Backpack battery backup for Pet disk drive

[zippysticks]

Anyone seen there before or used one ?

It was hooked up inside a Commodore 8050 drive unit I acquired recently.

Batteries seem long dead - I'm just intrigued about the (presumably important) systems/applications they were used in.

regards

 

[Ruud]

I never saw or heard of it. It could help if you tell us in what way it was hooked up to the drive.

 

[krebizfan]

There was an announcement in a 1983 Transactor magazine. At that time, the company was listed as the Electronic Technology Corp at the same phone number. The CSC does seem to be the big CSC consulting firm which operated an office in Apex, NC. The 80 column PETs had managed to infiltrate the insurance industry but I don't know if any of the setups had this form of battery backup.

 

[zippysticks]

I never saw or heard of it. It could help if you tell us in what way it was hooked up to the drive.

It was simply connected to the two large capacitors. Its an odd setup as I presume this would have provided an AC charging source from the transformer and when power is removed I can only presume the batteries produced a controlled discharge back to the logic board.

 

[Ruud]

It was simply connected to the two large capacitors. Its an odd setup as I presume this would have provided an AC charging source from the transformer and when power is removed I can only presume the batteries produced a controlled discharge back to the logic board.

It accepts the raw power and outputs enough power so the regulators can do the job. Simple but effective.

The WHY, that is another question. Why would a stand-alone drive need an UPS? Beats me. If it had a RAM board used as virtual drive, I could understand its use in case you forgot to save the virtual data, you could turn on everything and do it afterwards. If it came with a system that had a built-in UPS as well, I certainly would understand.

 

[VERAULT]

My guess would be this was for disk duplicating. The machine could be ran stand alone, boot from a disk then it would be off and running making copies. Just a guess though.


A very neat find.