Identifying A Vintage 'Winchester' Disk Pack

[dexters_lab]

Does anyone recognise the make/model of this removable hard disk pack?

it will be 1980s era and looks to be around 8" or so

[bd139]

Now that's interesting. I've never seen one of them before! It's also not listed in the museum of obsolete media either: http://obsoletemedia.org/

Blue says 1990s to me.

Interested to see if you find an answer to this.

[Gyro]

You can rule out DEC if that's any help. It's Blue, but I doubt it's 'Big Blue'.

Possibly one of the smaller players - Data General, Wang?

[rrinker]

CDC 1209





ANd if you want to know how I found that - I put: blue removable disk pack 8" in google and scrolled through the results. 

[NivagSwerdna]

According to a google on "CDC 9710" 82.9MB unformatted capacity and circa 1982.

[dexters_lab]

awesome work 

hmm, now... what are the chances of finding a 9710 drive! 

[ferdieCX]

You bring me back beautiful memories. I worked in the eighties as service engineer for a DEC representative, some of our customers had those drives and also the fixed disk version 9715. Those CDC drives had SMD interface an where attached to PDP-11 Minicomputers using controllers from Emulex. I have even the drive boards repaired, they had TTL and ECL logic.

[dexters_lab]

You bring me back beautiful memories. I worked in the eighties as service engineer for a DEC representative, some of our customers had those drives and also the fixed disk version 9715. Those CDC drives had SMD interface an where attached to PDP-11 Minicomputers using controllers from Emulex. I have even the drive boards repaired, they had TLL and ECL logic.

yea, sounds about right!

the disk pack in the photos i posted was used on a quantel paintbox, specifically the 'classic' model, we believe it contains graphics from the cartoon network in the mid 1980s.

[james_s]

It would be an interesting archeology project to extract the data. Finding a drive mechanism could be a real challenge though, a lot of equipment like that is simply extinct.

[DrGeoff]

Looks like a Lark pack. I used to use those in the mid-1980's. 25MB on the removable pack.
However they were also notorious for spin-up head crashes, where the heads were slammed into the side of the pack with total destruction of both.