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Bernoulli Box
I recently answered an add on craigslist for an "Infax Cartridge Disk
System" because it included an Apple II interface card. Turns out it's an
original Bernoulli Box! Each cartridge is about the size of a standard
8.5x11 sheet of paper and a half inch thick and holds 10MB. The drives weigh
a ton! A few bucks later I've got about 10 cartridges, 4 drives, an 8-bit
ISA card, Apple II interface card, and most (if not all) the original
documentation and software.
Googling for "Infax" and the company identified with the product, VuFax
turned up nothing. This technology predates SCSI and the interface seems to
be propriatary. The IBM ISA card seems to be little more than a handful of
TTL logic chips, which dampens my hopes of using the drives with Windows XP.
The Apple II card is little more complex, and you are able to boot from it.
I have a utilities disk for UCSD Pascal. All DOS 3.3 utilities are on a
Bernoulli disk, apparently included with the drive from VuFax. I wondered if
they had mondified DOS to work with the 10MB volume, but according to the
manual the DOS is not modified in any way and the Bernoulli box appears as
69 140K volumes.
The gentleman who sold the setup was kind enough to give me a demonstration
of how the drives operate. It's a good thing too, because there is virtually
no information available online. 3 of the 4 are in working order and he read
a few of the disks with an old 286. He explained that he originally used the
drives with an Apple II+ before migrating to IBM-compatibles.
Unfortunately, I have yet to have a chance to try the system with an Apple.
I was just wondering if anyone had ever seen/owned a setup like this, needs
software/documentation, or could provide more information. I snapped a few
pics to show what I'm talking about.
WARNING!! Each file ~1.4MB
Bernoulli disk in sleeve
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andrzg/pics/DSC00887.JPG
Double drive http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andrzg/pics/DSC00890.JPG
Single drives http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andrzg/pics/DSC00891.JPG
IBM PC Host Adapter 10-1031-00
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andrzg/pics/DSC00892.JPG
Apple Host Adapter 101A 10-1049-00
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andrzg/pics/DSC00894.JPG
-Greg