On 05/08/2016 02:02 PM, Paul Berger wrote: > Are you sure about the SA-400 being used in 5150s? All the ones I > ever saw where Tandon TM-100s which look very much like them and I > saw lots as a support person in an IBM lab in the early 80s. They > have the same sort of motor setup to turn the diskette, but use a > different head positioner. The TM-100s used a stepper with a taut > band positioner.
Quite. I purchased my 64K 5150 from Computerland in San Jose (I probably still have the receipt) and included an MDA, a floppy controller, the SA-400, as well as PCDOS 1.1, MASM 1.0 and the techref. I didn't buy a monitor because I already had an OEM kit monitor that was probably better than the 5151. I later added a Quadram Quadboard with 256KB of memory--and then moved to PCDOS 2.1 and worked out a simple interface to a WD1000 controller with a Shugart SA-1000 hard drive, giving me 4MB of real hard disk. When I was on a floppy-only system, I added a Micropolis 1115-VI second drive. An odd beast with buffered seek. So, yes, I'm quite sure. --Chuck
