John Gilpin wrote: >At the QL is 21 workshop, Dilwyn Jones kindly arranged a mini >exhibition for >us and some of our stock was used to supplement exhibits which Dilwyn >had. I >remember that we had a single floppy drive from Micro Peripherals >which we >had to call using fdk1_ instead of flp1_ and I also have a second >single >floppy drive which I believe was used as fdk2_ by the original user. >Since a >lot of QLers were not able to attend QL is 21, we have asked Dilwyn >if he >will repeat his exhibition at the Manchester Workshop and AGM in >April 2006. As John says, John Gilpin brought some of Quanta's stuff to the QL Is 21 workshop and between that and the equipment brought along by John Gregory, David Batty, Simon Goodwin and others there was a great selection of old hardware on display. Simon Goodwin even went to the trouble of creating a little quiz (Identify The Hardware - Quanta members see the picture on page 9 of the Oct/November 2005 issue.
I've kept the printed history material for the 2006 Manchester event to give people a second chance to see the exhibition, always assuming I can get that weekend off (if not, I'll try to get the stuff there somehow for someone else to set it up). The Micro Peripherals interface was a bit of a surprise choice for Sinclair in some ways, as most disk interfaces at the time used the 'FLP' standard as supported by Tony Tebby/QJump, like the CST QDisk, Sandy disk interface, Cumana and others. Upgrade eproms were available for interfaces like Medic and the Micro Peripherals units to bring them into line with the 'FLP' standard. As far as users were concerned, the main difference was that the drives were accessed as FDK1_ and FDK2_ rather than FLP1_ and FLP2_. Some years ago when I tried one of these interfaces, I could only get it to read QL disks recorded on its own drives, so I don't know if the disk standard was different, or if I was just unfortunate in having drives which perhaps didn't work properly. From what I remember, having the upgrade rom was well worth it, unless of course the whole point in having one of these was as a collector's item! The older QL peripherals are getting rarer and rarer, so I'm glad to hear that Quanta, the london group and others are keeping hold of some items for those who do like to collect the old gear! -- Dilwyn Jones -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.14.12/220 - Release Date: 03/01/2006 _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
