A couple of years ago when we knew we were about to get an AC200 with
3.5" floppy I asked this very same question. I suspect you are also a
Mac user, so have come to expect all disks to be readable provided the
right software is available!
I received a minute number of replies, about half of which didn't
address the question, and none of which gave me any solution. Bruker's
only Macintosh programmer, Joe Laughlin, who has now left the company,
thought it could probably be done, but did not have the resources to do
anything about it.
According to a local Mac expert here, access to the low level hardware
programming is something which Apple do not encourage, however, I seem
to remember that PC Exchange was an amateur effort before Apple took it
up.
We gave up in the end and bought Macintosh NMRLINK. This is about
one-third the cost of the Aspect ethernet add-on, while being about
three-quarters of the speed (about 8 seconds per 16K FID). Bruker seem
to have decided recently that the Mac does not exist, so it may not
still be available. If it is, it's well worth the 1900 pounds we paid
for it, compared to over 5000 pounds required for the allegedly rather
flaky Aspect Ethernet. Contact Bruker Billerica about this product. It's
given us no trouble at all, and I have it running completely
automatically doing a once daily archiving run from our excellent
automatic AC200 to a Mac Centris 650 with a 2Gb disk. I can of course do
manual transfers at any time.
If you want any more information or copies of the ADAKET disk
specification, or any of the old emails I have about this, please let me
know.
Alan
P.S. Prices will certainly have gone up by now!
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Dr A S F Boyd Chemistry Department
NMR Spectroscopist Heriot-Watt University
phone: +44-131-451 3214 Riccarton
fax: +44-131-451 3180 Edinburgh
cheasfb@bonaly.hw.ac.uk EH14 4AS
http://dava.che.hw.ac.uk/ Scotland
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