Quantel Paintbox 8" floppy drive

[AdamAnt316]

Hello everyone. At a hamfest last month, I spotted a couple of 8" floppy disk drives in a pile of junk. One of them was in an external case, while the other was mounted to what appeared to be a 19" rack panel. Since I wasn't sure what I'd do with the rack-mount drive, I grabbed the external one, mainly so I could say I had an 8" disk drive, and for possible retrofitting for use with one of my computers. It turned out that this floppy drive was meant for use with the Quantel Paintbox computer graphics system, which I doubt would've been sitting in said pile of junk, but who knows. Anyway, here's a view of the front of the drive:

And here's a view of the rest of the drive:

Here's a view of the back panel:

And for good measure, a close-up of the writing and stickers on the top, showing inspection dates of 1988! :shocked:

Does anyone know anything about the sort of interface this drive might've used? I haven't opened the case to take a look at the innards, so I'm not sure if there's any circuitry between the drive itself and the connectors on the back panel, which are a pair of what appear to be IDC-style bi-pin connectors equipped with around 60 and 26 pins, respectively. Might there be a way to make this drive work with something that isn't a Quantel Paintbox? Thanks in advance!
-Adam

 

[Chuck(G)]

The drive appears to be a NEC FD1165 model and the connectors look a lot like it's SMD interface so nothing that you'll probably be familiar with.

Shame that you couldn't find the rest of the system. This looks to be from a DPB-7001 model--a hugely expensive video editing device. (think 6 digit price tag).

But I have no doubt that the keyboard "collectors" would already have scavenged the keyboard already.

 

[AdamAnt316]

The drive appears to be a NEC FD1165 model and the connectors look a lot like it's SMD interface so nothing that you'll probably be familiar with.

Shame that you couldn't find the rest of the system. This looks to be from a DPB-7001 model--a hugely expensive video editing device. (think 6 digit price tag).

But I have no doubt that the keyboard "collectors" would already have scavenged the keyboard already.

Thanks for the reply! I've seen lots of reference to hard drives used by the Paintbox system, such as is seen in this video, but little with regards to floppy drives. Kinda strange that 8" drives were being used with it in 1988, but I'm guessing they would've been formatted to hold 1-2MB or so apiece, as needed for graphical editing. Would it be possible to adapt the SMD interface to work with anything else, or would I have to bypass it and wire something directly to the drive? What could it be made to work with, if anything?

It was literally in with a pile of scrap metal near the dumpster. If I'd known what a Paintbox was, I would've taken a closer look at the junk, or at least would've also saved the rack-mounted floppy drive I saw. Didn't see a keyboard in with the rest of the pile, but who knows.
-Adam

 

[Chuck(G)]

While there were SMD controllers made for the PC platform, they weren't common. My 1984 WD handbook lists one and I think an ISA version was made by Interphase. You mostly associate SMD with hard drives for minicomputers. Your VAX likely came with one, probably an Emulex QD32 (at least that's what we used). SMD was a CDC innovation.

You're best off popping the thing open and connecting to the drive signals directly with a standard 50 conductor cable.

 

[dexterslab]

The drive inside should be a regular Shugart interface type and use regular 8" soft sectored DSDD 1.6mb floppies, there will be a SMD to Shugart converter board in there too. They did this so all the drive IO was entirely over the SMD bus and one set of interface cards (in the paintbox) rather than having separate FDD and HDD buses.

The Quantel DPB-7001 was a video painting system introduced in 1981 which worked on single video images (720*480 for 525 line video or 720*576 for 625 line regions) in true colour, although it could freeze single frames of video. It wasn't until Harry a few years later that actual video recording/editing/playback could be done.

There's a series of BBC programs called Painting With Light which put the Paintbox in front of several artists back in 1987, well worth a watch if your interested in video graphics:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4emDoNAn3Gx2DT1MhG3fuTm_tJcGvFu

It's a real shame you didn't find the rest of the system, as they are incredibly rare. The only one known to exist is the one i have, which is the same one featured in RGVX's video you linked to. Although Quantel (now Grass Valley Group) used to have one we don't know if they still have it.

 

[dexterslab]

The drive in the OP is indeed a 8" drive for a DPB-7000 Quantel Paintbox. Paintbox was a video painting system by UK company Quantel in 1981, the disks could store one single NTSC or PAL frame so 720*480 or 720*576. They were formatted in a very odd format, with only one sector per track, image data was stored as 16 bit YUV so each frame/image was around 830Kb.

The actual drive is a standard Shugart interface but there will be an additional board inside the box that converts the SMD interface to Shugart. The Paintbox used SMD (usually a Fujitsu Eagle M2294 330Mb) disks as storage so Quantel used the same bus to control the FDC as it simplified the Paintbox.

It's a shame there is nothing else left from the Paintbox machine as they are crazy rare, other than the one i have i have never seen another that hasn't been trashed.

The reason why they were still using 8" drives late into the 1980s is because it was designed in the late '70s, released in '81 and production ran through to about '89 when the 2nd gen machines were released and they moved to 3.5" 1.44Mb drives. Quantel ran support for them through until the early 2000s where parts were often returned and refurbished so it's quite usual to find paintboxes with parts from a mixture of years.