Random tidbits Bdale thinks are worth documenting.

Bdale Garbee
bdale@gag.com

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Teac FD-55F
Every once in a while I feed a few "interesting" key words into the eBay search engine. Last night, I happened to find a pair of Teac FD-55F 720k 5.25" floppy disk drives for sale at a reasonable price. I think the pair I once had got sold along with an XT clone I used for my FIDO BBS back in the day. They were a neat thing to have in an XT, because they would put twice the backup data per floppy on cheap floppies (the kind sold for 360k drives, the floppies for 1.2M drives were significantly more expensive!), and with two of them you could do a full backup of a reasonable hard disk of the era quickly by loading floppies in alternating drives about as fast as you could handle them.

But the reason I've been looking for a pair is that before I put them in that XT clone, they were the drives I used on my original Ampro Z-80 Little Board running CP/M in the mid-80's. Shoveling through the stuff in the shed a while back, I discovered that I still have that board, a bunch of oddball accessories I bought or built for it, and a significant pile of floppies and documentation that all appear to be in reasonable condition.

I got a lot of use out of that system back in the day, and it would please me to have it in working order again. Fingers crossed that the drives I just bought on eBay actually work when they get here...

[/bdale/retro/z80] permanent link