On Friday 30 November 2007, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > Then again, I should probably archive all > the 5-1/4" floppies while I still have a drive that reads them. I > have so 5-1/4" 96tpi double-density drives and floppies. I guess I > could teach Linux to read the floppies in a 5-1/4" high-density > drive. (Data rate of a 360K floppy but the track spacing of a 1.2M > floppy - the same format as a 720k 3-1/2" floppy.) One word: CatWeasel. Programs are available for Linux to read and write virtually any format floppy with a PC. Even Apple ][, Commodore, TRS-80, PDP-11 (RX02 even if you have an eight-inch drive, RX50 for the 5.25), even Mac formatted 3.5 inch floppies can be read and/or written. With xtrs and a catweasel your Fedora 8 box can be the fastest TRS-80 ever made.... (yes, I still occasionally fire up xtrs to remember just how good modern OS's like F8 are compared to the old TRSDOS I started with many years ago.) You want the MK4 card, which isn't too hard to find. If you wanted an MK3, well, I have one that I'm looking to seel now that I have an MK4... :-). See http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=42&products_id=206&osCsid=4749689b5aa2256c81e7b077ee67bc5d for an order page from amigakit for the MK4. The card is $123.41US. If you have lots of old floppies to archive, this is the card to have. The old 96TPI 5.25 inch double-density drives were pretty common on TRS-80's, too, in the enthusiast markets at least. 80 tracks and double-sided; aka 'quad density'. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
