Semi-OT: IDE & SATA to USB "dongles"

Tony Duell wrote:
So (to get it on-topic for classiccmp), people with machines
that only 
support IDE drives are going to have problems in the future
finding 
working replacements (I doubt very much if any of us could
repair any 
reasonably-modern IDE drive, alas). I've seen adapters to
use IDE drives 
on SATA hosts, but not the reverse.

Oh well... Looks like designing an ST506 (host) to IDE
(drive) interface 
is not going to be a particularly useful thing. Better to
work out a way 
to keep the old ST506s/412s/etc working.

-tony

------------------------------------------------------

I'm lost in your logic here.  ST506 and 412 have been
obsolete for 15 years.
They will become harder and harder to find and keep working.
 If you are
trying to keep the old systems running, you will eventually
have to do a
dongle of some sort with newer drives.   Why not now?


Keeping the old drives working is going to require parts and
technology that
don't exist commercially any more.  You can still find the
high volume
circuitry in the surplus stores.  But it's the heads and
platters that wear
out and ferrite heads and oxide media are gone.  Occasional
bits and pieces
show up less and less often.  Why not put the energy into
adapting the
latest drive technology?  That buys you an extra decade or
so. 


IDE drives are going to be around in far greater volumes
long after the last
ST506 is still working.  I just had a report that last year
was the biggest
year ever for hard drives: 376 million units, the huge
majority IDE.  That
gives a pool of drives to use that will outlast most of us
on this list.
And there are already IDE to SATA dongles to stretch out
another generation.


And there are the side issues to keeping the old systems
going.  How long
will we be able to find 8" and 5.25" media? 
Printer ribbons?  Rubber parts
for teletypes and typewriters?  When do you toss in the
towel on trying to
keep the old systems going?


One of my other hobbies is amateur publishing.  We used
Gestener mimeograph
machines.  The machines are easy to keep running.  But I
haven't been able
to buy any stencils in the last 5 years.  A place in India
made them until
around 2000.  Now it's just the odd cache that shows up on
eBay every 4-6
months.  The ink we've tried to make ourselves with a
little success.  And
of course, the twiltone paper is long gone.  Modern paper is
too slick and
non-absorbent.  When we get a mimeo going, it still looks
like crap because
of the poor ink and paper.


So I wonder again, when do we give up on keeping the old
machines running?
If my CDC 160-A memory goes, there's no more core memories.
 My Jetex
engines don't have fuel any more.  My old typewriters have
platens that turn
to powder if I try to type.


Some time, we have to let go and upgrade as much as it is
unaesthetic or
displeasing.  When?

Billy

On 5/30/2006 at 1:28 PM Billy Pettit wrote:

>Some time, we have to let go and upgrade as much as it
is unaesthetic or
>displeasing.  When?

Now that's an interesting question.'

I think if "maintainability" is plotted against
time,  it often looks like
a bell-shaped curve.   Near the peak of the curve, we have
devices that use
available commodity components (e.g. 7400-series TTL and/or
discretes), so,
for example, it's possible to keep a PC XT mobo going for a
long time.  Way
off on the back end of the curve are devices constructed
from things that
were once commodity items, but which are old enough to be
rare
(point-contact transistors, germanium diodes, UV-201As, your
160A core,
etc.).  Off the front end of the curve are those devices
constructed from
devices that, although only slightly out of date, are no
longer available
and whose specs may never have been published outside of an
internal
company document (try to replace a house-numbered ASIC on a
1990's PC
mobo).

If one wanted to make an ST-506 or 412 replacement, I'd be
sore tempted
just to do it with some battery-backed SRAM and a
microcontroller.  100 MB
was once a big hard drive, but it's not even big for SRAM
nowadays.  The
replacement might extend the useful life of your device by
decades, since
there's no moving parts to wear out.  I'm sure that you
could do likewise
for your 160A core.

Someone once offered me a genuine Linotype hot-type
typesetting machine. I
didn't take the guy up on his offer, but I wonder if there
are any of the
beasts still in use.

Cheers,
Chuck
                                                            
               
                                      

"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
>
>If one wanted to make an ST-506 or 412 replacement, I'd
be sore tempted
>just to do it with some battery-backed SRAM and a
microcontroller.

You know, some friends of mine once did that for the
original macintosh.
I just remembered.  They figured out the signals coming out
of the
floppy port in the back and faked the signals in software. 
With a z-80
if I recall correctly.  I think it had a big (for the time)
battery
backed up sram bank.  It was probably all of 1-2mb.  I'm
guessing this
was essentially talking to the IWM (and doing group code)

at the time I was working on the Hyperdrive and we had
*10mb*, woo hoo.

hmmm... I wonder if either of them saved any of that.  I'll
ask.

those two guys later founded Shiva

(and I got was a t-shirt! 

-brad

On 5/30/06, Billy Pettit <Billy.Pettitwdc.com> wrote:

> Some time, we have to let go and upgrade as much as it
is unaesthetic or
> displeasing.  When?

There comes a time when it's no longer viable to keep old
machines
running. Computers aren't anything unique in this regard.

The oldest human weapon that wasn't simply a thrown object
is probably
a sling. There's at least one nearly 3,000yr old one that
was found in
Egypt, but it's far too fragile to use or test - but for
trying it
out, it can be reconstructed:

http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk/detail/details/inde
x_no_login.php?objectid=UC6921&accesscheck=%2Fdetail%2Fd
etails%2Findex.php

After a while, when parts and consumables can no longer be
found or
fabricated, old computers, like, say, old motorbikes, are
going to
become purely museum pieces, that cannot actually be *run*.
They're
already no use - you wouldn't go to work on a 1905 Douglas
and you
wouldn't run a PDP-8 to read your email. Doesn't mean
they're
valueless. Better to preserve them in their original state
in a museum
than to bodge together some hybrid of ancient and modern
kit.

To give people the experience of using them, write and
emulator & make
it perfect & faithful. That way,m the OS, the software,
the data
files, the *feel* of the machine can be kept alive
indefinitely.

One day, future computers won't run our current
"modern" software. But
we can run the emulator on an emulator when that happens!

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