Date   : Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:49:46 GMT
From   : Pete Turnbull <pete@...>
Subject: Re: IDE Interface for BBC

On Jan 11, 18:17, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
> In article <10401111611.ZM101@...>, Pete
Turnbull

> >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.

Yes, I remember Carl.  He was a relative latecomer, but a useful
addition to tech support.  I'm pretty sure it was Carl who came over to
Northern Ireland with me.

However, the people who did the real work were Laurie (Mr Econet, Acorn
employee number 6) and Bruce Cockburn.

> >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.

No, that's incorrect.  The E01 and E20 were just "Filestore".  Only the
later ones (E01S, E20S, E40S) were ever called Stacking Filestore.  The
S stood for stacking, as I wrote earlier.

> 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.

Same here.  Except sometimes the hinges broke too, so I occasionally
saw one with a reflective tape over the optical sensor :-)

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

They also had all the collision detect circuitry (at a time when a lot
of Acorn Econet Modules didn't) and had bias resistors on all the
lines.  They could also run as Print Servers.

-- 
Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York