[rescue] Various machines for sale

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2025, Dave McGuire via rescue wrote:

> > I had some HP Apollo 735 or 785 systems years ago that had SCSI 
> > connected floppy drives.  --  It was the same bus as the hard drives.
> 
>    Later HP-9000 systems too, like the internal floppy drive on the 
> -382.  And many DEC workstations.

 In reality the DEC implementation just used an 8080-based microcomputer 
with the usual peripherals in a 5.25" half-height drive form factor to 
interface a standard PC FDC to SCSI.  I have one of those.

> > Also, what was the interface technology for floppy drives in older SCSI 
> > based Mac computers?  Did they have an IDE interface just for the floppy 
> > or was the floppy SCSI?
> 
>    Neither.  Using IDE to control a floppy would be a challenge, as the 
> whole "design" (using the word loosely!) of IDE is centered around the 
> specific register layouts of an early Western Digital hard disk 
> controller chipset.

 Which was done with ATAPI though, which in turn is just SCSI-over-IDE.  
Though in principle handling a removable drive over plain IDE/ATA was also 
possible, as all the necessary commands were provided by the protocol.  I 
don't know if anyone has ever made such devices, but Linux used to have a 
driver for hardware suspiciously referred to as "IDE floppy".

  Maciej