I was going through a bunch of old MacWorld magazines from the early 90's and a particular ad caught my eye.
**Click to View** (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/CanonMO.jpg)
Not much is special about this Ad until you look at the MO drive and then the MO cartridge in the upper right.
For starters, that's a double sided (256mb per side) Canon MO cartridge, like the one I got last year in a large lot of NeXT MO cartridges. (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/100_0572.jpg)
It's also worth noting that Canon MO drives are unique in that they load the cartridge in the middle of the drive, not near the top like other drives.
So in theory what MASS Microsystems was selling was technically the same drive NeXT used but with a SCSI interface.
The only way to see just how compatible the drive is to NeXT MO cartridges is to find one of these drives which so far has been quite oddly hard to find. I can find TONS of the SMO-S501 and equivalent drives but that's it.
Also to consider is this Canon-branded magneto-optical disk on eBay, which the seller is claiming to be NeXT-compatible. If correct, it would mean that the product name "Diskfile" could be another thing to search for -- was it intended to be Canon's generic term for this device and its media?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Canon-502M-512MB-NeXT-Magneto-Optical-MO-Cartridge-/200628035983
Quote from: "pl212"Also to consider is this Canon-branded magneto-optical disk on eBay, which the seller is claiming to be NeXT-compatible. If correct, it would mean that the product name "Diskfile" could be another thing to search for -- was it intended to be Canon's generic term for this device and its media?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Canon-502M-512MB-NeXT-Magneto-Optical-MO-Cartridge-/200628035983
The Diskfile moniker was for the media that went hand in hand with the old Canofile system they sold. It was a hardware/software solution that allowed one to scan paper documents and index them for later retrieval. The optional printer was called a FilePrint, to stay with the "file" theme. When they later moved the product to a PC based software solution, they sold external drives so you could still access and use the OD's from the older system. Here is a youtube video of a sales vid that was created toward the end of the products life, for those who might be interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueUr7xVtiVYAs I mentioned in another thread, I worked for a company that sold and supported these systems back in the day. It kills me to think about it if these drives actually are NeXT compatible, as we had a whole section of the warehouse full of hardware that was pulled from clients as they upgraded. I inquired about them a year or so ago, but they had it all hauled away for basically scrap/recycling a few years before. I still have a few basically new 502 disks, but I have no NeXT OD to test for compatibility.
The 5001S drive looks to be what the MASS drive is OEM'd from. Again of course finding the Canon version is turning out to be equally as hard.
The Canon SCSI drives appear to be non-standard... I have been able to connect them to a Windows/Linux machine and can detect them, but have never been able to read/write/format a 502M disk in them, and certainly, have never been able to use a NeXT disk in them (media detect error). I spoke to a guy that wrote a driver and some applications for them, and he confirmed that impression, but wouldn't give me any detailed specs.
I had some cubes with (dead) Canon L10130 drives in them and the drives are similar enough to be able to use for parts for NeXT drives (though again, they're different in some ways). Some of the working NeXT drives I have now have parts from the Canon drives in them.
The Canon 502M media is usable in a NeXT drive.
I have a large number of (dead) NeXT drives if anyone is interested in them. By swapping parts, I have been able to create 6 reliable drives.
Also, if you're interested in having your media dumped, I'd be happy to do it gratis. I actually have over 100 MO images I will be putting online eventually... I need to index everything first and make sure I'm not making anything too secret available (I know one as the source code for Adobe Illustrator 3.0 on it).
Interestingly enough, you can actually mount the images under Linux...
Happened across two interesting paragraphs in my own copy of this volume (ISBN 0-201-15851-X). Webster wrote this book on a NeXT 0.8/0.9 system, and had special access to company engineers.
Page 17:
QuoteThe optical disk drive hooks up to the NeXT motherboard through a custom connector; the actual pinouts and signals are considered proprietary knowledge by NeXT. The drive is controlled by the Optical Storage Processor (OSP), a special chip that will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
Page 37:
QuoteThe other large chip on the NeXT motherboard is the Optical Storage Processor, or OSP. This chip implements the entire disk controller of the optical disk drive(s) and, like the IPC [Integrated Channel Processor], was designed and developed entirely at NeXT. It processes all requests by the CPU to read from or write to the optical disk. To ensure the accuracy of the data being transferred, it performs a sophisticated error-correction algorithm, known as the "Reed-Solomon algorithm," while the transfer is in progress. It has two internal buffers (private memory areas, each 128 bytes long) and uses double-buffering to perform the error correction; that is, it transfers corrected data out of one buffer (via the DMA channel) while reading data into the other buffer and then correcting it.
The OSP also implements the SCSI controller used for both the internal and external SCSI connectors.
