Commodore PET/CBM 8060 and 8280 Series Questions

[Pentad4k]

Has anyone used one of the Commodore 8" 8060 series or the 8280 series of disk drives? I hate to admit this, but I didn't even know Commodore made 8" disk drives until I stumbled upon a drive list for the Pet/CBM series. Fascinated, I tried to do some research, but haven't found much so I thought I would reach out to you.

Were their advantages to the 8" drives over the 5.25" ones?

Why would Commodore make 8" disks drives? 5.25" drives seemed to be more common. Even if you used your Pet with a mainframe that had an 8" drive, I would think the formats would be incompatible. Would the Super Pet from Waterloo make use of an 8" drive? Lastly, it must have sold reasonably well with five different models made by Commodore??

Thanks for any info!!

 

[daver2]

Very rare.

The 8" disk drives probably had a larger capacity storage than the 5 1/4" units.

Also, 8" drives were possibly more available than 5 1/4" to start with, but (I suspect) the window for Commodore was quite small. You start off with a development project with cost-effective parts and (by the time you get it to the market) technology has moved on and you have to produce something else that the market wants...

Just a thought...

Dave

 

[crock]

Has anyone used one of the Commodore 8" 8060 series or the 8280 series of disk drives? I hate to admit this, but I didn't even know Commodore made 8" disk drives until I stumbled upon a drive list for the Pet/CBM series. Fascinated, I tried to do some research, but haven't found much so I thought I would reach out to you.

Were their advantages to the 8" drives over the 5.25" ones?

Why would Commodore make 8" disks drives? 5.25" drives seemed to be more common. Even if you used your Pet with a mainframe that had an 8" drive, I would think the formats would be incompatible. Would the Super Pet from Waterloo make use of an 8" drive? Lastly, it must have sold reasonably well with five different models made by Commodore??

Thanks for any info!!

I have an 8280 which I restored years ago. Formatted capacity is 3946 blocks, so about a megabyte. One of the use cases of the 8280 was that it can also read IBM 3740 format disks, and the drive supposedly came with utilities to read the, but I have never managed to track them down.

As to the SuperPET, no - not aware of any native use for the 8280, but they are compatible. I converted the Waterloo language disks to 8280 format for an exhibition and VCF-CH a few years back.

Here's some pics.

Rob

 

[Pentad4k]

Thank you both for replying and sharing your information!


Rob,

That is awesome! You did an amazing job of restoring the 8280! It looks brand new next to your SuperPET!. May I ask a few follow up questions:

1. What DOS version is in ROM?

2. Is the 8280 8" drives faster than their 5 1/4" counterparts on the Pet/CBM?

3. I've never used an 8" drive, but I saw on Adrian Black's channel that many (all?) 8" drives run all the time even at idle. Does the 8280 do this as well?

4. Do you have any photos with the hood up so we could see inside?

5. Have you thought about doing a video on it? They seem to be very rare and I think many people would find it fascinating to learn more about the 8" drives.

Again, beautiful 8280!

Sincerely,
Mark

 

[crock]

1. What DOS version is in ROM?

2. Is the 8280 8" drives faster than their 5 1/4" counterparts on the Pet/CBM?

3. I've never used an 8" drive, but I saw on Adrian Black's channel that many (all?) 8" drives run all the time even at idle. Does the 8280 do this as well?

4. Do you have any photos with the hood up so we could see inside?

5. Have you thought about doing a video on it? They seem to be very rare and I think many people would find it fascinating to learn more about the 8" drives.

Again, beautiful 8280!

Sincerely,
Mark

1. It reports DOS 3.0 on power on, but all those are a bit arbitrary.
2. I think it's broadly the same. I never measured it but I do not remember it being noticeably faster or slower. The format is slower though as it's a 2 pass process.
3. I don't think that's correct. Power to the spindle is configured by jumpers on the drive mechanism and I think the 8280 the drives are configured to spin up on drive select, and to run for 20 seconds after drive select goes false.
4. Some, but I only took pictures of what I needed to reference to reassemble. I actually don't have too many but I guess I can pop the case at some point.
5. I restored this over 2 years between 2015 and 2017 when I did not have the confidence to do videos. If I had done it now I would definitely have done so. I have a backlog of a couple of vids I need to make, so maybe I can add this.

Rob

 

[Hutch]

I always assumed the use case for the IBM 3740 compatibility was as a "key punch" to write code or input data that would eventually be passed to the mainframe for processing.
I seems that a SuperPET, with it's serial interface connected to an IBM would make it more useful, though the primary use for the serial interface was to load programs from a time-share system.

 

[Pentad4k]

Rob,

Thanks for the follow up answers and sharing your knowledge! I do think you would have a lot of viewers since this hardware is rare. Again it is a beautiful restoration! You did an amazing job! If I may ask one other question: Do you need to use specific density 8" disks? We have single, double, and quad density 5 1/4" disks, but I wasn't sure if that applied to 8" disks as well?

Hutch,

I too wondered about IBM compatibility and thought the SuperPet might be a good match for the 8" drives. I had heard over the years that the SuperPet was designed to work along mainframes and minis but I never knew if that was true.


Sincerely,
Mark

 

[daver2]

>>> I had heard over the years that the SuperPet was designed to work along mainframes and minis but I never knew if that was true.

Yep.

As an intelligent 'terminal' to the mini/mainframe.

In this configuration, the SuperPET could even run without any disk drives at all - the software being stored on the mini/mainframe and transferred on demand via the network.

Dave

 

[Eudimorphodon]

3. I've never used an 8" drive, but I saw on Adrian Black's channel that many (all?) 8" drives run all the time even at idle. Does the 8280 do this as well?

Older full-height 8" drives often ran all the time (and even had 120v AC drive motors), most half-height 8" drives *don't* run all the time and use DC motors. IE, they're essentially built like giant 5.25" drives.

Some operating systems (not for Commodore PETs, obviously) required patches if you switched from constantly-running drives to start-stop models because they were written around the assumption that they could start using the disk "immediately" after selecting the drive. (The constantly-running drives had a "head load solenoid" to allow the head to lift off the disk slightly and save wear when the drive wasn't busy, but just engaging the head load solenoid was usually a lot faster than the second-scale delay it takes to spin up the disk from a complete halt.) TRSDOS for the Radio Shack II/12/16 had this problem; there "two versions" of TRS-DOS 2.0, "2.0a" and "2.0b", the only difference is "b" has the patch for the thinline drives on the later systems.

 

[Pentad4k]

Thank you all for the information. Having never used an 8" drive before, it has been very educational.