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Old 14th Sep 2017, 9:45 pm   #5
TowerRadio
Hexode
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Bristol, UK.
Posts: 388
Default Re: Burroughs "mini disk 3" 8" floppy disks

Greetings to everybody, my first post, although I have been reading nearly every post on this forum for a few years.
I was a Burroughs/Unisys field engineer for over 30 years but I was taught radio and tv by my father who was a skilled repairman. I was intrigued by Snowydog's post and thought I would perhaps help with it. The Burroughs Super Minidisk was also known in the trade as the 3/6d (as in old money) as it was supposed to store 3 or 6 Mb of data. The style as far as I can remember was the B9489-27 and it was used in the later CMS platform machines, the B92 and B900. Barclays and Natwest used them, running a standalone system called ACSYS. A similar version for solicitors was SOLACS. Snowydogs floppies lack the shield (see-through plastic material) that protected the floppy, and was used to insert/remove it. The floppies would have been factory encoded with all the track, sector info and the heads as far as I can recall were in contact with the disk most of the time, but cruising to and fro. The disk drive was a substantial unit, a big die-cast frame with a cardcage hanging on the back, maybe 9 logic cards. Switches allowed you to run a Maintenance Test Routine. Lots of users would have run their whole operation using these, others would only have used them to reload the operating system. Googling Burroughs SuperMinidisk will bring up a site where you can see the old Burroughs ads for the B92. I believe some people may have had them working up to 2K and even beyond but I stopped working on them mid-90's. Regards to all, Les.
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