Yep they put a lot of thought into that for being such a sofware that is boring to many outside of that workforce haha For the time I imagine it took the edge off computerphobia if the user was older and didn't really like them but needed to use one for work
Haha! This reminds of the early to mid 90s where you had to setup the sound blaster drivers to get real sound in games and then you had to pray to the gods that you had enough conventional, and extended memory.
I miss Radio Shack. They were around for decades. You could always head on down to your local shack and almost always get what you needed. Try doing that at Best Buy, ain't gonna happen. Another cool video Kevin. 😎👍
Seems like around the time they started selling cell phones, that was the start of their downfall. Not saying that selling cell phones caused it, but same time period. 1999/2000.
I don't miss them one bit. I used to work for them from 2001 to 2004. They treated us workers terribly, broke promises and stole everything from sales to incentives. I'm glad they're mostly gone.
The EX/HX external floppy drive plugs into a proper DRIVE connector, needs no external power supply, no drivers, can be swapped at boot and works 100% of the time. Why do you feel the drive featured in this video is a better option?
@@Torch70 I wouldn't change what I have on the HX naturally for the reasons you listed. But can't use the HX drive on a non Tandy system. This is a more versatile option.
Now I'm obsessed with trying to get the drive to work on the RL! Thank you for this wonderful video and hope you and your family had a wonderful Thanksgiving. 🦃
Ha, I wish I had a 5 1/4" solution for my raspberry who sometimes thinks it is a retro computer. I have a 5 1/4" drive and disks(!) but no adapter to connect it to my pi.
You can cobble one together with a lot of external tape drives (floppy controller based)! I've done it in a pinch. Backpack and adaptec used standard floppy controller s just need the floppy driver.
great vid VW, reminds me of my old Apple II with 2 external 5.25-inch drives-back in the days before HDs & IDE, you had to load DOS into RAM before you could use the disk drive to load the BASIC programs, so if you only had 1 external drive, you booted up the DOS disk into RAM. Once you were booted into DOS, you removed the DOS boot disk & then inserted the program disk you wanted to run. Sounds tedious, but remember we were originally using cassette tape recorders for storage so this was a huge leap. The next step was adding a 2nd 5.25-inch drive, this allowed you to leave the DOS boot disk in drive A, boot up into DOS, then just put the program disk in drive B to run it. This was bleeding edge in the early 80s...
About your faulty 1.2MB 5.25" diskettes. Since we're in the era of a magnetic layer glued to a Mylar/plastic surface, I'd bet that it's a matter of factory chosen binder material along with long term durability, just like with certain makers of cassette-, R2R- and videotapes, where some are prone to loose the magnetic layer more than others. So grasping for straws in the middle of the Pacific, I wonder if other manufactorers made better 1.2MB diskettes than your Maxell turned out to be. Maybe there's better out there. There should be. I like your channel. It's my preferred one. You're always right on target. There's no nonsense. No "talking hands a'la puppet master doing ballet" (man, I hate that). So. Cheers.
Very cool! I've recently become obsessed with parallel port devices such as this one, such an ingenious use of the good old LPT port. And with devices such as OPL2LPT I kinda feel the LPT port is gaining new life and almost becoming the PC equivalent of the ZX Spectrum edge connector. The retro homebrew community should come up with the concept of some sort of expandable bus you can plug into the LPT port, I'm sure we'd see all sorts of compatible devices suddenly pop up
IEEE 1284 compatible ports should be able to enumerate compliant devices (like ZIP drives) and automatically ask them to pass through to the next in chain. Would be nice to have some scans of the PCB of the controller to replicate it and the IC references…
Gotta love that compaq. Had one for years when i was 10-12 years old. My dad trash picked one. Completely soaked. Let to dry for 3 days. Blew it clean with air compressor and worked perfectly.
7:50: I have a lot of HD 5,25" floppy disks. The reason is simple: in 1992, 5,25" HD disks were significantly cheaper than 3,5" HD floppy disks, and had about 80 % of the capacity.
Nice drive. For a smal PC with a 5 1/4 the pride of my collection is a Commodore PC-1 - a tiny PC with a 5 1/4 built in. (has an external 3 1/2 using an Amiga interface) First PC I had.
Oh man, hearing "terminator resistors" in over 30 years gave me chills. Amazing how far we came with hardware and software... no more terminating resistors (or at least they are built in and software defined). hehe
My experience was quite different with 5.25" disks. I've only ever encountered a handful of them that failed in all my years using them back to the 80s. I've even come across warped ones that I removed the magnetic disk from and put in another plastic shell that worked fine. 3.5" on the other hand....I had so many that failed. The 360K 5.25" seem rock solid though.
Oh yeah 5.25" disks were far more robust than 3.5" disks, especially 3.5" HD disks, and especially 3.5" HD disks made after 1995 or so. 3.5" disks that came with boxed software seemed to be far more reliable than the blank 3.5" disks you could buy, even brand name disks.
It probably depends on the quality of the disk too, I have quite a few dead 5.25" floppies from random brands but most of my Verbatims still work fine.
I got one of those Tandy 25-1087 drives with my Tandy 1000 RSX. Still have the original driver disk too! I piggybacked my external Zip-100 into it. I didn't know about the NONSTOP switch though. That will come in handy.
I used to carry a floppy binder back in the day. This stuff makes me so grateful for modern solid state storage. All my floppy data fit on a single 64MB USB stick with room to spare, so nice. Oh, and the speed; USB version 1 was unreal fast compared to floppies.
