HLOTD (History lesson of the day)
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
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The first one I worked on was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND[^] in 1967. Looked like two sections of sewage pipe one above the other, and hummed to itself all day (and night). The best thing about it was that you could hide behind it for hours.
I worked around Fastrands for seven years or so. There was one just across the hall from my office, in the machine room. The horror! I never heard of one crashing through a wall ... I did hear of a Fastrand, secured in its special wheeled moving rig, roll down a sloped corridor, zip through the reception area and then out the front door to the parking lot. I don't know if there were any hardware or wetware casualties from the incident.
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Imagine the laptop that went into! :-)
What do you think that big silver thing was in the background?
Software Zen:
delete this; -
What do you think that big silver thing was in the background?
Software Zen:
delete this;:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: Very good!
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I worked around Fastrands for seven years or so. There was one just across the hall from my office, in the machine room. The horror! I never heard of one crashing through a wall ... I did hear of a Fastrand, secured in its special wheeled moving rig, roll down a sloped corridor, zip through the reception area and then out the front door to the parking lot. I don't know if there were any hardware or wetware casualties from the incident.
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
;P ;P That is crazy man!
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I worked around Fastrands for seven years or so. There was one just across the hall from my office, in the machine room. The horror! I never heard of one crashing through a wall ... I did hear of a Fastrand, secured in its special wheeled moving rig, roll down a sloped corridor, zip through the reception area and then out the front door to the parking lot. I don't know if there were any hardware or wetware casualties from the incident.
I remember a similar incident when the San Jose Mercury News installed a new HP3000 system. Standard installation involved a 24-hour spinup on the hard drives. The computer room was not complete, so the back wall consisted of industrial plastic sheeting. 17 hours into the spinup, the technicians checked the status of the drives. Drives 0-4 showed no faults, drive 5 showed a minor fault that registered 11 hours into the test. During the physical part of the check, the technicians discovered that the minor fault was due to the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system used to deliver newspapers to the trucks, ending on its side and continuing the rigorous series of checks with only the minor fault.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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I remember a similar incident when the San Jose Mercury News installed a new HP3000 system. Standard installation involved a 24-hour spinup on the hard drives. The computer room was not complete, so the back wall consisted of industrial plastic sheeting. 17 hours into the spinup, the technicians checked the status of the drives. Drives 0-4 showed no faults, drive 5 showed a minor fault that registered 11 hours into the test. During the physical part of the check, the technicians discovered that the minor fault was due to the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system used to deliver newspapers to the trucks, ending on its side and continuing the rigorous series of checks with only the minor fault.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Member 10707677 wrote:
the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system ...
While magically still being connected to its power supply and data cables.
Distance travelled to back wall, 3 feet. Distance from computer room to conveyor system, 4 feet. The drive hit the belt and toppled with 1-2 feet down the length of the conveyor. These were the old Perkins eight-platter 18-inch drives, designed for use onboard naval vessels. Cables were typically 60 feet long, with the excess coiled under the floor of the computer room. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it possible. The techs shut down the drive and gave it a thorough going-over. The only damage was a ding in the base cabinet. Luckily, the drive was designated a standby reserve, so the whole of the installation wasn't too badly affected by the extra testing of the drive. (This time, the techs remembered to lock the drive cabinet in place.)
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
Whilst working at BT in the 80's we took delivery of what we were told was the first 20Mb drive, it was the size of a desk pedestal and took 4 of us to lift it. we took delivery of another a month or so later as we filled it pretty quickly.
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
Reminds me of my first hard drive for the IBM-PC, the Corvus. A huge, loud, expensive device - over $5,000 for 10 MB.
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
I started working with them in the mid 1970s. They were about the size of a modern day dishwasher. Had platters - like vinyl records stacked about 5 high. I think they stored 400 MB. They were so big and expensive that peripherals were shared amongst several computers and I worked on a peripheral switch - how to switch hard drives, tape drives, paper tape, etc between computers. I remember getting an IBM PC with a hard drive for the first time. Probably mid 1980s. 10 MB instead of floppy disks. We thought we had it made.
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Imagine the laptop that went into! :-)
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What do you think that big silver thing was in the background?
Software Zen:
delete this;The opening behind the box on the forklift is the socket for the Flight Data Recorder
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
Was that the Flight Data Recorder or the Voice Recorder? :)
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Still remember working on the DEC 10 system in 1987, perhaps one of the first ones to be installed in Bangalore, India at the Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). Faintly remember that the storage device there was a magnetic tape drive. While writing programs (in FORTRAN then), it occasionally used to throw this message: "System shutting down in 5 minutes. Please save your files", followed by a countdown, till shutdown. Early versions of Windows used to do it best - throw up a BSOD :-)
I worked on a PDP-11/34a with 2 RK06 7meg word diskdrives (and a tape drive). I wrote a directory sort program that directly modified the directory pointers, (Skipping the slow step of loading into an indirect array, and then applying the changes). it was SO much faster. With one issue. Apparently I had a bug, and I cross linked 5 files in an infinite loop (directory enteries were a Singly Linked List). So, when I went to do the directory, the last 5 files kept repeating. But the segment of code was being run by the OS, and would not break. The drive head was going back and fourth over 2 points, and the drive slowly started ROCKING... More and More. A Mad dash to the front of the CPU to HALT the system. Forced an Odd Address Trap, to avoid the reboot, and then I had to remove my account, losing my files.. Because, like an idiot, I was working on the live system, without a backup. Pretty soon, I learned how to do backups. High School... We were lucky to survive some of our mistakes!
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Was that the Flight Data Recorder or the Voice Recorder? :)
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956. [First hard drive]
Sometime around 1990 I went with a class to tour an IBM facility in San Jose, CA. One of the rooms we visited was full of the 25 MB version of this drive. The customer apparently did not want to upgrade the system ...
