[Coco] Floppy Controller available.

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

More from the OP. He is reading gmane so he see your messages and reports 
two persons interested.

He has included a link to pictures of the Hard Sectored Floppies.

SHF

---------------------------------------------



> From: Stephen H. Fischer <SFischer1 at Mindspring.com>

> To: J. Kanowitz <jkanowitz at snet.net>
> Cc: Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:07 AM
> Subject: Re: TRS-80 CoCo J&M floppy system: "Want one?"
>
> Hi,
>
> There was one question asked.
>
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.tandy.coco/66651
>
> Click on subject "Floppy Controller available." to see other messages.
>

Everybody needs a hobby. ;) Thanks for passing it on and figured there must 
still be some interest - I was more of an Amiga necrophile for the past two 
decades and that will definitely cause "retrocomputing burnout" after a 
while. So far one person's expressed a specific desire directly so maybe 
it's just found a home.

I'm bad about aiming replies to lists I'm not subscribed to, so to the 
extent that it matters - yeah, full-height floppy "enclosure" (in terms of a 
metal frame with feet painted a generic battleship gray, anyhey) of which 
only half is occupied, so it looks a bit decrepit but I suppose that leaves 
room for expansion, somehow, maybe... some sort of hefty black box 
transformer power-supply for the enclosure... and I think, but haven't gone 
back and squinted to be sure, that this is just a floppy controller with no 
other whistles and bells.

The misuse and abuse of hard-sectored floppies - that's some ancient stuff 
where there's a number of index holes rather than just one. Obviously 
someone was really dedicated and had access to a ton of them left over from 
some prior generation of systems... if you remember the various sorts of 
"disk doubler" punches around both for making 5.25" 'flippies' on 
single-sided drives and trying your luck making 3.5" DSDD media format as 
DSHD, this was like the horrible backwards creative DIY version of that.

Trouble is, the poor guy went through all the trouble of carefully holding 
the vinyl up on each floppy and applying all these little hand-cut squares 
of tape over the 'extra' index holes, but didn't think to mark the "chosen" 
one to remain as the 'soft' rotational index with Sharpie, so once the tape 
started falling off leaving no trace (as masking tape tends to), argh, 
"oops". Or maybe the Sharpie ink fell off first.


I suppose the way to painstakingly recover those by trial and error would be 
to make a ring out of card stock or something, use one of the handy modern 
"Post-It" glue sticks to make it repositionable, and just keep pulling the 
disk and sticking it to expose a different index hole until something reads 
[if the controller even works]... or doing forensics with something like a 
Catweasel on a PC. But none of this was my data, just the previous owner's, 
I've no horse in the race, and I really don't have terribly high hopes that 
any of it would be in useful condition anyway [somehow the disk hardware 
wound up in the basement, but if the rest of the stuff still exists it's 
been stored in the climate-uncontrolled attic of someone else's garage for a 
decade now, so cycling between maybe 5F to >100F seasonally plus whatever 
humidity got in]. Which thus makes the potentially-rare-ish disk hardware at 
issue of even more no-use to me. :}



-Cheers,
-Joe Kanowitz, N1KZZ

------------------------------------------------------



> ...
> Trouble is, the poor guy went through all the trouble of carefully holding 
> the vinyl up on each floppy and applying all these little hand-cut squares 
> of tape over the 'extra' index holes, but didn't think to mark the 
> "chosen" one to remain as the 'soft' rotational index with Sharpie, so 
> once the tape started falling off leaving no trace (as masking tape tends 
> to), argh, "oops". Or maybe the Sharpie ink fell off first.
> ...
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hi,
>
> That is so funny that I thought about posting it.
>
> There may still be some interest, there are ~ 400, members and perhaps 800 
> more on gmane.
>
> Our muttering gets repeated many places so you never know. Wait a few 
> weeks.
>
> There are some CoCoers on the east coast.

2 bites so far, both eastcoast, so looks like it'll move. Feel free to share 
the anecdote by way of explanation, nostalgia, or hilarity, appears to be a 
picture of what I remember the exact brand of disk to be at 
http://sid.fi/~grue/hard_sectored_disk.jpg ...

...and in digging up that picture, I don't think I ever realized the pattern 
did have an asymmetry to it, so maybe there _was_ a method to the tape 
madness if I ever stumble back into the pile of disks. I guess there wasn't 
much else to do in the 1980s if people could live with the CBM 1541! [I 
actually had it pretty good, if boring, starting with a Tandy 1000SX and 
only getting to play with the non-MS-DOS stuff later. Commodore really drew 
the short straw on floppy speed because of a late glitch that forced their 
serial interface to ship at 1/8th the intended speed, if by any chance you 
didn't know, Apple and CoCo and everyone else had it good... of course the 
best local BBS was by and for Chickenheads so I got fascinated with the 
mysterious Commodore machines. Bit of a shame TRS always had the CoCos just 
sitting in the back showing the cursor rather than anything that demo'd the 
machine.]

-Cheers again,
-Joe Kanowitz