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Anyone want 1/4th of a DataTower?

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blusnowkitty:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/124651364516

Just bring your own QIC drive, chassis, and high-speed parallel card!

sigma7:
A particularly hard to find component of the DataTower is the DS101 controller board.

This is the board that connects to the Lisa expansion card, but is not a standard part of the large Priam drives that come up for sale regularly. It has two daughterboard connectors, one is used for the tape drive interface in the DataTower, the combination is shown here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/114907644@N04/18657104320

In 2020 there was an eBay listing for 3 DS101 boards; I purchased one but received a SMART-E board (not a DS101 as was pictured in the listing). I think Al Kossow purchased one too, but I don't know what he received.

There is currently a listing for a lot of 7 "DS101" boards from the same seller (antzzworld https://www.ebay.com/usr/antzzworld).

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234604052411

There is a DS101 in most of the pictures (identifiable by the two blue socket headers where daughterboards such as the tape controller go, and which are not on any other Priam boards AFAIK). However there is a different (not a DS101) Priam board in the first picture. No suggestion of what is in the other 5 boxes; presumably also large Priam boards of some type but they could be anything as the seller is rather casual with listings.

I've tried contacting the seller to inquire as to whether the pictures show the actual items (since my experience with this seller is otherwise), but received no response. Accordingly I'm not going to gamble the substantial shipping fee to send these to me in western Canada.

Another unknown for these boards is whether they work. They have bits of string at a corner where toe-tags have been removed; given the condition of the boxes, these might have been "needs service" tags, but could have been for inventory control or anything else.

The DS101 board in the DataTower I have didn't work at first, but I was able to cobble together a repair as shown here https://www.flickr.com/photos/114907644@N04/18222211294 which was enough to get it working for testing with BLU (but still haven't worked on the tape drive).  Sorry, I haven't found the posting where I explained the problem and solution. I expect to post more details, but it may have been a one-off problem that no-one else has. Hence my desire to obtain another DS101 to see if it has the same problem.


edit: found post outlining the problem/solution I was thinking of... https://lisalist2.com/lisalist1/2374.html
Note the link to photos in that post may be out of date (as well as obscured), the links in this post go to the same photo album.

blusnowkitty:
I saw that listing too! I wasn't considering making a bid, but knowing that there's possibly the right board to connect a Priam to a Lisa... although I still need to track down a Priam interface card...

Is it even worth trying to fix up the tape drive? It appears as if it's a QIC style drive, which is notoriously unreliable nowadays. I suppose if we found a tape of the Office System source code...

sigma7:

--- Quote from: blusnowkitty on July 03, 2022, 05:45:48 pm ---Is it even worth trying to fix up the tape drive? It appears as if it's a QIC style drive, which is notoriously unreliable nowadays.

--- End quote ---
QIC presents multiple problems, but I hope to include support for it in BLU (eventually) just in case something important surfaces.

Current problems are:
 - Drive wheel rubber has turned into goo
 - Drive belt in DC600 Cartridge has stretched so tape doesn't spool properly
 - Tape stuck together etc. (common problems for old magnetic tapes)

Fixing the drive wheel is not too difficult.

Perhaps 10 years ago or so, one could find a cartridge with a good enough drive belt and transfer it to the target cartridge, but I doubt there are any usable ones now. Apparently they were stamped / die cut from polyethylene sheets, so I'm thinking one might experiment with rings of various diameters cut from various thicknesses of vapour barrier.

Dealing with old magnetic tape seems to be well covered by audio folks.

But those issues may be moot... at least we've seen DS101 boards for sale, I've never seen mention of the tape drive daughterboard.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/priam/dataTower/PCB/SMART-T_QIC_top.jpg

Product spec. "Priam Aux 1 (QIC-02) Auxiliary Control Board)" found on bitsavers (thanks Al!)
eg. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/priam/smart-t/Priam_Aux1_QIC-02_Controller_Feb84.pdf

Perhaps there is some minicomputer system group (for PDP-11 or the like) that presents a better source for these.

sigma7:
In this reply I originally miswrote:

--- Quote ---Another limitation of the DataTower tape system is that it seems that it isn't a streaming tape as far as Lisa is concerned.

The tape will back up and restore the Priam hard drive, but is otherwise inaccessible.

I may be completely wrong about this -- if I ever get it working then I may find otherwise.
--- End quote ---

However I realize now that is very probably incorrect and the Lisa can in fact address the tape drive directly.

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