From: dbrown@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David Brown) Subject: Re: Free software and the future of support for Diamond products Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1992 06:38:09 GMT
> I recently heard conflicting stories about the folks who make
> those little Colorado tape drives that connect to the PC floppy
> controller; a friend said they won't tell you anything, but a
> computer store tech said they were reasonable folks. I haven't
> gotten around to checking it out for myself, yet. Does anybody
> know enough about how to program those drives to enable me to
> write a device driver?
I contacted the Colorado Memory Systems. They said I needed to
contact the Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC) standards people. I did, and
the QIC people sent me the drive specifications for no cost.
However, when I began writing a driver, I discovered that the drive
did not respond. After an afternoon with a logic analyzer, I
discovered that the drive requires a special sequence to enable it and
disable it. One other drive I have investigated has a different
wakeup sequence (it was a Mountain drive).
Other than this, I have been able to implement a rudimentary tape
driver (for Mach386). I can read and write to tape. It is not yet
reliable enough to use for storage purposes and can't stream on write
(meaning it is very slow).
I am still working on the driver when I can find time, and hope to
someday have something useful to people.
David Brown
dbrown@gnu.ai.mit.edu