Great video as always, if someone wants information about such a disk drive, he will find everything in this video. Now... 3.5" diskettes were a disaster, totally unreliable, especially the ones made in the 90s. I used some for backup, never used them for months, then when I needed them, they simply didn't work. On the other hand, the 360K 5.25" ones were surprisingly reliable, in total contrast with what one would expect. Virtually all of my 5.25" diskettes still work today.... I got older (and it shows), they did not xD
I always thought it was ironic that the maximum number of attached diskette drives went down (after starting at four with the PC) even as the capacities of the diskettes got larger. For the PS/2s, IBM had the "Data Migration Facility" to convert from 5-1/4" format (on another system with that drive type) to 3-1/2" through the parallel port, and also had the 4869-001 (360Kb) external 5-1/4" drive that ran from the primary FDC on the planar. Third-party manufacturers made ribbon cable and "bridge" assemblies for the PS/2s that didn't require the pass-through PCBs to be in adapter slots and bays. So then IBM made the "Diskette Adapter/A", which had a separate FDC chip, but could only run one additional drive per connection (internal and external) - but also at least supported the 4869-002 (1.2Mb) external drive (I did a video on all that too, and was told I needed to be more "scripted" in the single comment that someone else did). There were external diskette drives for the initial Thinkpads laptops and tablets using special connectors, as some of the other manufacturers did as well. Other manufacturers did have the parallel port and later USB models, but those moved from using an FDC chip inside the system. I can't really figure out why more recent systems still with an FDC just support one drive.
Great Video as always! I bought a Backpack Bantam a long time ago. It has been quite a useful drive to load files and programs on a PC with no CDROM. I still see them on Ebay. I wouldn't mind one more as a spare if this one ever croaks.
My college professor has the backpack version of a external CD ROM drive that connected via parallel port. It came in handy for computers that couldn't take a internal CD ROM drive. It was handy to install stuff to the hard drive without doing the floppy brigade trick lol.
Note that the parallel port on the planar of IBM PS/2s and other systems can be a strange I/O address (03BCh) to be an issue sometimes - the parallel port ZIP drives had this come up (I know of someone that even went to great lengths to add a second parallel port to a PS/2 Model 25) all the time until the workaround is learned.
I think you might have hit the nail on the head! As I remember there is more than one configuration for a parallel printer port just as there is for the serial ports. I'll bet that's why it wasn't working on the RL. I wonder if there is a parameter when loading the driver to set an alternate address.
@@DeepThought007: 03BCh was also the original parallel port address on the IBM monochrome adapter - more conventionally there is 0378h and 0278h. With DOS DEBUG, "D 0:0048 L 6" should show installed parallel ports in order. If there is partial functionality of the drive, I doubt it is an I/O issue.
Loved those backpack drives. My dad got some different ones from worked in the 90s when they were getting rid of them. That's one of those items I kick myself for getting rid of.
This reminds me of the photo portrait studio's IBM XT (20MB HDD, 512K monochrome display card, 5.25 inch FDD), that I used for simple database and word processing via PFS: ProFile and ProWrite.;) Eventually, the 20MB HDD died, so I "revved it up" to a 40MB HDD, 640K half length color display card, GeoWorks 1.0 and 1.2, Xtree Gold, and a bootleg dBase program.
I have yet to be able to wrap my head around the fact we cannot get the collective hobbyists to put together an actual working read/write 5.25 solution that reads/writes natively without images. I know the USB standard doesn't support it, but so what? There are plenty of proprietary USB devices with custom drivers etc, so what is holding back the development of an actual USB 5.25 floppy? Some say demand, but it is VERY evident (especially lately) that there is a huge demand for such a native solution. Ideally, an external shell with the pcb and power with connectors inside. USB and standard power plug on the outside. Or heck, even a brick 12v adapter would be suitable. I don't know enough to even begin, but it is obvious there are plenty of people who are.
I considered to use a Raspberry Pi to drive the floppy drive on one side (so in fact it would emulate a FDC chip) and communicate to the host computer via USB. It would be a question of software.
Good info thanks. I have a Unisys slimline 386. If I had such a device I could use a removable hard drive in its place. It only has one externally accessible drive bay.
What I wonder is if you could take one of those external USB 3.5" floppy drives and connect a 5.25" drive to that USB controller to see if it would work on a modern PC. Thanks for the videos!
@@vwestlife Not only that, but the USB floppy controllers usually can't read or write double density disks. I'm not sure if they work properly with higher-capacity disk formats (using tracks beyond 80 or greater numbers of sectors to push 3.5" HD floppy capacity to 1.7MB)
Although this is of little direct use for me, as back in the late 89es/earliest 90es I only used a DOS PC (w. both 3½" and 5¼" drives) as a means to move data between my CP/M machine and Macs, I like it; and I loved hearing the buzz of the Oki µLine92 printer again, what a beautiful sound.
Microsolutions Backpack solutions are the best thing you can get for old PC's. I have the Backpack 460mb Hard Drive and I had the Tape Drive which failed, so I swapped it with a 3.5" floppy drive. Use them both with my PS/2 Model P70. The Parallel port HD is faster than the internal DBA hard drive is!
Awesome! Didnt know about the nonstop option. I've been using my tandy external drive on my 1000SX and TX machines. I was surprised to find out that high density disks were supported!
