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Wait, could the changer swap disks automatically? That's super neat! I saw one a data tape changer once and I've always been fascinated by the mechanical aspect
by Teknoman117 4y ago
Wait, could the changer swap disks automatically? That's super neat! I saw one a data tape changer once and I've always been fascinated by the mechanical aspects of computer equipment in the past.
(on a side note, I am one of my only friends who actually enjoys going to the computer history museum. I just wish I could interact with the old machines. I wish there was a "come learn a bit of cobol, fortran, or <<machine specific assembly>> and write a small program for our 1401" option available.)
- systems_glitch 4y agoYeah, it was a single-drive duplicator, and you loaded a stack of 3.5" diskettes in. You could command it to load a diskette and eject a diskette, and I think he'd said there was an "out of diskettes" indication. The floppy drive itself was a regular old PC drive, 34-pin interface, just mounted in a machine on a long cable vs. inside the PC case. Bigger, fancier duplicators have multiple drives and write in parallel, but due to the cheaper configuration of this single-drive duplicator, it was possible to use it like a tape library. Mostly this was for fun, I'm sure he had tape drives on which to save his backups!