I repurpose floppies, retrieve information from older floppies that can no longer be read from today's systems. I came across this 3.5-inch floppy disk that was never used and I was curious about its history or what was held on the disk. There is a seal on the back so it has never been used. I did find out that there is a patent for the FOB system.
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I plan on keeping it with my other oddities but would like to know what this disk holds.
Thank you.
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PLOT FINAL
FIGURE ORIENTED GEOMETRY
Coffin Advanced Technologies
Box 916, Cony Road
Augusta, Maine 04330
Serial #8501B System 4P9816
Many programs had the first disk of their program as a copy this and file away the original disk for the next person to install the program to copy and pass it on and never actually use #1 disk because the information would be written to that disk that would personalize the program to you and your computer only and in doing so would make it impossible to install the program to another computer.
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Whatever is on it looks like it may have been prepared by this........
"The 9816 was introduced in late 1982. This was the low-cost model in the 200 Series range. It only had two expansion slots and featured a monitor integrated with the system unit and modular keyboard and mass storage (usually a?ÿ9121?ÿdual 3.5 inch floppy drive). The monitor was nine inches diagonally with a 400 by 300 dot resolution. The 9816A came standard with 128K RAM. The 9816S came standard with 256K RAM. The 9816 family was also known as the 200 Series Model 16, 9000 Model 216 and 9000/216."?ÿ HP?ÿMuseum.
@flga .... and it was only $15,999!!!
A relevant old thread
https://surveyorconnect.com/community/buy-sell-trade/fog-computers-figure-oriented-geometry/
The name was trademarked in 1985
The company quit filing corporate reports in 1992.
The author was probably Kerry Coffin, who Linkedin shows later worked for ESRI.?ÿ Perhaps Melita @mkennedy knows him. In between, he was at Softdesk and Blue Marble.
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I'd love to see what the output looked like if anyone has that...?ÿ ?ÿI learned Simplicty (?) for cogo calcs when I started surveying in the late 90's.?ÿ But we used the coordinate list to hand draw all the maps.?ÿ ?ÿ
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@flga
Can you play Pong on that thing!?
If ya could I didn't know about it. Actually I never have used 9816. Was using a Wang 2200 system with Houlgin(?) CEADS software at the time. You could play "Hunt the Wumpus" which used up about an hour a day. ????
@bill93 He still works at Esri so an email sent to him (first initial last name at esri.com) should get to him. I have met him but haven't talked to him for years...I'd guess at least 10 years.
@flga
I worked for a guy that had a Wang, too. you entered the angles and distances by hand and it calc'd the coord's. You could then send it to the plotter that was a big table and you held the paper down with magnets. Then a bar with a bracket that held a ball point pen (a screwdriver was taped to it for weight) would plot the points and you would connect the dots by hand. This was your worksheet; you would trace over, with Mylar, for final.
Good times!
@flga Holguin was the best COGO software ever, IMHO. As soon as they tried to migrate from the 2200 to HP workstations, it all turned to crap. Too damn bad!
Thanks, everyone for the feedback, and the history is very interesting. I am assuming the data on the disk is some kind of blueprint or similar. Personally I'm a computer nerd.
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I will add this to my collection with the information you were so kind to post.
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Thanks again everyone...
I found a seat on the Carlson wagon from the very start and have continued to use his original product that has merely been added to what he has to offer our industry today.
Did try dozens of early choices before I made my choice and they all did what they said they did. My choice for Carlson was that it represented and was designed to do things as I was taught in my school how things were to be done and that his product did not take relearning the use of a keyboard to make use other than how typing was taught.
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