Are you using the 25-1087 drive? I didn't think the card-edge parallel port of the older 1000s was able to support it, even if you adapt it to a DB25 connector, because it's missing some of the pins.
I am going to leave a bunch of these to my daughter and granddaughters and I hope they understand how to use it . They'll get what looks like Computer Reset's collection .
Wow - such great fun! Bring back the good old days. But so many people, these days, have never experienced an 'older' pc runnng dos - blistering performance. Just shows that perhaps, windows is not really a progression. Love your video - thanks!
I think it's great you use PC-DOS. I used it during the waning years of DOS. It had a create memory manager that MS-DOS lacked, and MS's issue with IP theft just really bothered me. I had a Tandy 1000 RLX. It was a nightmare machine, as the hard drive was a weird XT IDE drive that had its own BIOS. The RLX did not recognize ANY IDE drive except either the 20 or 40MB Seagate IDE with BIOS. So I was stuck with 40MB. What was interesting was MS-DOS 5.0 was installed on a ROM drive as D:. The benefit was the OS did not consume valuable hard drive space, and it was faster. When I gave the computer to my brother, our dad installed a later MS-DOS which consumed a large chunk of the drive. I would have just kept it running 5.0.
0:01 -- Nice Compaq Deskpro EN you got there dude.. I got one and instantly crammed (initially) a Asus a320i-k w/ AMD a10-9700.. and now it has a ASRock Phantom x570 ITX inside and got a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
Happy Thanksgiving vwestlife ( Kevin), I saved a 5.25 drive from a old pc that was messed up. Its from a gateway that was a 286sx( I believe) computer. I believe its made by epson beacuse the 3.5 floppy is. Both are all metal construction internally which is great vs the 3.5 I had that was made from 2006 while the ones I have are from 1992. I have found 3.5 floppies brand new at goodwill 5.25 not at all but ive yet to use it.
2:45 -- is it possible to use a 12v DC power brick instead? Y'know like it is on the NES, it uses a 9v AC power brick because the AC to DC converter circuit is in the NES and you can still use a DC power supply of some kind (be it a power brick, batteries, etc)
I used to have a ton of Memorex 3.5" see through floppies in multiple colors. I did use one as a back up for Windows 98 SE about 21 years ago. Unfortunately I don't have an external 3.5 inch drive to see if it still works.
19:40 Are you sure it's not because you created a CONFIG.SYS which lacks what Windows would autodetect otherwise? Maybe you need to add some more stuff there? Long since I wrote DOS drivers but there's no reason disk drivers would care about filesystems, they just provide sector read/write functions.
When you say at 0:40 that its floppy controller could only take one drive, which the existing 3½" drive was occupying, are you sure? All PCs I've ever played with, there was only one floppy _connector_ (34 pin, IIRR) on the motherboard, but it could control two _drives_: usually 01 and 10, and the cable with three connectors on it (one for the motherboard, one for each drive) had some cores twisted over between the latter two connectors. Obviously, you'd need the right connector for the drive: usually, 3½" drives used the same sort of connector as the motherboard, and 5¼" drives a board edge connector. Many leads had the right type.
That is true with virtually all PCs from the '80s and '90s, but beginning around the year 2000, 5¼-inch floppy drives had fallen out of favor to such an extent that many new PCs only supported a single, 3½-inch drive. Even if you connected a second floppy drive to the cable, the BIOS wouldn't recognize it.
I'm curious to see what the whole adapter board looks like. I'd guess it has some jumpers which are used to identify the drive. Changing them could probably turn it into a Backpack drive or a 360k drive.
i'm also wondering if the DRIVETYPE identifier was actually an integer 0-9 or something, and it only didn't complain about '360' bc that is also an integer.
This looks eerily similar to the external 5.25" drive that commodore used to sell. I had one with my PC-I back in teh day; probably the only noticable difference is the 23 pin vs. the 25 pin plug.
This is some of the fancier video editing you've done! It came out nice! Does this drive work with Imagedisk? It seems like runs at about the same speed as a normally connected drive.
An interesting external LPT drive. LPT port was truly the USB port of it's day with all kind of peripherals made for it, from storage devices to sound cards. From a quick look at that bridge PCB, I think a 12V DC supply would have most likely worked as well for that drive. An AC brick was used likely because it was cheaper.
our family 286 was our first PC and it came with 1,2 and 1,44mb High Density drives. I still bought a lot of 5 1/4 disks because those were cheaper and my parents would only supply me with a certain amount of 3'5 inch ones, never enough for my growing appetite for more software. So I had to buy extras with my own pocket money, and 1'2 inch ones were indeed becoming obsolete and much cheaper,
Turn OFF the DISKETTE CHIP SELECT from here at 6:57. The external enclosure has it's own chip select function. This maybe the issue why you were getting the freeze up since one can't talk through the other. Not sure if PARALLEL CHIP SELECT plays a role or not.
The moving sights (movies) and talking sounds (talkies) take me back to the 1980s. We now needs the smellies! P.S. I had few errors with 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppies back in the day (but it was new equipment). Hey, it beat 76KB on a single-sided 8-inch floppy, and you haven't lived until you toggle in a bootloader for cassette tape to load Bill Gates' BASIC.
The closest I came was loading punched paper tape BASIC programs into a TTY that was connected to a UC time share mainframe, my senior year of high school.
