Hi,
Wait a minute. There has to be some sort of a file structure, at least a simple FAT. They need to keep which sectors and heads and tracks go with which data file, which equals each shot! If it's just a jumble of data written to sectors, then you'd never reassemble anything that looked like an image.
Unless.....
You knew I was going to say that, didn't you?
Unless they start at track 0, sector 0, head 0 with a file header for the first shot and then proceed sort-of as a Run Length Limited scheme until you run across a file footer denoting the end of the shot. Then, they simply start in with a new file header for the next shot and so on as you switched the heads and sectors and tracks in a logical order.
This is a trick I used way back in 1981 or so when we had Winchester drives interfaced to minicomputers (think PDP-8 here, which were already ancient at the time) which were never meant to have such drives attached. So, the thing had to be kept ultra simple but a Winchester offered a *lot* of storage for cheap. Think of interfacing a USB Terabyte drive to a DCS 760c today. It was like that.
Those slowpoke machines were meant to use Hollerith cards, paper tape and mag tape. Sequential Data, as it were. So, we used a Winchester as essentially a large piece of tape, or think of it more like a phonograph record (provided you know what one of *those* were!). Oh, that means that the power of seeking directly to the desired data - the whole reason for being for a Winchester drive - was totally lost in the sauce and it became one -large- sequential storage device.
If this is what's in the DCS, then that means one would have to go thru each shot in the order it was stored to find the one shot you wanted. That would not be an issue if the whole idea was to dump *all* shots to something else at one go. But, it has a screen to 'chimp' with, sort-of, right?. Do you *have* to run from Shot One thru to the end when using the inboard screen?
It makes me shudder to think that Kodak was pulling this ancient trick in the late 1980's with what was then modern computer parts meant to randomly access data!
However, even if this is the case, the physical and electrical drive interface would have to be something one could find a controller card for (ST-506, ESDI, SCSI). You'd just have to reprogram DOS to understand that the data is RLL-like and start at 0,0,0 and - Go! I have such a routine for OS/2 that allows such operation on any drive you have attached, so it can be done. I used to have IBM Internal Use versions of DOS that also sported such capability, so it's not unheard of. That said, good luck getting Winders to do something like that.
later!
Stan
p.s. It occurred to me that the acronym for Sequential Access Data is - SAD. Fits!
Login
FAQ
Search
