On 12/28/2010 11:38 PM, MotoFox wrote:
Awwwww....

On the other hand, I acquired another vintage 1995 Force 54CD, Pentium
90 MHz, just last week. Got rid of the old, junk/ed Conner 512MB hard
drive and replaced it with my trusty old 8GB Quantum "Bigfoot" drive. I
am using the machine as a terminal for the ADDS/NCR Mentor 2000
mainframe that I brought back from the dead earlier this year.

This F54CD is now the second one I own (first was purchased brand-new,
in 1995, at the long-defunct "Computer City" store in PDX.)

Keep it real.


TRUSTY Quantum Bigfoot??? An oxymoron if there ever was one. The
history behind the Bigfoot is telling, so I'll tell it.

Way back when, Quantum experimented with a new technique for sputtering
the magnetic oxide coating onto the material used to make the disks
inside the drives. Lo and behold, the sputtering resulted in lots of
defects in the magnetic media, so the capacity of 3.5" drives at the
time was much diminished compared to the competition. Quantum's
response was to build 5.25" Bigfoot drives, increasing the surface area
on which bits could be written.

Once, I mistakenly bought a number of surplus Bigfoot drives from Compaq
just after they acquired DEC. I sold them as quickly as I could, the
ones that worked... Ben Myers