Yup, that's the counterfeit system that I rescued and eventually after Usagi got his first centurion system, a mutual friend of ours told him I had another. You can hear the story in his video about acquiring the counterfeit machine.

Exactly. Also, don't forget that you can connect an 8" floppy drive to a PC. The pinout and setup of the drive are different than a 3.5 or 5.25 disk. Still, the geometries are the same for equivalent capacity, just the same as, in the case of the Eagle in this video, which has "Quad Density" disks (i.e., 80 track versions with the same encoding and other geometry equivalents with lesser density disks). It would allow you to image and write images for 8" disks. For example, with the Eagle, since it's an 80-track drive (and was available in single or double-sided versions, the equivalent formatted capacity for single-sided is 360KB, and double-sided is 720 KB. For the 5.25" disks like this, a 1.2MB drive is required, as standard 360KB drives cannot handle the double track density due to stepping and head width limitations. Likewise, a double-sided 8" floppy uses the same encoding and stepping as a 5.25" 1.2MB drive. What I'm saying mirrors what you're saying, when restoring some of these older machines to operation, you have options.

@@TheTXDj The next issue is the 8" drives. Gave them away back in the early 90's. Just one of my mini regrets over time. The drives were attached to a full CPM system and a dead hard drive. Just part of my conversion to PC's.

If it could, it surely wouldn't be fast. xD

@@TheTXDj time to challenge the dev to make it work great on an 8086/8088 xD. (Also would love to see modern embedded Linux ELKS running on it for an extra boost of awesomeness, just because. And Windows 3.0 with productivity tools. So like. All the cool stuff. So hey. More videos of this machine if you ever are in the mood for a recording project! xD

@@EirikrTinkerTries It's not my machine. Also, I am doubtful anyone would invest the time to try to bring System V Revision 2 up to par with modern libs and tools.

@@TheTXDj where there is a nerd, there is hope haha

@@EirikrTinkerTries You're not wrong, but at the same time, I could see more possibility in doing something like that with fuzix or something, idk.

Heck, the "golfball" of the selectric was far more complicated than the type cylinder in a 33, and the 28 and 35 and 37's typeblock arrangement is just craaaaazy. Also oops, sorry about setting that video private. It's back online, follow the link in the description.

In a way, it is partially electromechanical. All the control logic is done with wire spring relays, as you can see from 5:56. The problem of course if it were purely electromechanical would be debouncing the switch contacts on the modulator to make a clean signal that the far end could demodulate. I suppose the same is true if a simple discriminator circuit toggled a relay as well.

Good to hear from you, Chris! Hope you're doing well!

Yes. That's the one that I picked up the same day I shot this video, and a couple years later got it to Usagi Electric so he could (hopefully) make one of the two Hawk drives work. I had known at the time this was a centurion system, but did not know about the "counterfeit" history. When he talks in his original video about that machine, that's me he was referring to. :)

@@TheTXDj awesome! thanks for saving it as a piece of history and not just scrap gold

@@sneedsfeedandseed7777 If I was looking for gold, I have about 40 lbs of CPUs that I would have scrapped instead. LOL

I'd say nearly half the people who came to buy stuff didn't live in Dallas either. We had several people come from various other countries and all over the US and Canada.

Understandably, not everyone who wanted to come could, but we had people from all over the world who came to visit and buy things: Australia, Brazil, Romania, and more.

I'm sure. And it's quite possible depending on their age at the time of purchase they could very well have passed away when this video was made. I haven't looked at the bottom of that modem in quite some time, but it used to be common practice when engraving on expensive property to put other identifying information on there to rule out the "same name" scenario when ownership might be called into question, such as theft resulting in a criminal trying to pawn the item for cash. Long before identity theft was a common thing, people would often use their Social Security Number or Driver's License number or a phone number for that extra differentiation, and that could have been the case here. But again, we're talking about a 6+ year old video, I'm not going to remember why I did it, other than courtesy to the original owner. Also, I'm too tired right now to hunt it down and remind myself why, other than a name, I may have done that beyond common courtesy regarding PII.

@@TheTXDj I wasn't asking you to look the name up.

If you're looking for that, that's on the companion video that I guest hosted for The 8-Bit Guy about this system.

Xerox 860 kzfaq.info/get/bejne/kNGca5Nzps_Feas.html

@@TheTXDj Thank you!

What about it?

@@TheTXDj Do you have it on github n if u don't. You should. Of you do. What's your link?

absolutely. all you have to do is toggle in that address and examine, when you see it's wrong, toggle in the correct byte and deposit.

This isn't about acidic batteries, it's about alkaline batteries.

I didn't, sadly. I should.

Well that's a first.

Neat! Using the rare floppy drive or the cassette drive?

@@TheTXDj love using the floppy but now using SD cards in the ADAM!

All Bell 10X modems and all Bell 20X modems are FSK (Frequency Shift Keying). Bell 103 is backwards compatible with 101 because they use the same frequencies, and is why a 300 baud modem is more accurately a 0-300 baud modem, because the speed of the FSK shifts is directly driven by the speed of characters coming into the modem's serial interface, and vice versa, the demodulated signal drives the bit rate out the serial interface to your terminal or computer. You may be thinking of later standards which used QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, such as v.32 used in 9600 bps modems. In v.32 4-QAM is used, employing 8 phases and 2 amplitudes to get 16 values, and thus 4 bits per symbol, hence the name 4-QAM. This is also why it's wrong to call it a "9600 baud" modem, because baud denotes symbol rate, and one symbol is equivalent to 4 bits, and thus 9600 bps QAM is actually a 2400 baud modulation implementation when using nomenclature correctly. QAM is still used today - as it can also be used digitally. One example is 802.11 WiFi. Digital cable/cable modems tend to use 64-QAM and 256-QAM. ADSL can use up to 32768-QAM. The deeper you get into it, the crazier the math will make you.

You may also be thinking of ASK (Amplitude Shift Keying). Didn't consider this because I don't believe I have a single modem in my collection that uses ASK, though some of the very obscure and very old ones that I have little information about may have. ASK is similar to OOK (On-Off Keying) which can be used with a laser or LED to signal a 1 with light, a zero without light, only with a carrier wave amplitude instead. ASK wasn't used much in digital communications by my understanding because its sensitivity to various conditions made it more susceptible to error than FSK. And for the record, the modem you see as the answering modem is an old Racal Vadic 3451, the so-called "triple" modem, which implemented Bell 103, Bell 212, and Racal's precursor to 212, and the first commercially available full-duplex 1200 bps standard simply known as "Racal-Vadic 3400" after the modem model line that implemented this standard.

Newseeep is a file manager