Re: Bernoulli Box

[ben yates <winston19842005@yahoo.com>]

On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:17:20 -0500, Greg Andrzejewski wrote:

> 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.
> 

Dang, those pics are huge/slow on dial-up!
I remember these. We had both the 10 mb and later 20 mb Bernoulli
disks/boxes on our Digital VAX systems back when I worked at Stromberg
Carlson, in Lake Mary, FL, way back in '87 to '89. The drive boxes
contained two drives side-by-side.

I can't really tell you much more about them. It was my job to
mount/dismount them for users, and remove labels, reformat, and apply
labels to them. I do know they had a pretty high failure rate compared to
later similar media. It was pretty early technology as far as
high-capacity removable-media went.

A few years back I came across a smaller Bernoulli box, with some 40 mb
cartridges, that I hoped to use on my TI, since it had a SCSI interface.
Couldn't get it to work, so I just moved on to a Syquest 200 mb removable
instead.

I probably have that stuff lying around somewhere...