8” floppy’s on Atari 8-bit

[sideburn]

Back in the 80’s one of my friends ran a popular Warez bbs. He was kindof cocky and didn’t disclose much information and also had an older guy on his street that I think was the technical brains around his little operation. I was a pretty tech savvy kid and always wondered how he managed to have an array of 8” floppy drives hooked up to his 800xl’s and 1200xl’s. 
 

anyone have any ideas how he had this rig setup? Must have been around ‘83

[Bee]

ATR8000

 

Thank you

[erichenneke]

I'm sure he had an ATR8000.

[_The Doctor__]

ATR800, CSS Black Box, Atari's 8 inch SIO, or one of the 8 inch SIO pcb cards with or without printer port...

[NorbertP]

By and large the only difference between a 5.25" drive and an 8" drive is physical size* - if your controller supports one it supports the other - so assuming the drive assembly in a 1050 or 810 has a standard connector there's nothing stopping you from using an 8" mechanism in it. (Adrian Black has done a few videos about it.)

 

* Older drives also used an AC motor driven directly from mains voltage.

[sideburn]

Ahhh! Yes that must have been it. I know he had a modem hooked up and some Atari bbs software and a pretty cool looking ascii art home page and tons of pirated software on the bbs. He had 800xl’s and a 1200xl which I think was brand new or just coming out at the time. And then a bunch of 8” drives. He was a spoiled brat kid and never would answer any of my questions and I always thought it was because he didn’t know the answers and had someone else setting him up. Then one day he took me to this older guys house who had all this equipment so I’m sure that was the main guy. 

[sideburn]

30 minutes ago, NorbertP said:

By and large the only difference between a 5.25" drive and an 8" drive is physical size* - if your controller supports one it supports the other - so assuming the drive assembly in a 1050 or 810 has a standard connector there's nothing stopping you from using an 8" mechanism in it. (Adrian Black has done a few videos about it.)

 

* Older drives also used an AC motor driven directly from mains voltage.

Yeah I watched his videos. That’s actually what got me thinking about it and wondering how he pulled it off with SIO. 

[+Larry]

I just looked at a couple of Adrian's videos.  The 8" drives are monsters!  I have a couple of 8" disks, but never saw the actual mechs before.  All that stuff from the 70's was huge!