I've been into retro-gaming for a couple years now, and, after the 30th anniversary of the Amiga, I've been getting into retro-computing too. To feed my dirty habbit, I've been doing quite a bit of garage sale hunting. Last weekend I went to a garage sale that advertised on craigslist as "HUGE HOARDER SALE". It did not disappoint. There were a bunch of Atari 7800 games in boxes, so that by itself was worth the trip.

I talked to the guy a bit. He told me there was more stuff inside, but he hadn't had a chance to go through it yet. He did want to, "sell an $80 game for $3." Fair enough. A little more chatting, and he offered to let me have a look. The games were almost all common stuff, but there was a Mega Man IV, in the box... I told him to look up a price for that one, and I still got a really good deal.

The rest of the house... OMG. It really was like you see on TV. Boxes covering almost every inch of the floor and stacked to the ceiling in places. The guy told me that he thought it would take about two years to get the place fully cleaned out. Ouch.

In the kitchen (obviously) there was a big, big pile of computers. I started looking through that... and there was some weird stuff there. The most interesting bits were an Osborne 1, a Mac SE/30, and a DaynaFile.

I first saw the DaynaFile from this view, and I thought, "An external SCSI chasis. I can use that."

I picked up, turned it around, and almost dropped it. First of all, that's a 5.25" floppy drive in a SCSI chasis. That earns some serious WTF marks alone. Look closer... 360k.

Now I had to have it. I added it to my pile. I figured that after amortizing the total price over all the things I got, I paid about $1 for it.

Upon getting it home, I dissected it. Inside is a perfectly ordinary 360k 5.25" floppy drive.

The whole thing is controlled by a little 8031 microcontroller that bridges the SCSI bus to the floppy bus.

As if the whole thing weren't crazy enough... there's the date on the ROM. It's hard to read in the picture, but it says, "DAYNAFILE REV. 3.1 @ 1989". Yes... 1989. Why? WHY?!? Why did someone need a 360k 5.25" SCSI floppy drive in 1989?!? By that time Macs, Amigas, Atari STs, and even most PCs had 720k 3.5" floppy drives standard in 1989. I understand wanting to read 1.2M 5.25" PC floppies or 1.44M/720k 3.5" PC floppies on a Mac, but 360k? For shame!

The bummer is that there's no powersupply for it. I found a user manual, which is filled with some serious lolz. '"Reading and writing files" is MS-DOS terminology.... Reading a file is the same as opening a document and writing a file is the same as closing a document and saving changes." Now I remember why I used to make fun of Macintosh users.

What the manual doesn't have anywhere in it's 122 pages is a pinout of the powersupply connector. The Internet says it uses an Elpac WM220... should be possible to rig something up.