I have a couple of Quad-Density 5.25" drives, you can use them on a PC set up as a 720k 3.5", the comptuer will know no better, but I mainly got them to use as 5.25" 880k drives with my Amiga, because I want to be different-ish... :P
I noticed that the external floppy drives I find on Ebay have 37 pin external connections. They refer to them as "parallel port floppy drives" but a parallel port only has 25 pins. The only 37 pin connection I've seen is on my IBM 5150 floppy drive card. How can these drives work on a parallel port?
Why can you redesign the Floppy Drive to operate like the ((MO)(Magnetic Optical)) Drive so you can read the data off the floppies using a LASER and magnetize the spot with with the write coil when the place you will write has been heated up using the LASER.
As I said in the video, this drive does not require a bidirectional parallel port. On the 1000RLX it works fine regardless if I set the port to either bidirectional or unidirectional.
Curious....did you try a drive letter other than B? I never seen a floppy controller that only supported one drive only. Even if it only had one connector (like the Compaq) you needed a special cable with a twist and sometimes some pins removed. I had an external Tandy drive and I think mine was high lettered >c. When you wanted to make it primary it would make it A but then the 3.5 went high. Of course this was the Tandy drive, so it was special. P.s. funny coincidence you break out a 5.25 drive now! I'm retrobriting my apple //e floppy drives today! Happy Thanksgiving 2021
@@Caseytify I don’t mind even an internal 5.25” drive, but I just want to play those games that probably never got rereleased digitally. Those programs are on an obsolete format and even my cousin has been begging to find anything that can backup those disks!
An external USB 5,25" floppy drive is what I am missing, I carried my old drive from my 386 all the way to my Athlon XP. But after that, my computers no longer had a floppy controller.
Now we need a USB to FDD interface along the lines of the USB to IDE & SATA/IDE ones. Maybe a USB to ISA interface w/PSU? .. then can use a floppy controller card. Or likewise but with PCI? Then can use the CatWeasel .. with a modern laptop !!
The drivetype parameter might be an enumerated value and the error about the KB is related to integer parsing - have you tried a lower number (i.e. 1, 2, 3)?
If the driver is intercepting all disk drive system calls, and is not FAT32 compatible, then it is possible that it would result in data corruption when using it with a FAT32 hard drive.
Happy Thanksgiving, VWestlife
That lawyer software was so comforting with it's friendly suggestions, 'usually YES', 'usually NO'. So nice.
you have to be a lawyer to install it properly
Yep they put a lot of thought into that for being such a sofware that is boring to many outside of that workforce haha
For the time I imagine it took the edge off computerphobia if the user was older and didn't really like them but needed to use one for work
@@farerse usually Yes
Of course, or else you might be sued, by a lawyer.
@@revoltosotintan "Most people use it".....
...."Are *YOU* going to use it?" 🤣🤣
It's something about the way they worded it that is just so funny.
The drive noise flooded me with memories. Took me back to 88. Enjoyed the video, sir.
"It was just working!! ... .... ok now it works.."
Oh man, hah. Reminds me of loading games from DOS all too well. Thank you for the video! :)
Haha! This reminds of the early to mid 90s where you had to setup the sound blaster drivers to get real sound in games and then you had to pray to the gods that you had enough conventional, and extended memory.
@@marccaselle8108 Oh gosh, yeah... and maybe some unrelated com port errors, not knowing what I'm doing thinking that must be the issue... Good times!
Happy Thanksgiving VWest, I hope you have a great day.
I miss Radio Shack. They were around for decades. You could always head on down to your local shack and almost always get what you needed. Try doing that at Best Buy, ain't gonna happen. Another cool video Kevin. 😎👍
Seems like around the time they started selling cell phones, that was the start of their downfall. Not saying that selling cell phones caused it, but same time period.
1999/2000.
@@REXXSEVEN That was when Radio Shack shifted from being a hobbyist store to selling generic consumer electronics and toys.
RadioShack still exists, but they don’t really.
I don't miss them one bit. I used to work for them from 2001 to 2004. They treated us workers terribly, broke promises and stole everything from sales to incentives. I'm glad they're mostly gone.
Some clever engineering to use the parallel port like that. Always love old or obscure accessories
It seems that serial and parallel ports are che most Universal port , too bad both are pretty slow. But they works in the vast majority of cases
Why? The parallel port gives you an 8bit databus and signalling.
@@napomania like my dreamcast sd card reader ;) with 100 games
....hands up all those that would pay to have USB 5.25 inch drive!
🙋🏻♂️
@@adventureoflinkmk2 yep
oooh...YES!!
Yes! And 5.25" floppies too
Yes
actually very useful. happy thanksgiving :)
I love it! I have a proprietary 360KB external drive for my 1000 HX, this is a much better option. Thanks for covering this in depth.
The EX/HX external floppy drive plugs into a proper DRIVE connector, needs no external power supply, no drivers, can be swapped at boot and works 100% of the time. Why do you feel the drive featured in this video is a better option?
@@Torch70 I wouldn't change what I have on the HX naturally for the reasons you listed. But can't use the HX drive on a non Tandy system. This is a more versatile option.
Now I'm obsessed with trying to get the drive to work on the RL! Thank you for this wonderful video and hope you and your family had a wonderful Thanksgiving. 🦃
Great find, now we need a 5 1/4" external for modern PC's. :-)
Ha, I wish I had a 5 1/4" solution for my raspberry who sometimes thinks it is a retro computer. I have a 5 1/4" drive and disks(!) but no adapter to connect it to my pi.
