[Coco] wikipedia entry on "floppy disk hardware emulator"

[Michael Furman]

Looks like it's a real commercial product called a EMUFDD.

http://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_Hardware_Emulator_Home.html

As mentioned in the documentation, it really is designed to replace any 3.5" floppy drive as a plug in, and can load an image off the USB stick into internal flash.

Think about... Music synthesizers, keyboards, drum machines, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, data recorders, industrial process machines, cnc, mill, lathe, internet routers, telephone/PBX switches... Etc.  Many of these types of devices probably still had floppy drives up until the mid 2000's as USB became more widely prevalent and serial ports started disappearing.  Some of these machines are big and expensive, and still get the job done after 10-15-20 years of service.  If you can't get replacement floppy drives, what do you do with them?  How do you keep them running if they already have a built in floppy controller? Expect to boot off that broken floppy drive? We ordered this part 10 years ago, can you give us another 50 of them to replace ones that have broken? Yeah you have the CNC program but no way to get it into the machine...

For us retro computer people we can move along with new methods, technologies, toys like SuperIDE, Drivewire, drivePacks etc. They all solve this problem in one way or another and help us keep interested and excited in our hobby.  But for some commercial applications technology doesn't change that fast and it's just better to buy a $200 floppy emulator than a new CNC.


--
Michael R. Furman
Email: n6il at ocs.net
Phone: +1 (408) 480-5865

On May 29, 2012, at 11:22 AM, "Robert Hermanek" <rhermanek at centurytel.net> wrote:

> So I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for "floppy disk" for fun, and they have a section about devices that mimic a floppy disk, and it links to this entry.  It's on wikipedia, so pretty safe I think:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator
> 
> I guess my question is, is this a joke or hoax?  There are no models mentioned, google searches come up pretty blank.  If you look at the photo of the circuit board, it appears the tops of the chips have been blacked out, not sure why they would do that if this were legit.  Anyone aware of a device along the lines that the great and powerful wikipedia says may exist?  
> 
> If so it would be kind of fun to be able to plug it directly into a coco disk controller like you can other 3 1/2 drives...
> 
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