write routines.

Needless to say, the Q280 will be supported by the next release
of SF&I.

Ephraim Vishniac
decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim