I totally forgot to mention another reason why you wouldn't have found a hard drive in an IBM PC 5150 back in 1981. The power supply! The power supply that came with the original 5150 was not really up to the task of running a full-height hard drive along with everything else. When the hard drive model I have came along (Seagate ST-225), it was a half-height model that was less power-hungry and could be added into an existing 5150 with a 35W PS.
"So it looked like a drive was inside." Not only did it look like there was one inside, there _was._ For 2 reasons: 1. the floppy drives were still in, and 2. card readers are "drives" in a sense, and that CF card "drive" was inside.
I saw your post in Vintage Computer Club! I came, watched and subscribed! I love your intro! Very well laid out video and informative. I have a 5150 as well and absolutely love it! :) I'm about to get 2 more! Never can have too many 5150 :)
@@RetroHackShack I might do some mods or something. I have 3 MFM hard drives for the 5150. One of my systems is from Microsoft and has a good selection of cards and upgrades. I like to keep these systems as authentic as possible but that XT card is very tempting :D
Problem with 8:03: .bmp extension was introduced in 1990 with Windows 3.0, which could barely run on a 5150, but it could run (minimum CPU is 8086), it also supported the CGA graphics card (barely, and in 640x200 monochrome), 3.0 was more suited for 5160 (XT) and 5170 (AT) compatible machines, and Windows 3.1 dropped Real Mode support, requiring a 286 or later processor.
An external floppy drive was vital if you were using a wedge Amiga. I had an A1200 and everything come on at least 2 disks, if not 4 or more, plus you'd need a save disk. The amount of time and faff saved would probably equal about 30 minutes or so a day by having an extra floppy drive. Thankfully Amigas(except the A1000) have the OS on ROM(you DO need a disk to invoke it, but most programs and games would invoke it if you inserted the first disk into the internal drive on boot), so you could typically have a program disk in DF0: and your save data on DF1:, only needing to use the supplied OS disk if you want to change screen resolution or load an additional driver. Of course, you have WHDLoad these days, so a second floppy isn't really required.
Use two thin drops Orwell one on each side of the connector place in a vice and gently close till compressed the wood protectes the font from the faces of the vise
thank you for posting. at 12:50, it looks like you only have half of the pins, either even or odd, connected to the cable. perhaps you address this later in the video. i think one could leave the original end on the cable, and ADD the 37-pin d-shell, to create a flexible 'dual purpose' cable. i don't have a fdd card to look at. could you desolder the external 37-pin connector from the card, and solder in an internal 34-pin header, and just use the unmodified cable & mount the gotek internally ? take care & stay safe.
I don't trust inflation counters. The cheapest new car you could buy in 1980 that I see was either a Chevette or Pinto. Both cost about $4000. The cheapest new car that you can buy in 2021 is about $16000, which is about $4000 more than the inflation calculator would have us believe.
Hello, Eznix showcased your channel so I thought I would give it a look. :-) Very good video on the subject too. I know what was going to happen when you put the ribbon in the 37 pin plug the way you did it the first time.... :-) You see even though the drive was found and a drive letter assigned, you basically had transmit and no receive on the cable. think of it as a two lane road, traffics going both ways until you raise the one drawbridge and the traffic can't go any more... Lol As for making the cables, The computer shops I worked in back in the 90's (yet today in my shop) we used a small vise and set the cable in the plug/connector with the top cap in the slots and the cable aligned and then we very very slowly cranked the handle and kept checking the alignment until it was squished together. This worked 99.9% of the time... :-) We made a tone of Scsi cables then as the cases were 2+ feet tall and none of the cables were ever long enough for anything including power. Great time to be a computer guy in those days. I still love to build old computers out of old junk from eBay... Lol Currently I'm only 8 years behind on my junk... I have one of the first PC Jr's I have in storage that I need to get out and make sure it still boots on the 360 dual floppies. I get it out once a year to check it out, then pack it back up in the boxs and new moisture packets. Hmm, I think it has that port on the back, I will have to look. I love Tech Tangents channel he is a good source too! Anyway I sub today to help ya out so I will watch some more vids later, I'm taking a break from a bash script I'm working on... Take care and good luck with the channel! Thank you for the videos! LLAP
@@RetroHackShack BTW you are doing a Great Job on the videos! You folks that do this content on YT are braver that I will ever be... :-) So I'm looking forward to more great stuff... Yes I caught the pun... LolLolLol LLAP
Did you end up painting it? I'm curious what method and paint code you used. I'm not familiar with those products you showed at about 1:48 but would like to know more..
