I have no idea what is on it, even if i could retrieve it due to old age (it’s dated October 1983). Does anyone have any idea where I might find such an old drive for it?
Man, we used to have an old (?)Tandy(?) machine that my dad had in his basement. It had two 8" drives, each one the size of a modern CPU. Unfortunately, some church was the previous owner; it had a “Xenix” OS that accepted some DOS commands, but the password was still activated and we couldn’t hack it. So it was an interesting but bulky paperweight (or boat anchor, I suppose), and we gave it to Goodwill. You could try your local thrift shops; sometimes they have some really ancient equipment there. Getting it to run would be another matter, of course. eBay? I also Googled ’ 8" disk drive ’ and got some hits.
:: Scarlett suddenly remembers some old 5.25" floppies she has floating around here from her college days; better check them out on the old 486 before it croaks ::
Me too. It’s in my pants.
(C’mon, someone had to say it… it would’ve been either me or Fenris.)
Your’s is only 8.25" when floppy? Mine’s only that short after extreme cold water shrinkage.
(You knew that this would happen.)
Fenris
There was an IBM word processor which used them. I’m not too sure about this, but the old Wang computers used a floppy about that size.
I’ve always wondered what Wang was thinking when he used his name as the brand. There was just so much fodder in Wangs and floppies back then. [sub]What do you do if your Wang goes down and you can’t get it up again?[/sub]
From 1996
*Wang Laboratories, Inc., of Lowell, Massachusetts was once one of the great R&D centers of the U.S. technological phenomenon. Wang gave the world word processing, imaging and DP/telephony integration, among other things. Most people don’t know that SIMMs came from Wang, finally acknowledged in a legal case reportedly concluded only this year or last. Most people don’t know that OLE came from Wang, reportedly acknowledged in a recent settlement with Microsoft. And most technical people who have worked with Wang’s PACE database and subsequently moved on to mainstream RDBMS products have been sorely and rudely disappointed to find that the big name products were a technological step down (this is moderating in light of offerings of the last year or so, but in most products it is still not possible or easy to create a working, multitable app as it is in PACE).
Founded by Dr. An Wang in 1951, Wang Laboratories enjoyed great success in the 1970’s and 1980’s, first with the Wang 2200 computer system and later with the VS line of computer systems. The 2200 was a microcoded BASIC-only system that proved to be a Volkswagen of small computer systems. Something in the area of 65,000 were produced, and many are still running today. The VS was (and is) a true multitasking, multiuser data processing system supporting multiple programming languages under a decidedly proprietary operating system. Many tens of thousands were produced from 1978 through the present, and something like 20,000 may be in operation today.*
Xenix, for those of you unfamiliar, was a version of Unix. SO it accepted Unix comands. A lot of machines used to use 8" drives, Tandy Models 2,12,16,6000(new name for 16). My first computer job was a tech on these things, and used to have one(traded for an AMC Pacer). A lot of the old s100/cpm machines used these things, as well. Imsai made a bunch.
No, no, no, I think that it is a coaster for drinks…
Ahhh . . . I think I tried things like “clr” and “dir.” i don’t know Unix, but I’m guessing things like that could be common across languages.
Wanted something that weighed less & took up less space, eh? 
Oh, don’t be silly. It’s got a hole in the middle, and it’s not the least bit absorbent.
Well I didn’t say that it was a very good coaster…
Maybe that’s why you don’t see them around any more.
My God, I’ve created a monster… I sadly knew this would happen…
Hey you wanna know old? Directly across from my office door is one of these
Ok stuffinb, is that thing still working?
I used to run a Crosfield digital color scanner. That system used a set of 8.25 discs for systems operation and data storage. (No internal hard drives for the OS; a 65 meg Winchester drive stored low-res images for transfer to the 300 MB disk-pack. Ah, talk about boat anchors!)
It powers up but I don’t know if it really works. It’s sorta acting as a cubicle for our Accounts Payable guy. I remember the Bosses son saying he was gonna donate the thing, but it’s still here.
For what it’s worth, I have a still-functional PDP-11/03L in my parents’ basement that uses a dual 8" floppy drive as its only form of storage. Connect a 300 baud terminal to that puppy and away you go! Woo-hoo! I have an 8" floppy with the RT-11 operating system on it and another one with games like the old text-based Trek and chess on it. Ahh, the good ol’ days…
I have a PHILIPS dot-matrix printer (ca. 1978). It is the size of a suitcase, and weighs a ton! Unfortunately, the power supply burnt out, but just to make you guys realize how things have changed, this thing cost around $1500.00 new!
About 7 years ago, I was a word processing clerk for the American Psychological Association. Their mainframe software, and presumably the mainframe itself, dated from 1977. And the dumb terminals were so old, they were encased in wood! The only way I know this is from one that had a chipped corner. The cases appeared to be plastic, but they were really wood! Yes, the APA has since replaced their entire network with WinNT.
BTW: I belive my brother still has some sort of big blue box on display in his retail business. I think it’s an ALTAIR.
[PBS] Millions of years ago, giant floppies roamed the Earth. It was the Age of Floppies…[/PBS]