blobrana wrote:
Hum,
a computer inside a floppy disk....
Not quite a computer inside a disk, but the Z180 board I mentioned above was inside a Cumana disk drive designed for the Amstrad NC100 range of Z80-based portable micros that were briefly popular in the UK around the early 1990s...
The board contains the CPU, an EPROM, a RAM chip and the disk controller IC. It's very small, and in order to save space, the Z180's address and data lines are a bit scrambled! I built a nice messy "EPROM unscrambler" to descramble the EPROM's contents... Should have done that in software, I guess!!!
The drive is about the same size as an external Amiga drive, maybe slightly longer. It has a 9-pin RS232 serial port on a flying lead, and an input for DC voltage.
The odd thing is that, in terms of basic CPU power, the disk drive had more grunt than the computer to which it was connected...
- Ali