I chuckled at the Windows 10 wallpaper on Windows 98 anachronism!
Another memory jogger for me! Loved hearing the old dot matrix printer just as I did the modem you used some time back.
You can cobble one together with a lot of external tape drives (floppy controller based)! I've done it in a pinch. Backpack and adaptec used standard floppy controller s just need the floppy driver.
do you have any specific enclosure / driver examples that work (and are readily available)?
@@reanimationxpQic80 tape drives are what I used...DC 2120 If I remember correctly.
@@reanimationxp Microsolutions Backpack model 141080 is one I used.
great vid VW, reminds me of my old Apple II with 2 external 5.25-inch drives-back in the days before HDs & IDE, you had to load DOS into RAM before you could use the disk drive to load the BASIC programs, so if you only had 1 external drive, you booted up the DOS disk into RAM. Once you were booted into DOS, you removed the DOS boot disk & then inserted the program disk you wanted to run. Sounds tedious, but remember we were originally using cassette tape recorders for storage so this was a huge leap. The next step was adding a 2nd 5.25-inch drive, this allowed you to leave the DOS boot disk in drive A, boot up into DOS, then just put the program disk in drive B to run it. This was bleeding edge in the early 80s...
This is a quality video, thank you for including everything about the backpack!
Mans bringing people back to the 1980's I love it!
About your faulty 1.2MB 5.25" diskettes.
Since we're in the era of a magnetic layer glued to a Mylar/plastic surface, I'd bet that it's a matter of factory chosen binder material along with long term durability, just like with certain makers of cassette-, R2R- and videotapes, where some are prone to loose the magnetic layer more than others.
So grasping for straws in the middle of the Pacific, I wonder if other manufactorers made better 1.2MB diskettes than your Maxell turned out to be. Maybe there's better out there.
There should be.
I like your channel. It's my preferred one. You're always right on target. There's no nonsense. No "talking hands a'la puppet master doing ballet" (man, I hate that).
So. Cheers.
It's so nostalgic hearing the floppy disk loading up :) I never had a 5.25 drive for a normal PC, only for the Commodore 64.
Happy Thanksgiving Kevin!
Very cool! I've recently become obsessed with parallel port devices such as this one, such an ingenious use of the good old LPT port.
And with devices such as OPL2LPT I kinda feel the LPT port is gaining new life and almost becoming the PC equivalent of the ZX Spectrum edge connector. The retro homebrew community should come up with the concept of some sort of expandable bus you can plug into the LPT port, I'm sure we'd see all sorts of compatible devices suddenly pop up
IEEE 1284 compatible ports should be able to enumerate compliant devices (like ZIP drives) and automatically ask them to pass through to the next in chain.
Would be nice to have some scans of the PCB of the controller to replicate it and the IC references…
Back in the 90s I bought a scanner (the hot new tech at the time!) that ran off the parallel port.
Are you the same Mario Brito that created those old programs for Jane's Longbow 2?
@@FlyboyHelosim I am indeed! :) That was quite some time back tho, probably beginning of 2000s. Good memories from those times
@@mariobrito427 Awesome, it's good to see that you're still around. You have quite an unusual name so thought that it must be you.
Gotta love that compaq. Had one for years when i was 10-12 years old. My dad trash picked one. Completely soaked. Let to dry for 3 days. Blew it clean with air compressor and worked perfectly.
7:50: I have a lot of HD 5,25" floppy disks. The reason is simple: in 1992, 5,25" HD disks were significantly cheaper than 3,5" HD floppy disks, and had about 80 % of the capacity.
Nice drive. For a smal PC with a 5 1/4 the pride of my collection is a Commodore PC-1 - a tiny PC with a 5 1/4 built in. (has an external 3 1/2 using an Amiga interface) First PC I had.
Used to have one back in the day, with an external 20 Mb drive that cost and arm and a leg.
Awesome video! Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
That keyboard makes such a unique sound. I've restored several of them.
Thanks for improving my thanksgiving!
Oh man, hearing "terminator resistors" in over 30 years gave me chills. Amazing how far we came with hardware and software... no more terminating resistors (or at least they are built in and software defined). hehe
My experience was quite different with 5.25" disks. I've only ever encountered a handful of them that failed in all my years using them back to the 80s. I've even come across warped ones that I removed the magnetic disk from and put in another plastic shell that worked fine. 3.5" on the other hand....I had so many that failed. The 360K 5.25" seem rock solid though.
I've had more problems with 3.5" floppies than 5.25" ones. I do not understand the porblems video poster is having.
Oh yeah 5.25" disks were far more robust than 3.5" disks, especially 3.5" HD disks, and especially 3.5" HD disks made after 1995 or so. 3.5" disks that came with boxed software seemed to be far more reliable than the blank 3.5" disks you could buy, even brand name disks.
It probably depends on the quality of the disk too, I have quite a few dead 5.25" floppies from random brands but most of my Verbatims still work fine.
Same here. I even used to format some of my 5.25" HD disks to 1.44MB, to handle 3.5" disk images.
I think Kevin makes it clear that the 1.2 Mb 5.25" were unreliable, not the 360K ones.
Happy Thanksgiving Vwestlife.
Oh, very nice! That's certainly a very useful drive. Nice that it's not Tandy specific too!
I got one of those Tandy 25-1087 drives with my Tandy 1000 RSX. Still have the original driver disk too! I piggybacked my external Zip-100 into it. I didn't know about the NONSTOP switch though. That will come in handy.
I used to carry a floppy binder back in the day. This stuff makes me so grateful for modern solid state storage. All my floppy data fit on a single 64MB USB stick with room to spare, so nice. Oh, and the speed; USB version 1 was unreal fast compared to floppies.
You make me miss my old 110CS with your 105CS
I had it from 1998-2003
Great video as always, if someone wants information about such a disk drive, he will find everything in this video.
Now... 3.5" diskettes were a disaster, totally unreliable, especially the ones made in the 90s. I used some for backup, never used them for months, then when I needed them, they simply didn't work. On the other hand, the 360K 5.25" ones were surprisingly reliable, in total contrast with what one would expect. Virtually all of my 5.25" diskettes still work today.... I got older (and it shows), they did not xD
Ok
I always thought it was ironic that the maximum number of attached diskette drives went down (after starting at four with the PC) even as the capacities of the diskettes got larger. For the PS/2s, IBM had the "Data Migration Facility" to convert from 5-1/4" format (on another system with that drive type) to 3-1/2" through the parallel port, and also had the 4869-001 (360Kb) external 5-1/4" drive that ran from the primary FDC on the planar. Third-party manufacturers made ribbon cable and "bridge" assemblies for the PS/2s that didn't require the pass-through PCBs to be in adapter slots and bays.
So then IBM made the "Diskette Adapter/A", which had a separate FDC chip, but could only run one additional drive per connection (internal and external) - but also at least supported the 4869-002 (1.2Mb) external drive (I did a video on all that too, and was told I needed to be more "scripted" in the single comment that someone else did). There were external diskette drives for the initial Thinkpads laptops and tablets using special connectors, as some of the other manufacturers did as well. Other manufacturers did have the parallel port and later USB models, but those moved from using an FDC chip inside the system. I can't really figure out why more recent systems still with an FDC just support one drive.
🎵I like small PC's and I cannot lie...🎵
Great Video as always! I bought a Backpack Bantam a long time ago. It has been quite a useful drive to load files and programs on a PC with no CDROM. I still see them on Ebay. I wouldn't mind one more as a spare if this one ever croaks.
My college professor has the backpack version of a external CD ROM drive that connected via parallel port. It came in handy for computers that couldn't take a internal CD ROM drive. It was handy to install stuff to the hard drive without doing the floppy brigade trick lol.
brings back memories from my childhood!
Note that the parallel port on the planar of IBM PS/2s and other systems can be a strange I/O address (03BCh) to be an issue sometimes - the parallel port ZIP drives had this come up (I know of someone that even went to great lengths to add a second parallel port to a PS/2 Model 25) all the time until the workaround is learned.
I think you might have hit the nail on the head! As I remember there is more than one configuration for a parallel printer port just as there is for the serial ports. I'll bet that's why it wasn't working on the RL.
I wonder if there is a parameter when loading the driver to set an alternate address.
@@DeepThought007: 03BCh was also the original parallel port address on the IBM monochrome adapter - more conventionally there is 0378h and 0278h. With DOS DEBUG, "D 0:0048 L 6" should show installed parallel ports in order. If there is partial functionality of the drive, I doubt it is an I/O issue.
@@DeepThought007 The 1000RL's parallel port is at 378h, not 3BCh.
The last time I used a 5 and a quarter floppy diskette drive was a apple 2E computer in elementary school when I was 7.
Loved those backpack drives. My dad got some different ones from worked in the 90s when they were getting rid of them. That's one of those items I kick myself for getting rid of.
This reminds me of the photo portrait studio's IBM XT (20MB HDD, 512K monochrome display card, 5.25 inch FDD), that I used for simple database and word processing via PFS: ProFile and ProWrite.;) Eventually, the 20MB HDD died, so I "revved it up" to a 40MB HDD, 640K half length color display card, GeoWorks 1.0 and 1.2, Xtree Gold, and a bootleg dBase program.
I have yet to be able to wrap my head around the fact we cannot get the collective hobbyists to put together an actual working read/write 5.25 solution that reads/writes natively without images. I know the USB standard doesn't support it, but so what? There are plenty of proprietary USB devices with custom drivers etc, so what is holding back the development of an actual USB 5.25 floppy? Some say demand, but it is VERY evident (especially lately) that there is a huge demand for such a native solution. Ideally, an external shell with the pcb and power with connectors inside. USB and standard power plug on the outside. Or heck, even a brick 12v adapter would be suitable. I don't know enough to even begin, but it is obvious there are plenty of people who are.
I considered to use a Raspberry Pi to drive the floppy drive on one side (so in fact it would emulate a FDC chip) and communicate to the host computer via USB. It would be a question of software.
Thank you, you made me remind thouse days.
Good info thanks. I have a Unisys slimline 386. If I had such a device I could use a removable hard drive in its place. It only has one externally accessible drive bay.
the t20 was my first laptop I owned. sufed the web on that bad boy til 06😎
That lawyer software had me cracking up LOL! Format that sucker.
What I wonder is if you could take one of those external USB 3.5" floppy drives and connect a 5.25" drive to that USB controller to see if it would work on a modern PC. Thanks for the videos!
No. That has been discussed in many vintage computer forums but unfortunately USB floppy drive interfaces can only use 3.5" drives.
