Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC

We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining.

You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class.

The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password.

I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse.

I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique.

- They required quite a lot of strength to open and particularly to close - some of our students were scared they were going to break them (and the cost a lot back then) because of the force needed.

- One student did the classic "remove disk from envelope" thing where they took the actual mylar disc out of the floppy container. He may have been taking the piss, but if so he lost out, as we made students pay for the disks.

- Somewhat unrelated - when I was working in the Netherlands in the 90s, I noticed that supermarkets in Utrecht, a big university town, had floppy disk dispensers in supermarkets - students put in a guilder or whatever, and got a 3.5 inch floppy they could submit their coursework on.

- They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was.

- They were horribly unreliable - we used to have to keep sending ours back to RML in Oxford to get them recalibrated or replaced every few months.

Still, all in all they were a million times better than my own personal computer at the time - a Dragon32 with a cassette deck for storage!

After a couple years I talked them into getting PC clones, but the consultants overruled and convinced the agency to get us an IBM AT with a 60GB^H^HMB hard drive, 2 floppy-only XTs, and a Token Ring Network! The server software used so much space on the AT that you could barely run anything else on it.

Then we had the issue of transferring all of the data from 8" disks over to the IBMs. The consultants wanted thousands of dollars to put each disk into a "toaster" (they called it) that would transfer things to 5.25 disks. I knew it could be done much cheaper, so after a trip to the library to look up serial cable diagrams, a stop at Radio Shack to get some connectors, and a rummage in the office basement to find some old phone cord, I rigged up a transfer cable! The sending program on the NEC was written in their version of BASIC, and the receiving program was written in Turbo Pascal. After several hours at a low baud rate, all of the data was transferred. I got a decent $600 bonus out of it!

[1] http://oldcomputers.net/nec-apc.html

[edit: MB, not 60GB!]

At one time I had a calibration disk and an "exerciser board" for 8" drives that could be used (along with an oscilloscope) to adjust the track positions and gain settings on the drive.

I gave away all of those old goodies after I purchased at 25MHz 386 PC clone that could emulate CP/M faster than the native Z-80 hardware.

It was fun tinkering with computer hardware in that era, but it was also frustrating because of the limitations of the technology. It's hard to believe that processors of today run three orders of magnitude faster, and have six+ orders of magnitude more RAM, with six orders of magnitude more disk storage with about five orders of magnitude faster disk I/O.

I don't miss the old days so much.

Unfortunately the machine was not in a working state. There was some suspicion that it was a simple issue, but I’m not an EE and I try to make sure my retro equipment works prior to buying it. Since the system wouldn’t boot, I was unsure whether the drives were even working. I ended up not buying it in part because of this and in part because I was moving soon, but I kinda regret not doing so, seeing how rare full DsiplayWriter systems are and how much a complete system will sell for (a lot more than I was going to pay for it).

At the time I had done a small amount of research on using the disk drives with a PC. I was mostly inconclusive with me finding maybe one person selling boards to adapt 8” drives. So it’s cool to see something like this now.

Those were also the days when we still used acoustic couplers with our Hayes Micromodem 100's because god forbid we should ever attach anything directly to Ma Bell's precious phone lines. ALL HAIL THE PHONE COMPANY! BLESSED ARE THE DIAL TONE MAKERS!