1 Every once in a while I feed a few "interesting" key words into the eBay
2 search engine. Last night, I happened to find a pair of Teac FD-55F 720k
3 5.25" floppy disk drives for sale at a reasonable price. I think the pair I
4 once had got sold along with an XT clone I used for my FIDO BBS back in the
5 day. They were a neat thing to have in an XT, because they would put twice
6 the backup data per floppy on cheap floppies (the kind sold for 360k drives,
7 the floppies for 1.2M drives were significantly more expensive!), and with
8 two of them you could do a full backup of a reasonable hard disk of the era
9 quickly by loading floppies in alternating drives about as fast as you could
12 But the reason I've been looking for a pair is that before I put them in that
13 XT clone, they were the drives I used on my original Ampro Z-80 Little Board
14 running CP/M in the mid-80's. Shoveling through the stuff in the shed a
15 while back, I discovered that I still have that board, a bunch of oddball
16 accessories I bought or built for it, and a significant pile of floppies and
17 documentation that all appear to be in reasonable condition.
19 I got a lot of use out of that system back in the day, and it would please me
20 to have it in working order again. Fingers crossed that the drives I just
21 bought on eBay actually work when they get here...