Documentation for Xebec Owl (a 1984 SASI-disk-drive)

[Tom Gardner]

In early 1984 I was in discussion with Jim Toreson of Xebec about selling
them Shugart Corp's SA700 drive mechanics for use in the Owl.  He went his
own way and I'm pretty sure the Owl embedded the controller into the drive
eliminating the ST-506 style interface.  That would account for the
additional firmware.

Toreson moved Xebec to Nevada and he is still there, see:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-toreson-a514128/ 

Maybe he can identify an old engineer with some info in his/her attic or
garage ;-)

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Peters [mailto:martin at shackspace.de] 
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2019 9:57 AM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Documentation for Xebec Owl (a 1984 SASI-disk-drive)

Anyone here, owning a Xebec Owl and/or its documentation?

The Owl is a SASI-disk-drive from 1984. One could say that it's mostly a
Xebec S1410A mounted on a drive, thus eliminating the ST-506-interface.
The one I had my hands on seems to be a late version, called the Owl II
(20MB instead of 10MB). It shiped with a PC-SASI-controller for the
8-bit-ISA-bus (TTL) and 4KB Boot-ROM (in a 2764-EPROM).

The firmware of the Owl II itself seems to be more advanced and bigger than
that of the well-known Xebec-bridge-boards: The Owl has 16KB
(27128) of firmware, compared to the 4/8KB (2732/64) of a S1410/10A/20.
A lot of its commands are explained in the documentation of the S1420
controller, but it seems there are some commands missing, e.g. the command
0x0C.

The drive is not compatible with later SCSI equippment. The owner reported,
he did not manage to run it with a "modern" PC-SCSI-Controller and I'm not
surprised about this: Some commands and codes are incompatible to SCSI/CCS,
so the SENSE codes. There is also a command collision with the INQUIRY
command, uhhhh :(

Does someone own the/some/any documentation for the Owl?

It doesn't seem there's much more out there than this brochure:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xebec/brochures/Xebec_Owl_Datasheet_198410xx.pd
f

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