Something

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AnotherFairportfan
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Re: Something

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
Be glad you never had to deal with FastRand.

Drum memory was almost as good at storing data as it was at storing angular momentum.

Kate worked on those once upon a time.
Proof Positive the world is not flat: If it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.
Warrl
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Re: Something

Post by Warrl »

GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
Largest I ever physically worked with was about a third the size of a washing machine, didn't shake, and had a pair of 10-meg platters - one fixed, one removable. The case the removable platter was (permanently) in was about a foot and a half across.

Now the problem with removable storage is that it's too small. There's no room to label even an SD card, let alone a microSD card. And if you drop the latter, good luck finding it again.
ShneekeyTheLost
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Re: Something

Post by ShneekeyTheLost »

GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
Not just wobbling either. You're used to a drive booting up without making any noise. I almost wonder if my drive has gone dead sometimes because it doesn't make that noise, because I grew up with it.

Then again, there's some people who have done some interesting things with that.
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Dave
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Re: Something

Post by Dave »

GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
As well you should. The motors which moved the arm assemblies back and forth across the layers of players, were bigger and heavier than most of today's entire disk drives.

There was a story, at a school district computer center where I worked for a while, about an accident involving one of those big drives. It was undergoing a maintenance alignment of some sort... spinning, with the protective top cover in the open position... when the technician dropped some ash from his cigar into it (this was back in the day before no-smoking regulations, and perhaps before common sense had evolved past the amphibious stage). The central bearing siezed, and the rotating torque of the disk threw the disc across the room like a flying guillotine.

Probably too good a story to be literally true, but like many such it contains a kernel of truth. Those disk packs weren't light... half a dozen rigid aluminum platters 14" in diameter, spinning at about 1800 RPM. When in operation they needed to be treated like the industrial devices that they were.

Sometimes, fixed-head disks were used... trading off capacity and cost and electrical complexity for faster access. One system I used in college had a RAD which was used entirely as a swap device... a full-sized cabinet, with about as much memory capacity as exists in the on-chip L3 cache of a modern CPU.
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GlytchMeister
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Re: Something

Post by GlytchMeister »

ShneekeyTheLost wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
Not just wobbling either. You're used to a drive booting up without making any noise. I almost wonder if my drive has gone dead sometimes because it doesn't make that noise, because I grew up with it.

Then again, there's some people who have done some interesting things with that.
I actually remember that sound! :P A childhood memory from the dying days of Compaq, but I remember!
AnotherFairportfan wrote:Drum memory was almost as good at storing data as it was at storing angular momentum.
:lol:
That’s a good one
He's mister GlytchMeister, he's mister code
He's mister exploiter, he's mister ones and zeros
They call me GlytchMeister, whatever I touch
Starts to glitch in my clutch!
I'm too much!
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Just Old Al
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Re: Something

Post by Just Old Al »

Warrl wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
Largest I ever physically worked with was about a third the size of a washing machine, didn't shake, and had a pair of 10-meg platters - one fixed, one removable. The case the removable platter was (permanently) in was about a foot and a half across.

Now the problem with removable storage is that it's too small. There's no room to label even an SD card, let alone a microSD card. And if you drop the latter, good luck finding it again.
DEC RK05, or Control Data 9427 H Hawk drive. I taught repair procedures on both of them - still have my tools around here somewhere.

Know them well, and the CDC 9762 and 9766 - difference being the # of platters. 9762 had 4, 9766 had 10. Those packs were HEAVY.

Ah, the good old days...when men were men and a computer tech carried a hundred-pound tool kit with things like wrenches and bearing pullers.
"The Empire was founded on cups of tea, mate, and if you think I am going to war without one you are sadly mistaken."
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AnotherFairportfan
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Re: Something

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

Dave wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
As well you should. The motors which moved the arm assemblies back and forth across the layers of players, were bigger and heavier than most of today's entire disk drives.

There was a story, at a school district computer center where I worked for a while, about an accident involving one of those big drives. It was undergoing a maintenance alignment of some sort... spinning, with the protective top cover in the open position... when the technician dropped some ash from his cigar into it (this was back in the day before no-smoking regulations, and perhaps before common sense had evolved past the amphibious stage). The central bearing siezed, and the rotating torque of the disk threw the disc across the room like a flying guillotine.

Probably too good a story to be literally true, but like many such it contains a kernel of truth. Those disk packs weren't light... half a dozen rigid aluminum platters 14" in diameter, spinning at about 1800 RPM. When in operation they needed to be treated like the industrial devices that they were.