Why four floppies on a retro PC? 360k, 1.2M, 1.44M, some STM32-based thing. Of course, if you're as crazy as Adrian, you can now also look at how he did 8" on the PC. 😁 You said you wanted a tool for IDC … do you have a panavise or even a full bench vise? There are hand tools with a hinged bit to apply pressure evenly, like a panini press, but you can do the same with a vise if you're careful. The crimp creates a cold weld that'll much better connection than just reusing the existing holes, too.You'll lose about 1.5cm of the cable length to get the more solid connection now, but it's probably worth it long-term. If you want a cheap IDC tool and don't have the vise handy (or want something faster than a vise), ASIN B072MM8X7Y is a cheap tool that should do the job. The _real_ to-spec universal IDC tools were crazy expensive, but as you discovered, you don't need them to make something work. 14 drives on the Apple II, think about it: 2 per slot. They need not really be in the slot in question under ProDOS. Edit: Oh, forgot to add … taping off the hole on a 1.44M disk to use it as 720k … If it came formatted, the residual 1.44M formatted data may eventually start to interfere with the more recently written 720k. This especially happens with the cheap disks which always came formatted that were made late in the 1.44M drive's lifespan, boo! Don't put anything you're not afraid to lose on them unless you at least seriously hit these things with a bulk erase first. Some carry the opinion that you can't ever truly erase them to an unformatted state, and they're still gonna be somewhat failure prone even then. I'm of the opinion that as the 1990s wore on, disks were made more and more cheaply. By the time you hit 2000, they were unreliable AF anyway.
@@RetroHackShack I actually want to get some IDC connector pliers because they seem a little less fiddly when putting e.g. 34 pin wires in 37 pin connectors. But I have much higher priorities these days.
"Great shape mechanically"? If the original fan and hard-disk drive were loud and sounded like they were about to fail, how would that supposedly be "great shape mechanically"?
Technically, no. It does affect how the system labels those drives though. See the notes on this page: minuszerodegrees.net/5150_5160/external_diskette_drive/5150_5160_external_diskette_drive.htm
"Only this is the digital version." They're _both_ digital. You shot the magazine into the video with a digital camera, did you not? Then you scanned it with a scanner, or included a copy that someone else used a scanner on, did you not? And because it's here online, it's digital in that way, is it not?
is there a way to have a Gotek read a 1.2 or 1.44 image when connected to an XT class computer ? I have one running under flash floppy 3.3 connected to a Columbia Data Products Vp computer the disk controller is built-in the motherboard
Hi, there's a second lesson you need to learn from this experiment. That is to NEVER, *EVER* try to turn a 1.44MB floppy into a 720KB floppy by taping up the hole that identifies the disc as an HD disc. The disc media is very different to that in a real 720KB disc and requires a higher write current to be written to reliably, hence as you found you get disc errors when trying to read the disc some time later. Everyone knew not to do this in the '80s and '90s but for some reason certain RUclipsrs, whom I won't mention here, are saying on their channels these days that this is an OK thing to do. It simply isn't and you have had a practical demonstration of why it isn't. *PLEASE* don't perpetuate this misinformation.
In the early 90s, it was very common to punch an HD hole in 720K disks. The claim was by that time, the manufacturers were using the same media in both versions of disks. No idea if it's true, but they seemed reliable at the time.
@@JamesPotts It's absolutely not true that the same media was being used in both types of disc by the '90s. The media used in 1.44MB discs has a much higher coercivity than in 720KB discs and thus requires a higher write current to be written to reliably. The two types of media are *absoulutely* not interchangeable if you at all value the integrity of your data.
@@RetroHackShack Hmm, and how many bad sectors were reported during formatting? And could you still read the discs a few weeks/months down the line? It was then, and still is now, a false economy. Nobody I knew that tried it ever did it more than once, including myself.
I totally forgot to mention another reason why you wouldn't have found a hard drive in an IBM PC 5150 back in 1981. The power supply! The power supply that came with the original 5150 was not really up to the task of running a full-height hard drive along with everything else. When the hard drive model I have came along (Seagate ST-225), it was a half-height model that was less power-hungry and could be added into an existing 5150 with a 35W PS.
"This is the Byte magazine I showed just a minute ago..."
You've been showing it all along.
"So it looked like a drive was inside."
Not only did it look like there was one inside, there _was._ For 2 reasons: 1. the floppy drives were still in, and 2. card readers are "drives" in a sense, and that CF card "drive" was inside.
10:16 You can use a gotek in a commodore 1581 disk drive, hence you can use one with a c64.
I saw your post in Vintage Computer Club! I came, watched and subscribed! I love your intro! Very well laid out video and informative. I have a 5150 as well and absolutely love it! :)
I'm about to get 2 more! Never can have too many 5150 :)
Will you do anything different with the other two?
