Re: Yee-Haa!! 5.25-inch USB floppy!

On Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:59:34 -0800, glen herrmannsfeldt
<gah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
(snip)

Actually I do get it, "Translation I want and somebodies gotta do it".
The horrible fact of life is that current PCs FDC and floppy are
being dropped or soon to be. The 1.44mb drive is no longer a
fit with 4GB thumb drives and the like. It's already reached maye
even passed the point where people buy USB or before that parallel
port devices to fill the gap of the PC not having a floppy or at least
not the correct one. When does USB go poof like the floppy?

Apple dropped floppies about 10 years ago. The solution, then,
was to use USB floppy drives! Most laptops dropped floppy for
external USB floppy drives, too.

(snip)

Software for the host as the standard host driver will not recognize
the special USB devices capability, it will have to be a registered
driver as XP and Vista are likely targets.

I would do two separate boxes. I haven't looked at the USB protocols
at all.

Software to talk to that driver to do the capture and organization
of the data retrieved. It would also have to configure and
otherwise monitor/control the USB device.

Hopefully the existing host software works, but I don't know that.

How much you willing to pay? I figure it's a few weeks work
between the hardware and then the PC based software for first proto.
For a serious moment I'd estimate it as a minimum of 60 billable
hours and I'd think at a bargan rate of say $50/hr it's a $3000 plus,
material and external charges (machine shop, PC board fab,
software development tools, misc materials) are on top of that.
I'm sure most would say I've estimated low.

Sounds about right to me.
(snip)


Then again I have PDP-11, uVAX,, AmproLb+, KayproII and 4/84,
Visual1050, DEC Vt180, NS* plus a few S100 machines that read
those formats natively.

For the ones he is most interested in, I believe they are
256byte/sector. That should be an easy software change if the
source for the USB/floppy software is available. As above, I
don't know if windows knows how to read USB/floppy other than
at 512 bytes/sector. Well, I don't even know if sector length
matters in USB.

The project gets more interesting for 8 inch drives, though I
am sure that they can't be USB powered.

Also, writing is a little harder than reading, and the OP didn't
say which is needed.

My choice would be to find some system to copy all the disks over
to 3.5in and work with them that way.

I use the S100 crate for NS* and 8" and I've only found a few 5.25"
(128byte/sector SD) that the PC [Dell 486] will not do and those disks
hold nothing of any value or interest due to their extreme lack of
space (80k formatted).

The only time I need cross platform floppies these days is when
I need a blank PDP-11 (RX01) formatted 8" and the occasional boot
disk. Most of the systems that need boot disks are soft sector
formats the PC does just fine, the exceptions have been those boxes
that need hard sector (NS* horizon or Advantage). File transfer is
via PCplus to a xmodem program on the CP/M machine. Since
I use the S100 and AmproLB+ this is not inconvenient.

The nice thing about the 486 is it's a nice utility box (dell Pizza
box) with good video and a nice 4.3gb disk, 3.5 and 5.25" floppies,
a NIC and my logic analyser. The 4.3 GB is a nice size for local
archive and the NIC transfers nicely to the bigger faster machines
where I can burn CDs. I like having my archives in several places, on
several machines and multiple medias for backup.

I try not to let market driven PCs limit what I can do by not
embracing them when not needed.


Allison


-- glen

.

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