[Coco] Diskettes

[Willard Goosey]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 07:58:14AM -0400, Steven Hirsch wrote:
> Cool.  I have one of those drives (definitely pulled from a Rainbow).  
> I had no idea that it logically combined the two diskettes!  

I think that's how it worked, anyway.  It might be a rather problematic
drive to wire up to a CoCo, given the slightly weird way the CoCo disk
controllers wire side-select.

>DEC always 
> HAD to be different.  Back in the days when CD drives used caddies, DEC 
> even spent the effort to create their own, incompatible, form-factor.

Yeah, they were evil that way.  I always thought the Rainbow and Pro-xx
machines were cool, dual-processor (Rainbow) and noob-friendly PDP-11,
but I could never scrounge up a full set of compatible parts for either.
Except for the CoCo I'm trying to get out of the old-computer thing.

> The Rainbow (not sure about the Pro-xx) was notorious for not shipping 
> with a low-level disk format utility!  They based the business model on 
> selling pre-formatted media to customers at inflated prices.  Guess how 
> long it took for someone clever to reverse-engineer the low-level 
> scheme and release a free utility?

Not long, I'm sure.  Not that the Rainbow lasted very long.  The day of
MS-DOS but not PC compatible machines was pretty brief.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard