Two Caleb drives
Posted by darthuna@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 13 comments
A couple of months ago, I tried to connect my Caleb drive to my laptop using an IDE to USB converter. It didn't work. Some people here suggested the converter was not ATAPI. Anyway, I haven't been able to secure an ATAPI converter, but I found another Caleb unit. I'm hoping that at least one of the two is in working condition!
In case you don't know (yes, I know some of you know, but on my previous post some of you didn't!), the Caleb drive is an IDE drive that reads 144MB floppy disks (note there's no decimal point in 144), and it's backwards compatible with 1.44MB and 720KB floppy disks.
glencanyon@reddit
I've been looking for any Caleb 144mb disk, but I've never seen one. Great find. These are really hard to come by.
teknosophy_com@reddit
6th grade me is reading this going "WHAT? I could've had THIS?!"
TrannosaurusRegina@reddit
Beautiful!
Amazed I never heard of these before the previous post despite spending dozens of hours researching this subject over the past fifteen years or so!
GeordieAl@reddit
I remember when these were released. They looked interesting but came a little too late to market, by the time they were available ZIP disks and Superdisks had cornered the market.
I liked the fact that the disks were standard 3.5" size and could be stored in my regular disk boxes, whereas the ZIP disks were slightly different sized.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
Not only that. You can't pile ZIP disks because they're not flat. You can pile regular floppy disks, super disks, and Caleb disks
GeordieAl@reddit
Thinking about it, I think the 3.5” floppy was pretty much the pinnacle of removable media design. Handy size, stacks/stores nicely, hard case to protect media, sliding door to keep out contaminants, soft cloth inside to wipe away dust particles.
gcc-O2@reddit
And they didn't disappear when you sat them down on a desk for five seconds like a USB drive
TrannosaurusRegina@reddit
Exactly!
Adequate size to actually see and label properly, and no bigger!
Pangocciolo@reddit
I live again...
SaturnFive@reddit
Huh that's interesting, never heard of those. ATAPI should only be required for CD and DVD optical interfaces but no idea how these drives actually work. Worst case, a PCI IDE card in a modern machine should detect them
computix@reddit
Removable drives, like this, the ZIP drive and LS-120 also use ATAPI, though there are two versions of the ZIP drive, one pure IDE, the other ATAPI.
ATAPI is basically SCSI over IDE.
Ex sources:
Artful3000@reddit
Are the 144mb flopticals?
darthuna@reddit (OP)
Yes.