William Donzelli wrote:
I have just started to fool around with a 4331-2 (and 3830), and the
IPL floppy is just plain tired. Not the drive, but the floppy media
itself! But then, what can one expect from a 30 year old disk.
Anyway, is there anyone out in IBM land that can write a 23FD 8 inch
floppy anymore? It is an odd format (the original, actually) of 80K or
so, and the drives are almost always read only - including mine. I
know there were some independent resellers and such that modified the
drives for writing. Does anyone know of any?
<snip>
Sorry, but I really doubt it. Even with a writer, the infrastructure
needed to hook it up and use it is almost certainly history. What's
more, the people who once knew how to operate a 23FD ("minnow file")
writer probably retired years ago, and the code that got loaded to them
might or might not still be around anywhere--much less at the EC levels
you would probably need to make the machines do anything useful.
The 3830 was the control unit for 3330's (and 3350's), and it wasn't
even new when I joined IBM in 1977. I think the last machines to use
23FD's were probably manufactured in the early 1980's.
I suspect that you might have better luck scouring the planet for more
disks in hopes of finding readable ones, but after 25-30 years it's way
past the expected end of life for digital magnetic media manufactured in
that era, and it'll be a crapshoot. If you do find readable disks,
perhaps you can get the data off in a form that allows you to dummy up
the 3830 and 4331 interfaces to the 23FD and load the code to get it to run.
On the other hand, in my dusty old CE toolbag at home, I think I still
have a few spare bulbs that fit 3830 control panels (probably both
colors, too), and of course other machines' panels if they used the same
commonly-used push-in grey bulbs with two prongs in the base. Send me
your address offline if you want them. First come, first served!
--
John Eells
z/OS Technical Marketing
IBM Poughkeepsie
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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