On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 08:45 +0000, Chris Green wrote:
You've not been around very long have you! :-)
The first PCs I used *only* had floppy drives, no hard disk, let alone a CD. I've not used 8" floppy drives on PCs but I certainly used them for many years on a Unix box I developed on and some micro based systems.
AFAIK The X86 platform was never used with 8"...I do seem to remember the early IBM's having a tape interface though (tape as in cassette tape not data tape)
I just missed using 8" disks, my first PC was originally 5 1/4" as were the CP/M machines at school. My spectrum was using a new fangled 3 1/2" low density drive that friends said would never take off because the media was too expensive. Other Spectrums has a nasty proprietary 3" disk format...but I didn't speak to those people.
The first exposure I had to 8" was when I was given an Intelec MDS, This annoyed my parents somewhat as it took up the whole spare room...made the whole house shake when it was turned on, and actually did very little that was useful (it was more of a development environment than anything else, ICE modules and Prom burners etc) beyond getting the thing to bootstrap I didn't know how to use it. That also had one of the original Winchester style drives and a proper Teletype, although I never figured how to get the teletype working so I used another console that came with it.
In the end I got bored of it and took it apart...But the silliest thing I did was throw away the lovely bound set of hand drawn schematic manuals, complete with sticky label "patches" to the circuits.
Could kick myself now.