🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <539@helm.UUCP> dave@helm.UUCP (David Goldblatt) writes:
>	[...] the '100 is by FAR technically superior, but as you
>said, everyone jumped on the IBM bandwagon. Too bad.  My gripe: I can
>get a PC hard drive controller for $99.  To get one for my '100 from
>Zenith is $899, and with a 10 meg hard drive it's $999.  That's 
>ridiculous, especially when I can buy a 40 meg hard drive for $450!
>Anyone know of other hard drive <cheap> controllers for the Z-100 with
>MS-DOS?
>
>-dg-
>
>...!ihnp4!chinet!helm!dave
>...!philabs!sbcs!helm!dave
>
I, too, was dismayed by the high cost of Zenith's hard disk.
I picked up a Xebec S1410A SASI hard disk controller for $200 from a
local electronics supply house nearly a year ago.  It seems to me that
they were also selling an S-100 host adapter for ~$125, but I built my
own for ~$40 using a schematic in the controller manual as a guide.  I
wrote a driver in machine language and later converted it to C using the
C device driver stuff that was posted to the net a while back.  I have
been using this setup with a 5.5Mb disk and it runs like a champ!

Also, I remember seeing an article in REMark sometime in the last year
describing a driver for an S-100 hard disk controller for the Z-100.  I
don't remember the maker of the controller, but the cost was ~$300.  The
driver was a few hundred lines of assembler that you fat-finger in
yourself.

If there are any hackers out there who are interested, I would be
willing to share my driver.  It will probably not work unmodified with
any host adapter other than mine.  The differences will probably be just
the positions of bits in the status word and the address of the card.
If somebody is *really* crazy and wants my schematic, I can share that
too.  I guarantee nothing except the possibility of *hours* of blissful
debugging ;).

Paul



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Paul L. Allen
Boeing Computer Services Artificial Intelligence Center
...!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula