Retro computing

[lovingboth]

Can anyone read 360k 5.25" DOS floppies?

I've found and installed a 1.2M 5.25" floppy drive, but it declines to read any 360k floppies. (I know about the problems of writing to them with a 1.2M drive, but I should be able to read them...)

Does anyone have a DC2120 QIC tape drive that connects to the floppy or a SCSI interface?

I've found a Trakker DC2120 drive that attaches to the parallel port, but most of the ancient backups that I'm interested in browsing were done with PC Tools' backup program which used a different data format (for good reasons) from the standard and wants its tape drives to be SCSI or connected to the floppy interface.

(For people under 40 :) before writeable CDs came along to the consumer market - the blanks were well over a tenner each at first, and the drives cost many hundreds! - the 'affordable' backup solution involved small tape cassettes that would hold 60M, later increased to 120M, of data. Anyone who ever had to back up onto floppy disks thought they'd gone to heaven... a hard drive you could afford would fit onto at most a couple of these, with compression, rather than several hundred floppies.)

Comments

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Well I have lots of old backup tapes and even a SCSI 1/4" tape drive but I am not sure if it would work with a Trakker DC2120 tape?

[lovingboth]

DC2120 is the tape size / format, Trakker the name for the parallel-connected drives. If yours takes 1/4" cartridges, it probably does them - it was a widely supported format.

The real test is will it run PCBackup (or more exactly CPBackup 7 - they swapped the P and the C for version 7! - as memory is telling me PCBackup 6 fell over if you tried to run it on anything faster than a 386/33 or so...)

I have the CP Tools disks somewhere.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Well it is still packed in a box somewhere but when I find it I'll give you the model number so you can check if it works. I also have lots of old 1/4" tapes if you want them?

[lovingboth]

Please, when it turns up.

No, thanks to the tapes... unless there's something really interesting on them :) This is going to be a read 'em, copy anything interesting and dump 'em job.