A modern //c-compatible external hard drive

I’d missed this in my searching around, but there is (going to be) an option for external mass storage on a //c, the SmartPort Virtual Hard Drive, which allows you to plug in a USB thumb drive, with a note from last month saying that deliveries may begin this month. […]

I don’t fully approve

I’d never advise doing this to a drive that wasn’t irreparably dead, and I would actually think it would be a little bit cooler if the drive retained its original look rather than just being turned silver (though I understand how much work went into turning it silver), but—with those […]

Rambling about modern usefulness of vintage machines

So, I’ve been collecting a bunch of vintage machines, mostly because of the nostalgia value, but practically speaking, what good are they? What realistically might ever lead me to turn one of them on? Some of these are just visually appealing (the G3 and G4 iMacs, the G4 Cube), or […]

BBooting the QX-10

I popped open the QX-10 again today and swapped the A and B drives. When I had them out, I observed that the B drive (the then Right drive, second picture) has a chip that the A drive (the then Left drive, first picture) lacked. “Hmm,” I thought, “maybe that’s […]

INSERT DISKETTE 1, Me 0

After setting up the Epson QX-10 and finding that, although it happily displayed “INSERT DISKETTE” on its monitor, it didn’t recognize any of the diskettes I inserted in response, I decided to pull it open quickly and take a look to see if anything presented itself as an obvious problem. […]

Score

This isn’t right. The drive I’ve got hooked up to my Kryoflux produced this little marvel today. Guess there’s not much hope of retrieving whatever it was that was on that disk. Also, I think I’d better disassemble that drive and figure out what’s happening before any more disks are […]

Subliminal Apple branding

Including Apple stickers with computers and other hardware was always kind of a goofy, childish thing, but I think it worked. People used them, people stuck them to their folders in school, to their file cabinets, very often (kind of superfluously) to their computers or disk drives. Mine, for some […]

Kryofluxing QX-10 disks

A more daunting project than using the Kryoflux to image old PC floppies is trying to image the floppies that I used on the Epson QX-10 I had for a couple of years. There isn’t a lot out there on the QX-10, actually. There’s a page that has some information […]

Kryofluxing old PC disks (the Salon program lives)

So, my Kryoflux unit arrived, and I have set it up. No time for enclosures, I just used the box it shipped in as my enclosure. I ran a number of my old PC floppies through it, and for the most part had pretty good success. I recovered a number […]

Success with ADTpro was surprisingly good

I took a shot at imaging some of my 5.25″ Apple floppies from the mid-80s today, using ADTpro talking to my IIgs over the modem port connected via a Keyspan dual serial adapter (driver here) to the USB port on my MacBook Pro. Two bits of good news to report: […]