[Coco] Back, in the days ...

[Bob Devries]

As far as I know, SASI stands for Shugart Associates System Interface, and 
was the fore-runner of SCSI.

My first hard disk system for the coco was a Xebec SASI to ST502 adaptor 
with a Tandon 10MB drive; full height, 5.25".
A real brick. I now use a pair of Quantum LPS 120S drives on my Disto 
4-in-1.

--
Regards, Bob Devries, Dalby, Queensland, Australia

Isaiah 50:4 The sovereign Lord has given me
the capacity to be his spokesman,
so that I know how to help the weary.

website: http://www.home.gil.com.au/~bdevasl
my blog: http://bdevries.invigorated.org/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George Ramsower" <georgeramsower at gmail.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Back, in the days ...


> Ward Griffiths  reminds me:
>
>> From: "George Ramsower" <georgeramsower at gmail.com>
>>>   Reminiscing the old days, I remember when IBM came out with the PC 
>>> with
>>> 640K RAM. They said this was more memory than anyone would ever need.
>>>  A five meg hard drive was big enough for anything you could ever use.
>>>  A computer running a clock speed of sixteen megahertz was fast!.... 
>>> Really
>>> FAST!
>>
>> It was Bill Gates who said that 640k was as much as anybody would ever 
>> need.  And the earliest stock hard drives for the PC/XT were ten meg.
>>
> I wasn't so sure. I THOUGHT it was IBM, so did some checking...Now  I 
> don't think anyone ever said that.
>
> "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
>  a.. Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 
> 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that 
> were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark.
> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
>
>>>  I'm sure some of you remember the Turbo mode. Wow!
>>>  The first hard drive for the coco was a five meg unit. It wasn't a 
>>> standard
>>> SCSI interface, it was something a little different. Somewhere in my 
>>> arsenal
>>> of my old documents, I have the schematic of that old controller. I 
>>> remember
>>> it had  very few chips.
>>>   I contacted Tandy (way back when) and they faxed me a copy of the
>>> schematic. It was had drawn and not very pretty.
>>
>> No drive released or supported for the Color Computer by Tandy 
>> Corporation was anything remotely related to SCSI.  They were all ST-506 
>> using an adapter that made the CoCo end look like a Model 3/4 edge 
>> connector, with the actual hard disk controller in the first drive 
>> enclosure.  The adapter connected to all of the same drives that attached 
>> to the Models 1/3/4 and 2/12/16/6000 (except for the early 8.4 Mb drives 
>> for the 2/16 which were crap 8" Shugart SASI devices) which ranged in 
>> capacity from five to seventy megabytes per drive (and four drives were 
>> supported, mix and match 5, 10, 12, 15, 35 or 70 MB drives -- only the 
>> first had the controller, a WD-1010 that supported up to four heads and 
>> 1024 cylinders per unit).
>
> Someone told me once that the SASI interface was a downscaled SCSI and the 
> coco controller was even more hacked. Memory may be bad on that. I knew 
> the drive itself need an adapter. My first hard drive was an MFM drive, a 
> SCSI controller and a SCSI interface card on the coco... the same card I'm 
> still using today
>>
>> The first drives officially supported for the CoCo were 10 Meg.  The 5 
>> Meg drives were ancient history before the first official Tandy CoCo HD 
>> adapter, though if you had one it worked fine.
>
> Bit rot in the brain again.
>
>> --
>> Ward Griffiths
>
>
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