Date   : Sun, 11 Jan 2004 18:17:55 +0000
From   : Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>
Subject: Re: IDE Interface for BBC

In article <10401111611.ZM101@...>, Pete Turnbull
<pete@...> writes

>Actually the Adaptec is a SCSI card, unlike most of the other similar
>cards

Noted, thanks.  This kind of correction is always useful for the
archives.

>I remember the day Laurie Hardwick proudly showed me the first
>Filestore running two real embedded-SCSI drives.  Wow, a total of a
>massive 60MB!

Did you meet Carl Sellers?  He was Acorn's Econet guy.  I had a lot of
dealings with him.  I think he left around the same time that Acorn
moved out of 645 Newmarket Road.

>I can't remember if they also moved
>the host adaptor out of the E20 into the E01  -- if they did, the
>external expansion bus would have been SCSI on the E01S instead of the
>(modified) 1MHz Bus on the E01.

That's right, E01 used 1MHz bus, E01S used SCSI.  You could format the
E01 hard disc by attaching it to a Beeb's 1MHz bus.  The E01S could be
formatted using a utility running on a network station.  All the
FileStores were formally referred to in the documentation as 'Stacking
FileStores'; the E01S was so called to differentiate it from the earlier
E01 because it had a SCSI interface.

The FileSnores (as we called them, because they were so slow compared to
SJ's MDFS) were designed to allow the hard disc unit to stand on top of
the E01(S) base unit, hence the term "stacking".

The base units were placed into utility mode by opening the front flap.
The catch on those was very prone to snapping off, so most of the
FileSnores I saw had the front flap held shut using blue-tack or
sellotape.

One addendum:  The FileStores had their own Econet clock, so no separate
clock box was needed for short Econet networks.

-- 
A. Top posters.
Q. What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?