@@vwestlife Not only that, but the USB floppy controllers usually can't read or write double density disks. I'm not sure if they work properly with higher-capacity disk formats (using tracks beyond 80 or greater numbers of sectors to push 3.5" HD floppy capacity to 1.7MB)
@@vwestlife Teac fd505, newtronic d53, epson sd800 2 in 1 5.25 and 3.5 internal drive 1 slot ftw
Although this is of little direct use for me, as back in the late 89es/earliest 90es I only used a DOS PC (w. both 3½" and 5¼" drives) as a means to move data between my CP/M machine and Macs, I like it; and I loved hearing the buzz of the Oki µLine92 printer again, what a beautiful sound.
Microsolutions Backpack solutions are the best thing you can get for old PC's. I have the Backpack 460mb Hard Drive and I had the Tape Drive which failed, so I swapped it with a 3.5" floppy drive. Use them both with my PS/2 Model P70. The Parallel port HD is faster than the internal DBA hard drive is!
Here in Europe, high density 5,25" floppies are much easier to find than 360k ones. They were still in use during early 90s.
That’s everywhere bro bro Double Density is hard to find anywhere now
The DaynaFile was a SCSI 5.25 Floppy Drive for Macintosh and NexT computers.
I wonder if it read FAT12, or could at least format it for use.
Awesome! Didnt know about the nonstop option. I've been using my tandy external drive on my 1000SX and TX machines. I was surprised to find out that high density disks were supported!
Are you using the 25-1087 drive? I didn't think the card-edge parallel port of the older 1000s was able to support it, even if you adapt it to a DB25 connector, because it's missing some of the pins.
Nice video.
Missed the sound of floppy drives and dotmatrix printers.
Happy Thanksgiving bud!
I am going to leave a bunch of these to my daughter and granddaughters and I hope they understand how to use it . They'll get what looks like Computer Reset's collection .
Wow - such great fun! Bring back the good old days. But so many people, these days, have never experienced an 'older' pc runnng dos - blistering performance. Just shows that perhaps, windows is not really a progression. Love your video - thanks!
Thanks for the upload! :)
I think it's great you use PC-DOS. I used it during the waning years of DOS. It had a create memory manager that MS-DOS lacked, and MS's issue with IP theft just really bothered me.
I had a Tandy 1000 RLX. It was a nightmare machine, as the hard drive was a weird XT IDE drive that had its own BIOS. The RLX did not recognize ANY IDE drive except either the 20 or 40MB Seagate IDE with BIOS. So I was stuck with 40MB.
What was interesting was MS-DOS 5.0 was installed on a ROM drive as D:. The benefit was the OS did not consume valuable hard drive space, and it was faster. When I gave the computer to my brother, our dad installed a later MS-DOS which consumed a large chunk of the drive. I would have just kept it running 5.0.
0:01 -- Nice Compaq Deskpro EN you got there dude.. I got one and instantly crammed (initially) a Asus a320i-k w/ AMD a10-9700.. and now it has a ASRock Phantom x570 ITX inside and got a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
5 and a quarter floppy disks go brrrr! 😂
Happy Thanksgiving vwestlife ( Kevin), I saved a 5.25 drive from a old pc that was messed up. Its from a gateway that was a 286sx( I believe) computer. I believe its made by epson beacuse the 3.5 floppy is. Both are all metal construction internally which is great vs the 3.5 I had that was made from 2006 while the ones I have are from 1992. I have found 3.5 floppies brand new at goodwill 5.25 not at all but ive yet to use it.
2:45 -- is it possible to use a 12v DC power brick instead? Y'know like it is on the NES, it uses a 9v AC power brick because the AC to DC converter circuit is in the NES and you can still use a DC power supply of some kind (be it a power brick, batteries, etc)
If you make a config.sys in windows 98 you must add the lines for himem, ifshlp, and the other device drivers listed.
I used to have a ton of Memorex 3.5" see through floppies in multiple colors. I did use one as a back up for Windows 98 SE about 21 years ago. Unfortunately I don't have an external 3.5 inch drive to see if it still works.
19:40 Are you sure it's not because you created a CONFIG.SYS which lacks what Windows would autodetect otherwise? Maybe you need to add some more stuff there?
Long since I wrote DOS drivers but there's no reason disk drivers would care about filesystems, they just provide sector read/write functions.
My first floppy drive.
When you say at 0:40 that its floppy controller could only take one drive, which the existing 3½" drive was occupying, are you sure? All PCs I've ever played with, there was only one floppy _connector_ (34 pin, IIRR) on the motherboard, but it could control two _drives_: usually 01 and 10, and the cable with three connectors on it (one for the motherboard, one for each drive) had some cores twisted over between the latter two connectors. Obviously, you'd need the right connector for the drive: usually, 3½" drives used the same sort of connector as the motherboard, and 5¼" drives a board edge connector. Many leads had the right type.
That is true with virtually all PCs from the '80s and '90s, but beginning around the year 2000, 5¼-inch floppy drives had fallen out of favor to such an extent that many new PCs only supported a single, 3½-inch drive. Even if you connected a second floppy drive to the cable, the BIOS wouldn't recognize it.
I'm curious to see what the whole adapter board looks like. I'd guess it has some jumpers which are used to identify the drive. Changing them could probably turn it into a Backpack drive or a 360k drive.
i'm also wondering if the DRIVETYPE identifier was actually an integer 0-9 or something, and it only didn't complain about '360' bc that is also an integer.
