On 9/5/22 11:07, Tom Stepleton via cctalk wrote:
Are you sure about that? The 5100 doesn't support floppy drives. And
I've
never heard of third-party drives (that would need IMFs, too) for the
5100.
$3100 is about what IBM charged for a fully loaded 5150. (PC)
THAT is not a 5100! $3100 for a 5100 would have been a bargain.
We are neither talking about the 5150, nor about $3100 but $31,000 for a
5100 (see above). Or did I miss something?
There was a third-party floppy drive for the IBM 5100 :-)
Or at least there as something that was sold in this way. Here is its
brochure:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sykes/brochures/Sykes_Comm-Stor_5100_Brochure.pdf
Note that it "plugs directly into the Serial I/O Adapter of the IBM 5100
with no hardware or software changes". So it's a serial-port connected
floppy drive that talks to the 5100 in a format that it likes.
(What is an IMF?)
--Tom
The unit I have is IBM.
It only did single sided diskettes, low density. It's the only device
which I've ever had which could write deleted sectors. The formatting
on the diskette is very similar to the tape formatting with two EOT
records followed by the remainder of track 0 padded out with deleted
sectors.
My Tarbell controller would read the two records and returned errors for
the remaining sectors. That's how I discovered that deleted sectors
existed.
Sykes made much more robust devices, and I'm not familiar with the unit
for the 5100. But I'd not be surprised if it wrote and read many more
formats.
Thanks
Jim
thanks
jim