@@RetroHackShack I might do some mods or something. I have 3 MFM hard drives for the 5150. One of my systems is from Microsoft and has a good selection of cards and upgrades. I like to keep these systems as authentic as possible but that XT card is very tempting :D
Problem with 8:03:
.bmp extension was introduced in 1990 with Windows 3.0, which could barely run on a 5150, but it could run (minimum CPU is 8086), it also supported the CGA graphics card (barely, and in 640x200 monochrome), 3.0 was more suited for 5160 (XT) and 5170 (AT) compatible machines, and Windows 3.1 dropped Real Mode support, requiring a 286 or later processor.
When I first heard you stumble on the minus-zero name, I was going to ask if you were an OTR fan. X Minus One is a great show.
Yep
Very good and useful video!
Thanks!
Thanks David!
Haha, funny "hard drive bezel" for your CF reader!
An external floppy drive was vital if you were using a wedge Amiga. I had an A1200 and everything come on at least 2 disks, if not 4 or more, plus you'd need a save disk. The amount of time and faff saved would probably equal about 30 minutes or so a day by having an extra floppy drive. Thankfully Amigas(except the A1000) have the OS on ROM(you DO need a disk to invoke it, but most programs and games would invoke it if you inserted the first disk into the internal drive on boot), so you could typically have a program disk in DF0: and your save data on DF1:, only needing to use the supplied OS disk if you want to change screen resolution or load an additional driver.
Of course, you have WHDLoad these days, so a second floppy isn't really required.
Why I don’t have a friend like you 😂😂😂 my friends faces when I talk about my 5155 portable 😮 😅
Use two thin drops Orwell one on each side of the connector place in a vice and gently close till compressed the wood protectes the font from the faces of the vise
thank you for posting. at 12:50, it looks like you only have half of the pins, either even or odd, connected to the cable. perhaps you address this later in the video. i think one could leave the original end on the cable, and ADD the 37-pin d-shell, to create a flexible 'dual purpose' cable. i don't have a fdd card to look at. could you desolder the external 37-pin connector from the card, and solder in an internal 34-pin header, and just use the unmodified cable & mount the gotek internally ? take care & stay safe.
"Unless you had a lot of money... you probably didn't have the money..."?
Heh, OK... duly noted! 👍👍
I don't trust inflation counters. The cheapest new car you could buy in 1980 that I see was either a Chevette or Pinto. Both cost about $4000. The cheapest new car that you can buy in 2021 is about $16000, which is about $4000 more than the inflation calculator would have us believe.
Hello, Eznix showcased your channel so I thought I would give it a look. :-)
Very good video on the subject too. I know what was going to happen when you put the ribbon in the 37 pin plug the way you did it the first time.... :-)
You see even though the drive was found and a drive letter assigned, you basically had transmit and no receive on the cable. think of it as a two lane road, traffics going both ways until you raise the one drawbridge and the traffic can't go any more... Lol
As for making the cables, The computer shops I worked in back in the 90's (yet today in my shop) we used a small vise and set the cable in the plug/connector with the top cap in the slots and the cable aligned and then we very very slowly cranked the handle and kept checking the alignment until it was squished together. This worked 99.9% of the time... :-)
We made a tone of Scsi cables then as the cases were 2+ feet tall and none of the cables were ever long enough for anything including power. Great time to be a computer guy in those days.
I still love to build old computers out of old junk from eBay... Lol Currently I'm only 8 years behind on my junk...
I have one of the first PC Jr's I have in storage that I need to get out and make sure it still boots on the 360 dual floppies. I get it out once a year to check it out, then pack it back up in the boxs and new moisture packets. Hmm, I think it has that port on the back, I will have to look.
I love Tech Tangents channel he is a good source too!
Anyway I sub today to help ya out so I will watch some more vids later, I'm taking a break from a bash script I'm working on...
Take care and good luck with the channel!
Thank you for the videos!
LLAP
Thanks so much for the nice comment and the ad"vise" :) on getting those connectors pushed together!
@@RetroHackShack BTW you are doing a Great Job on the videos! You folks that do this content on YT are braver that I will ever be... :-)
So I'm looking forward to more great stuff...
Yes I caught the pun... LolLolLol
LLAP
Probably similar to the Altair 8800 even if we're not familiar with it.
"You can bring in files off of a USB stick..."
Then what would you be bringing in files _on?_
Did you end up painting it? I'm curious what method and paint code you used. I'm not familiar with those products you showed at about 1:48 but would like to know more..
This is still something I need to come back to. So busy!