Clint (LGR) would've loved this piece of hardware!
Would’ve? Did he die?
@@kaitlyn__L I hope not!
(English isn't my native tongue)
This looks eerily similar to the external 5.25" drive that commodore used to sell. I had one with my PC-I back in teh day; probably the only noticable difference is the 23 pin vs. the 25 pin plug.
This is some of the fancier video editing you've done! It came out nice!
Does this drive work with Imagedisk? It seems like runs at about the same speed as a normally connected drive.
Multicamera! Can't remember seeing that in your videos before. As always, an enjoyable and informative video.
An interesting external LPT drive. LPT port was truly the USB port of it's day with all kind of peripherals made for it, from storage devices to sound cards.
From a quick look at that bridge PCB, I think a 12V DC supply would have most likely worked as well for that drive. An AC brick was used likely because it was cheaper.
I dunno why they just didn't use USB, would have been much simpler... LOL (jking!)
our family 286 was our first PC and it came with 1,2 and 1,44mb High Density drives. I still bought a lot of 5 1/4 disks because those were cheaper and my parents would only supply me with a certain amount of 3'5 inch ones, never enough for my growing appetite for more software. So I had to buy extras with my own pocket money, and 1'2 inch ones were indeed becoming obsolete and much cheaper,
First sentence...instant thumbs UP!
Turn OFF the DISKETTE CHIP SELECT from here at 6:57. The external enclosure has it's own chip select function. This maybe the issue why you were getting the freeze up since one can't talk through the other. Not sure if PARALLEL CHIP SELECT plays a role or not.
That would disable the computer's internal floppy drive controller. It in no way affects the external drive connected to the parallel port.
The moving sights (movies) and talking sounds (talkies) take me back to the 1980s. We now needs the smellies!
P.S. I had few errors with 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppies back in the day (but it was new equipment).
Hey, it beat 76KB on a single-sided 8-inch floppy, and you haven't lived until you toggle in a bootloader for cassette tape to load Bill Gates' BASIC.
The closest I came was loading punched paper tape BASIC programs into a TTY that was connected to a UC time share mainframe, my senior year of high school.
Ok
I wonder if going into the manual hardware selection dialog would have made it possible to use the drive on Windows 98.
excellent video...
I have a couple of Quad-Density 5.25" drives, you can use them on a PC set up as a 720k 3.5", the comptuer will know no better, but I mainly got them to use as 5.25" 880k drives with my Amiga, because I want to be different-ish... :P
the ac adaptor you showed at 2:48 looks like it was made by a company called oem and i think that's hilarious
takes me back to the days of my first PC, an 8088 based clone
I noticed that the external floppy drives I find on Ebay have 37 pin external connections. They refer to them as "parallel port floppy drives" but a parallel port only has 25 pins. The only 37 pin connection I've seen is on my IBM 5150 floppy drive card. How can these drives work on a parallel port?
Why can you redesign the Floppy Drive to operate like the ((MO)(Magnetic Optical)) Drive so you can read the data off the floppies using a LASER and magnetize the spot with with the write coil when the place you will write has been heated up using the LASER.
LPT on the Tandy 1000RL may be output only. I did hear this years ago but never attempted to confirm.
As I said in the video, this drive does not require a bidirectional parallel port. On the 1000RLX it works fine regardless if I set the port to either bidirectional or unidirectional.
Really cool!
I would also like to see a count of how many computers you have. Working/nonwork
Curious....did you try a drive letter other than B? I never seen a floppy controller that only supported one drive only. Even if it only had one connector (like the Compaq) you needed a special cable with a twist and sometimes some pins removed. I had an external Tandy drive and I think mine was high lettered >c. When you wanted to make it primary it would make it A but then the 3.5 went high. Of course this was the Tandy drive, so it was special.
P.s. funny coincidence you break out a 5.25 drive now! I'm retrobriting my apple //e floppy drives today!
Happy Thanksgiving 2021
I need to get a 5.25 floppy drive for my obscure DOS games, where can I get an external floppy drive online?
External 5.25": good luck. External 3.5": ~$12-$15 on eBay.
@@Caseytify I don’t mind even an internal 5.25” drive, but I just want to play those games that probably never got rereleased digitally. Those programs are on an obsolete format and even my cousin has been begging to find anything that can backup those disks!
Some of the 1980s computer I used only had a one directional parallel port. I found out after I tried using a parallel Zip drive on my computer.
An external USB 5,25" floppy drive is what I am missing, I carried my old drive from my 386 all the way to my Athlon XP. But after that, my computers no longer had a floppy controller.
Now we need a USB to FDD interface along the lines of the USB to IDE & SATA/IDE ones.
Maybe a USB to ISA interface w/PSU? .. then can use a floppy controller card. Or likewise but with PCI? Then can use the CatWeasel .. with a modern laptop !!
Do you know if this is comparable with the Laser Compact XT?
I have kind of thought that the bezel is really part of the case in a way, so... there's that plastic part of the case.
The drivetype parameter might be an enumerated value and the error about the KB is related to integer parsing - have you tried a lower number (i.e. 1, 2, 3)?
Have you set the printer port from LPT to Bi-directional EPP.
20:35 did he just say that the format of his HDD is preventing him from using a floppy drive? That makes no sense to me
If the driver is intercepting all disk drive system calls, and is not FAT32 compatible, then it is possible that it would result in data corruption when using it with a FAT32 hard drive.