IBM 6360 8" floppy disk drive

A few weeks back I picked up a 1981 IBM Displaywriter. Very nearly perfect in condition. Here's a short clip of the dual 8" floppy disk drive unit starting up. Well what can I say, I love fooling around with old computer equipment and thought this was a pretty unique piece of a technology long past.

Enjoy!

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• Vintage
• computer
• hardware
• IBM
• floppy
• disk
• drive

[fcs2pixel]

I checked the drive again to verify the specs. and add some clarity.

The two synchronous stepping motors which control each of drives head movement are actually 24 volt DC.

Not AC, as I previously stated. They were manufactured by Sanyo Denki Co. Ltd. in 1980.

The drive motor, as seen in operation in the video, responsible for disk rotation, is rated at 115 volt AC, 1/200 horsepower, 1800 rpm. Manufactured by Howard Industries. Unfortunately I could not find a production date.

Cheers

[douro20]

Is this thing driven by a synchronous AC motor?

[fcs2pixel]

Yes, 24 volt AC.

[smartalex61]

Could you make a video of your IBM Displaywriter in action?

[fcs2pixel]

Done. My other video shows it's boot sequence.

[RetiredAFGuy]

Good to see others out there tht appreciate the older technology and rather than making videos of smashing old gear with a sledge hammer are showing those that could care less how these work. I have a few of these up to 3.5" 2.88 mb drives as well as hard drives back into the MFM days. A person that says they are a "computer tech" now wouldnt (and usually don't) have the skills to hook a hard drive of the MFM/RLL era.

[pinkishblueblack]

punch cards don't count ? :(

[DusteDdekay]

@fcs2pixel There's just something plain cool about specifying anything computing related in horsepower! :)

[PivotMasterD1]

That's a big spindle motor! What's next, 3-phase hard drives?

[sneakers55]

@purpleravenstar I thought you could tell the old hats because they remember Ethernet boards where the MAC address was not in non-volatile memory and the IP driver read it from a hand-typed configuration file!

[sneakers55]

(a rack full of ECL chips and a rack full of power supplies and fans to power and cool the ECL) that used a Zilog Z-80 just to POST and boot the rest of the machine.

[sneakers55]

IIRC, IBM first used floppies for diagnostic and microcode loading on mainframes. Many years ago, worked with a SEL/ENCORE 32/97 supermini (a rack ful

[purpleravenstar]

@RetiredAFGuy You can separate the old hats from the kids by telling them to install and configure a mouse driver on DOS mode and deploy Windows for Workgroups on a cold network site.

[Ratznium]

@RetiredAFGuy

I wouldn't, that's for sure. However, any real tech would say "give me a manual, and a few [many] hours and I'll get back to you"

[Messerschmitt262a2a]

@RetiredAFGuy yes, thats true xD

i am young and didn´t life in the MFM-time but i really like that old technology and i already built a pc using mfm hard drives...

[Jonassssss6]

@jasonbay13 8" floppies are actually the firs floppys ever. they were invented in 1969!!!

[jeremysart]

there weren't any PC compatibles built with 8in floppy drives, the earliest true "PC", the 5150 had 5.25

So this is not going to connect to your PC, not through an IDE or anything like that. Machines with 8in were pre PC compatible (5150)