Why four floppies on a retro PC? 360k, 1.2M, 1.44M, some STM32-based thing. Of course, if you're as crazy as Adrian, you can now also look at how he did 8" on the PC. 😁
You said you wanted a tool for IDC … do you have a panavise or even a full bench vise? There are hand tools with a hinged bit to apply pressure evenly, like a panini press, but you can do the same with a vise if you're careful. The crimp creates a cold weld that'll much better connection than just reusing the existing holes, too.You'll lose about 1.5cm of the cable length to get the more solid connection now, but it's probably worth it long-term. If you want a cheap IDC tool and don't have the vise handy (or want something faster than a vise), ASIN B072MM8X7Y is a cheap tool that should do the job. The _real_ to-spec universal IDC tools were crazy expensive, but as you discovered, you don't need them to make something work.
14 drives on the Apple II, think about it: 2 per slot. They need not really be in the slot in question under ProDOS.
Edit: Oh, forgot to add … taping off the hole on a 1.44M disk to use it as 720k … If it came formatted, the residual 1.44M formatted data may eventually start to interfere with the more recently written 720k. This especially happens with the cheap disks which always came formatted that were made late in the 1.44M drive's lifespan, boo! Don't put anything you're not afraid to lose on them unless you at least seriously hit these things with a bulk erase first. Some carry the opinion that you can't ever truly erase them to an unformatted state, and they're still gonna be somewhat failure prone even then. I'm of the opinion that as the 1990s wore on, disks were made more and more cheaply. By the time you hit 2000, they were unreliable AF anyway.
Yeah. I started using my vise after this episode.
@@RetroHackShack I actually want to get some IDC connector pliers because they seem a little less fiddly when putting e.g. 34 pin wires in 37 pin connectors. But I have much higher priorities these days.
Yeah, that guy even has a 5th floppy drive in that computer: a Zip drive!
"When it first came out..."
* When it came out... period. That's the first appearance.
"34-pin pin-style floppy drives..."
If it has pins at all, it's already a pin-style. If it's a card-edge connector, then it doesn't have pins anyway.
Ha, what were they doing with "buss" instead of "bus"?
maybe power the external gotek from +5vdc from the cassette port ?
Why _didn't_ you take an "after" photo?
8:04. I LOLed. :-)
You are the first person to mention that🙂
"Great shape mechanically"? If the original fan and hard-disk drive were loud and sounded like they were about to fail, how would that supposedly be "great shape mechanically"?
do i remember that the dip sw on the pc/xt mobo has to be changed to reflect the 3rd & 4th fdd ?
Technically, no. It does affect how the system labels those drives though. See the notes on this page: minuszerodegrees.net/5150_5160/external_diskette_drive/5150_5160_external_diskette_drive.htm
"Only this is the digital version."
They're _both_ digital. You shot the magazine into the video with a digital camera, did you not? Then you scanned it with a scanner, or included a copy that someone else used a scanner on, did you not? And because it's here online, it's digital in that way, is it not?
is there a way to have a Gotek read a 1.2 or 1.44 image when connected to an XT class computer ? I have one running under flash floppy 3.3 connected to a Columbia Data Products Vp computer the disk controller is built-in the motherboard
Yes
"Around 1977"?
* IN 1977.
Hey what is the source of the 3d printed drive bay?
www.thingiverse.com/thing:2217061
@@RetroHackShack I really like the HD fake plate you printed. Where did you get the little LED to put in it? I think I need to buy a 3D printer now!
I made it by cutting a piece of red plastic down to the size of the hole then I glued an led in back of it.
Hi, there's a second lesson you need to learn from this experiment.
That is to NEVER, *EVER* try to turn a 1.44MB floppy into a 720KB floppy by taping up the hole that identifies the disc as an HD disc. The disc media is very different to that in a real 720KB disc and requires a higher write current to be written to reliably, hence as you found you get disc errors when trying to read the disc some time later.
Everyone knew not to do this in the '80s and '90s but for some reason certain RUclipsrs, whom I won't mention here, are saying on their channels these days that this is an OK thing to do. It simply isn't and you have had a practical demonstration of why it isn't. *PLEASE* don't perpetuate this misinformation.
In the early 90s, it was very common to punch an HD hole in 720K disks. The claim was by that time, the manufacturers were using the same media in both versions of disks. No idea if it's true, but they seemed reliable at the time.
Yeah. I did it all the time.
@@JamesPotts It's absolutely not true that the same media was being used in both types of disc by the '90s. The media used in 1.44MB discs has a much higher coercivity than in 720KB discs and thus requires a higher write current to be written to reliably. The two types of media are *absoulutely* not interchangeable if you at all value the integrity of your data.
@@RetroHackShack Hmm, and how many bad sectors were reported during formatting? And could you still read the discs a few weeks/months down the line?
It was then, and still is now, a false economy. Nobody I knew that tried it ever did it more than once, including myself.
Yes. I never had a problem. I probably still have some notched disks somewhere.