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8 inch floppy drive for commodore Pet and manual (EN) for CBM 8028

Doesn't make sense, IEEE488 is another name for GPIB, which is a controller bus used on test equipment and older HP computers.

What are the discs off? The only GPIB disc drives I know about are the HP 9845 and similar.
 
Woodchips - I suspect you may not be familiar enough with Commodore drives to answer this question accurately. Commodore IEEE-488 drives were sold extensively in their business lines. They were all 5 1/4" drives (2031, 2040, 4040, 8050, 8250). There was also a (very rare) "CBM 8280", which was similar to the more common 8250 drive (8" vs. 5 1/4"). I believe the 8280 was sold in Europe, 50hz, I have never actually seen on in person (in USA). I could believe they were sold in Poland and other east bloc countries. So, this guy has a few disks apparently that were made using a 8280, assuming he misprinted the drive model name, and is looking for a drive to read them on. There was a thread earlier this month on cbm-hackers user group about the 8280 drive. Search the web, including my web site for more info on the IEEE drives sold by Commodore.
 
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You'd probably have the most luck starting with a CBM 8250 internal drive controller to adapt to 8" Tandon 848 drive (or Micropolis or MPI model ??) but it would involve a lot of engineering expertise to make it work. There was a big discussion on cbm-hackers about this drive and how to service drives and/or read disks, I suggest anyone trying to read an 8" CBM IEEE drive disk review te cbm-hackers threads on the subject in order to learn more about what is involved..cbm-hackers is where you go to talk about things like CBM IEEE drive hardware servicing.
b
 
Billdeg, you are correct, had completely forgotten that the PET used GPIB.

The good news is that the HP 9845 8" floppy discs used GPIB, I think. My drives have a large controller board in the enclosure but never really looked at it. On the other hand I suppose the Commodore unit would have its own command set.
 
The conversation about using alternative hardware like the HP GPIB or IBM General Purpose Bus for CBM disks used to come up a lot in the past. I don't recall if anyone ever made it happen. Maybe that's why the Zoom Floppy and related were found to be the best solution most of the time, accepting the fatal flaw that this only works if you have a CBM drive to read or write the files. I bet there is a way to use an 8250 drive's controller to read 8" disks in parts (as drive 0 and drive 1) by redefining the tracks/start point, sector size, etc.
Bill
 
Just for clarification, didn't the PET disk controllers create something like a GCR encoded disk, not FM or MFM. That would make using other drives and controllers to read the content limited to ones that understood the specific encoding of the disk.

Or am I mistaken. Comments please?
 
Cameron Kaiser said:
The 8060 series and 8280 were Commodore's only line of 8" disk drives, all IEEE-488. The original, virtually unknown 8060 was a single drive that stored 750K per disk; the later 8061, 8062 and 8280 were all dual drives and could read IBM 3740 as well as Commodore GCR format. The 8061 had a total capacity of 1.6MB, the 8062 3.2MB and the 8280 1MB. The slimline-styled 8280, the final 8" in the series, was powered by DOS 3.0 (the same DOS used in the 9060/9090).
Click to expand...

Out of those, I believe only the 8280 made it into the wild. There were two 8280's sold on eBay last month, at £667 and £700 from the same seller. Neither drive was in fully working condition.

So yes, perhaps a run-of-the-mill 8" floppy drive mechanism somehow could be interfaced to the controller board of say a 8250 and then somehow make it able to read disks. The ROM of the 8280 has been dumped and just this week two versions of the dump have been verified and determined one of them simply was bit rot and thus deleted from the FTP.
 
Let's precise. I'm searching CBM 8280 floppy drive and manual for printer CBM 8028 (English)
I would also appreciate if someone with working 8028 could explain me how it should behave after switching on - any movement of printing head, auto test etc.
 
piksar said:
Let's precise. I'm searching CBM 8280 floppy drive and manual for printer CBM 8028 (English)
I would also appreciate if someone with working 8028 could explain me how it should behave after switching on - any movement of printing head, auto test etc.
Click to expand...

If you hold down (I think) the line feed or the paper feed button when you turn on the printer and then let go, the machine will print a test page. I am not familiar with the 8028 printer, but they all pretty much work the same way.

You could sell the 8280 drive for the price of a new computer.

Bill
 
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