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Old floppy controller

hunterjwizzard

hunterjwizzard

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Mar 21, 2020
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Another find from the box I swear had chemistry supplies in it:

bLX6jaq.jpg


Looks like an 8 bit ISA card that can be put in a 16 bit slot.

My question: could this possible work on a newer windows98-era machine?

I'm wanting to have dual floppies in my do-everything retro monster(a gotech and a real 1.44mb drive) but I don't think the onboard controller supports 2 drives.
 
I wish I could make out the part numbers on the ICs and crystal. I suspect, however, that this may be a QIC tape accelerator board, not a floppy controller.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I suspect, however, that this may be a QIC tape accelerator board, not a floppy controller.
Click to expand...
Thats definitely more interesting, if less useful, than a floppy controller.

XU3RTyL.jpg


Sdy9DjC.jpg



In other news I am beginning to suspect there is some kind of problem with my phone. When I hit the photo button, it does an auto-focus, shows me a perfectly focused image, then switches to a grainy image and actually captures that. I can't tell if it always did that or its a new problem. Either way, hope these images are a bit better.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Thats definitely more interesting, if less useful, than a floppy controller.

XU3RTyL.jpg


Sdy9DjC.jpg



In other news I am beginning to suspect there is some kind of problem with my phone. When I hit the photo button, it does an auto-focus, shows me a perfectly focused image, then switches to a grainy image and actually captures that. I can't tell if it always did that or its a new problem. Either way, hope these images are a bit better.
Click to expand...
Maybe it's running on W2K.
 
So having united controller and drive, I'm pretty sure this is what happened. I harvested the two at some point in the early 2000s when I was obseively collecting tape drives believing it would soon net me an efficient storage library. That never happened, but I still occasionally find either an old tape drive or old tapes from that time. I very rarely had the trifecta of drive, controller, and media.

Anyway, I have drive and controller now. At least thats fun.
 
QoawLG1.jpg


I can take some more if you want.

I probably need to build a new retro computer to house this thing though. I am badly short on ISA slots.
 
So it was a ditto.. of sorts. Cant say i have ever seen a ditto max before. Just the standard ditto drives. I never owned one myself but we had plenty at work back then.
 
The specific model is a Model IO1000Mi, K729407, which from what I can tell is capable of taking up to 10gb tapes. If I'd had 10gb tapes back in the day this would have been an amazing storage solution, since DVD burners had not yet become affordable to the common man.

I most likely harvested this thing while in highschool, 2001-2003ish, obsolete then, but HDDs were still very expensive and CDs didn't hold much. Imagine how much Anime I could have fit on 10 gigabytes!!!! God I was a nerd in highschool....
 
So did this drive take special software to read and write or is there some generic tape software I need?
 
In general, the Iomega Ditto tape drives are plastic trash. I've had one or two where the internal plastic parts fractured with age. In many cases, Iomega couldn't be bothered with screws; they just melted the plastic studs over the metal components to hold them in place. I still have a Ditto 2.5 GB in shrink-wrap that will probably never see service. It's probably not even worth opening to get the Travan cartridge or wall-wart.
 
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