ahh, the HP 9133A - the largest and heaviest external 3 1/2" floppy drive ever built.
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ahh, the HP 9133A - the largest and heaviest external 3 1/2" floppy drive ever built. let's get it working! 🧵
@tubetime That layout of the floppy and hard drive recalls the drive assembly I saw when I worked at Westinghouse, except it was a seagate ST-220 and a 1.2MB 5.25” floppy. Controller board was in a separate Intel Muktibus style chassis tho
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@mwichary worse, it is 270K and it uses 256 byte sectors. it also runs at 600 rpm!
@tubetime You say “worse,” but all of this sounds awesome.
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it was made by an OEM that spun off xebec
@bitsavers that's wild
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@tubetime That layout of the floppy and hard drive recalls the drive assembly I saw when I worked at Westinghouse, except it was a seagate ST-220 and a 1.2MB 5.25” floppy. Controller board was in a separate Intel Muktibus style chassis tho
@FurryBeta @tubetime ST-225?
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@tubetime Is that like… 360KB capacity?
Single sided single density 5 and a quarter drives were like 85kbytes i think. Even at that time it was miserable. And slow.
Ibm pc single sided were originally 160k, later 180k, as they fitted another sector per track.
In a couple of hours my brain will involuntarily regurgitate the FAT IDs for them.
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@FurryBeta @tubetime ST-225?
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Single sided single density 5 and a quarter drives were like 85kbytes i think. Even at that time it was miserable. And slow.
Ibm pc single sided were originally 160k, later 180k, as they fitted another sector per track.
In a couple of hours my brain will involuntarily regurgitate the FAT IDs for them.
@tomjennings @tubetime Oh my god, FAT IDs!
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oh yeah, the hard drive has a controller board on top of it. and on the controller board is this super weird potted electronics module. i'll have to look into that later.
@tubetime I've only ever seen those on arcade boards and cryptographic equipment....
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ahh, the HP 9133A - the largest and heaviest external 3 1/2" floppy drive ever built. let's get it working! 🧵
Does that have HP-IB interface?
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the floppy drive is the extremely ancient Sony OA-D31V-1. it's not the first one to come out. more like the second one.
@tubetime I was gonna say, that looks a lot like an OA-D3X drive!
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@mwichary worse, it is 270K and it uses 256 byte sectors. it also runs at 600 rpm!
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@tubetime Does it take “common” 3,5” disks?
Or were there disks you could flip over?@nblr @tubetime Probably regular disks? But the earliest ones (I think just the OA-D30V but I’m not sure) used disks with a latching shutter. https://www.jamiecraig.com/early-floppy-disks/
I’m pretty sure there was never a flippable 3.5” disk.
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and it tests good! the weird 26-pin HP interface is natively supported by my Floppy Exerciser board (https://github.com/schlae/FloppyExerciser)
@tubetime I think the 26-pin interface is actually just Sony’s original interface. It’s also on the D30/32’s used on the ACT Apricot.
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and it tests good! the weird 26-pin HP interface is natively supported by my Floppy Exerciser board (https://github.com/schlae/FloppyExerciser)
@tubetime Neat seems HP was a fan of Sony drives, My HP1653B logic analyzer also has a Sony drive with HP specific interface though that one is 3.5 inch
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@FurryBeta @tubetime 20MB, sister to the 40MB ST-251. I really liked them though the bearings certainly got noisy over time.
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@FurryBeta @tubetime 20MB, sister to the 40MB ST-251. I really liked them though the bearings certainly got noisy over time.
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Does that have HP-IB interface?
@vk3kri yes
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and it tests good! the weird 26-pin HP interface is natively supported by my Floppy Exerciser board (https://github.com/schlae/FloppyExerciser)
on to the surprise hard drive. but, no surprise, it won't spin up and pulls a bunch of current on 12v. hmmm.
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on to the surprise hard drive. but, no surprise, it won't spin up and pulls a bunch of current on 12v. hmmm.
the motor won't move. I think it is stiction. ugh.
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whoops, surprise hard drive inside!
this one is a Seagate ST-506, a MFM drive with a whopping 5MB capacity!
@tubetime Dude, that is the OG Hard Drive there, ya gotta respect what it heralded in the years to come. I mean sure, you can get a short M.2 drive today that holds as much as a million of those drives could but hey, on a minicomputer or a CP/M system, it was So Much Space!
