Dwight Elvey
Veteran Member
Hi
It is not my sale but I saw a Digital Systems disk drive on ebay. The price is a little high but it is a dual 8 inch. This was one of the first, if not the first disk drives available for the IMSAI/ALTAIR. It is missing the buffer board that would go on the S100 ( not a complicated board as it has bus buffers and simple address decoding as I recall ). The buffer is something that would be easy to wire wrap.
The controller is built into the drive box. Rather than having code that runs on the CPU bus, it DMA's the sectors onto the S100 bus, so that it takes no RAM space with EPROMs. It DMA's a boot strap sector into RAM on reset. These were made by the same fellow that made the first disk controllers for G. Killdal. They were close friends.
The drives and controller were originally made for non-S100 systems but easily adapted to the S100 with the buffer card.
Dwight
It is not my sale but I saw a Digital Systems disk drive on ebay. The price is a little high but it is a dual 8 inch. This was one of the first, if not the first disk drives available for the IMSAI/ALTAIR. It is missing the buffer board that would go on the S100 ( not a complicated board as it has bus buffers and simple address decoding as I recall ). The buffer is something that would be easy to wire wrap.
The controller is built into the drive box. Rather than having code that runs on the CPU bus, it DMA's the sectors onto the S100 bus, so that it takes no RAM space with EPROMs. It DMA's a boot strap sector into RAM on reset. These were made by the same fellow that made the first disk controllers for G. Killdal. They were close friends.
The drives and controller were originally made for non-S100 systems but easily adapted to the S100 with the buffer card.
Dwight