Sometimes, fixed-head disks were used... trading off capacity and cost and electrical complexity for faster access. One system I used in college had a RAD which was used entirely as a swap device... a full-sized cabinet, with about as much memory capacity as exists in the on-chip L3 cache of a modern CPU.
Proof Positive the world is not flat: If it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.
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AnotherFairportfan
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Re: Something

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

AnotherFairportfan wrote:
Dave wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:*shudders*

Washing machine-sized drives that wobbled like washing machines.

*shakes head*
As well you should. The motors which moved the arm assemblies back and forth across the layers of players, were bigger and heavier than most of today's entire disk drives.

There was a story, at a school district computer center where I worked for a while, about an accident involving one of those big drives. It was undergoing a maintenance alignment of some sort... spinning, with the protective top cover in the open position... when the technician dropped some ash from his cigar into it (this was back in the day before no-smoking regulations, and perhaps before common sense had evolved past the amphibious stage). The central bearing siezed, and the rotating torque of the disk threw the disc across the room like a flying guillotine.

Probably too good a story to be literally true, but like many such it contains a kernel of truth. Those disk packs weren't light... half a dozen rigid aluminum platters 14" in diameter, spinning at about 1800 RPM. When in operation they needed to be treated like the industrial devices that they were.

Sometimes, fixed-head disks were used... trading off capacity and cost and electrical complexity for faster access. One system I used in college had a RAD which was used entirely as a swap device... a full-sized cabinet, with about as much memory capacity as exists in the on-chip L3 cache of a modern CPU.
FASTRand, which i've mentioned, was basically a section of sewer pipe, filled with concrete and coated with oxide.

They rotated at 880 RPM.

The first FASTRand was a single-drum unit, and was quickly succeeded by FASTRand II, which had teo counter-rotating drums - the single-drum unit; Wikipedia says:
The large mass of the rotating drum caused gyroscopic precession of the unit, making it tend to spin on the computer room floor as the Earth rotated under it. Very few of these devices were delivered.
and
The Fastrands were very heavy (5,000 pounds) and large, approximately 8' long. Due to their weight, FASTRAND units were usually not installed on "false floor", and required special rigging and mounts to move and/or install. There were reported cases of drum bearing failures that caused the machine to tear itself apart and send the heavy drum crashing through walls*.
Specs:
Specifications (FASTRAND II)

Storage capacity: 22,020,096 36-bit words = 132,120,576 6-bit FIELDATA characters = 99 megabytes (8-bit bytes) per device
Drum rotation rate: 880 RPM (14.7 rotations per second)
Heads: 64
Sector size: 28 36-bit words
Track size: 64 sectors (1,792 36-bit words)
Track density: 105 tracks per inch
Average Access time (seek time plus rotational latency): 92 milliseconds
Data transfer rate: 26,283 36-bit words per second = 118 kilobytes per second (8-bit bytes) on 1100 series machines
Recording density, one-dimensional: 1,000 bits per inch (along one track)
Recording density, two-dimensional: 105,000 bits per square inch of drum surface
Max FASTRAND devices (drum units) per controller: 8
Controller price: $41,680 (1968 dollars)
FASTRAND device price: $134,400 (1968 dollars)

Weight per FASTRAND device: 4,500 pounds
Weight per kilobyte: 6 ounces (170 g)
{The BLS CIP Inflation Calculator says that$176,000 in 1968 is roughly $1,271,000 today.}.

=================

* One of the stories about bearing failures told of a night shift, the operator as (luckily for him) sitting leaning his chair back on two lege, feet on the desk, when the bearings seized and the drum came crashing through the front of the cabinet and shot across the floor, cutting the back legs out from under the chair; about the time he hit the floor, the drum had buried itself halfway into the opposite wall...
Proof Positive the world is not flat: If it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.
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GlytchMeister
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Re: Something

Post by GlytchMeister »

Humans are one dumb species sometimes.
He's mister GlytchMeister, he's mister code
He's mister exploiter, he's mister ones and zeros
They call me GlytchMeister, whatever I touch
Starts to glitch in my clutch!
I'm too much!
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jwhouk
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Re: Something

Post by jwhouk »

I keep opening this thread and half expect to be serenaded by George Harrison.
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Dave
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Re: Something

Post by Dave »

GlytchMeister wrote:Humans are one dumb species sometimes.
Clever, but often not very wise at all.
Alkarii
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Re: Something

Post by Alkarii »

Well, it was once believed that owls were wise, when in actuality they're kind of... Dumb.

(Edit: Second half of post removed, because once again, I forget this isn't More Stuff...)
Last edited by Alkarii on Sun Jul 22, 2018 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Atomic
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Re: Something

Post by Atomic »

Dave wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:Humans are one dumb species sometimes.
Clever, but often not very wise at all.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." - K
Don't let other peoples limitations become your constraints!

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