Smallest Storage Capacity Hard Disk?
vz24_...@yahoo.com
Steve
Dennis Ritchie
>
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
Plenty.
Digital RS64, ca. 1970, 128KB.
Digital RS11, 512KB.
We didn't have the first, but the second was the first
disk we were able to get for our first PDP-11.
Dennis
Don Chiasson
<vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cb24ba4b.0111...@posting.google.com...
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
smaller?
>
> Steve
32 bit words as its
main storage rather than core memory. The machine first came out in the
late 1950's and cost
about $50k. A couple of sites turned up on a search:
http://www.computer-museum.org/collections/royal_tube.html
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/early.computers.html#LGP-30
First computer I ever used.
Don
e-mail: it's not not, it's hot.
Ric Werme
>I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
I assume you're including drums, after all, they aren't floppies.
DEC's RM10B, a Bryant drum, has 345,600 36 bit words written as 6 bit bytes.
If you're really interested in 8 bit bytes, well, you can do the conversion.
A little harder is the drum in Bailey Meter's 756 multiprocessor process
control system my father designed. A decimal machine, it used 25 bit
words (sign and 6 digits). Its drum held 28,000 words, I'll leave it to
you to translate that into bytes of your choosing. Note that a binary
computer would only need 18 bits to hold the -99,999 to +99,999 range the
756 worked with.
I know of one system that was shutdown in 1995, so it's not as obsolete as
you might expect. In the end, the programmers were using a Lotus spreadsheet
to optimize instruction layout on the drum! (The drum was the system's
main memory too.)
-Ric Werme
--
"When we allow fundamental freedoms to be sacrificed in the name of real or
perceived emergency, we invariably regret it. -- Thurgood Marshall
Ric Werme | we...@nospam.mediaone.net
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/werme | ^^^^^^^ delete
Michael Black
And is it safe to say that the physical size of a hard drive
decreases as the capacity increases?
It's interesting how people in retrospect think older systems
and equipment are limited (and small). I was recently reading a book
about Unix administration from 1986, and a small system was
defined as supporting 1 to 4 people, had a 40MB hard drive, and 1meg
of ram. He defined a large system as having 1.2gigs of hard drive,
16megs of ram and could handle 17 to 500 users.
When you see all those people in the Linux newsgroups asking if
there is a distribution for "an old computer, 200MHz, 32Megs of ram,
2 gigs of hard drive", it makes you either wonder if they've been
hoodwinked, or what miracles went into those old systems.
If you look back, especially if you haven't been around computers
all that long, I imagine it would be difficult to imagine a 512K
hard drive. Someone can't see what the point would be, of
putting all that effort and money into a harddrive that was so limited.
Yet I can remember, mid-eighties, when a 10Meg hard drive would have
easily held all the programs I had for my Radio Shack Color Computer
(running OS-9). amd lots of space to spare. If people can't visualize
computers that had only 64K (or even 512K) of memory, but worked fine,
they sure can't imagine 512K hard drives.
Michael
Charles Richmond
<http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/royal/>
Take a look...it might be "deja vu" all over again...
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Charles and Francis Richmond <rich...@plano.net> |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
jmfb...@aol.com
Michael Black <blac...@gloria.cam.org> wrote:
>
>
>On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Dennis Ritchie wrote:
>
>> vz24_...@yahoo.com wrote:
>> >
>> > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
smaller?
>>
>> Plenty.
>>
>> Digital RS64, ca. 1970, 128KB.
>> Digital RS11, 512KB.
>>
>> We didn't have the first, but the second was the first
>> disk we were able to get for our first PDP-11.
>>
>> Dennis
>>
>>
>And is it safe to say that the physical size of a hard drive
>decreases as the capacity increases?
Nope. DEC's RP07 was chest-high.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Elliott Roper
vz24_...@yahoo.com wrote:
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
>
>
> Steve
DECs DF32 for the PDP-8 was 32K 12 bit words.
I think there was also a DF10, same physical size used as a swapping
disk on early PDP-10s
Fixed heads, single platter about 12" diameter if I recall. I have a
hazy memory that the recording surface was shiny metal rather than
oxide, but it could be that I didn't know what I was looking at.
Al Kossow
Roper <ell...@yrl.co.uk> wrote:
I had a long talk with one of the designers at DECWorld this past
summer about the DF32 and RF08.
The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
I also found out the DF32 and RF08's were designed by people with
no previous disc design experience!
Joel Gallun
> When you see all those people in the Linux newsgroups asking if
> there is a distribution for "an old computer, 200MHz, 32Megs of ram,
> 2 gigs of hard drive", it makes you either wonder if they've been
> hoodwinked, or what miracles went into those old systems.
We had this discussion in the office a few days ago. We decided that
bundling the X window system with Unix was the big knee in the code
bloat curve for Unix.
My first Linux system ('93?) was a 386/20 with 6 megs of RAM and a
60MB hard drive. It was massive overkill. Even with a 10MB partition
with DOS on it to do embedded x86 development, I had plenty of free
space. No X though.
Joel
--
Joel Gallun
Compaq support team @ America Online
http://www.tux.org/~joel
Kevin Handy
>
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Dennis Ritchie wrote:
>
> > vz24_...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > >
> > > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
> >
> > Plenty.
> >
> > Digital RS64, ca. 1970, 128KB.
> > Digital RS11, 512KB.
> >
> > We didn't have the first, but the second was the first
> > disk we were able to get for our first PDP-11.
> >
> > Dennis
> >
> >
> And is it safe to say that the physical size of a hard drive
> decreases as the capacity increases?
>
> It's interesting how people in retrospect think older systems
> and equipment are limited (and small). I was recently reading a book
> about Unix administration from 1986, and a small system was
> defined as supporting 1 to 4 people, had a 40MB hard drive, and 1meg
> of ram. He defined a large system as having 1.2gigs of hard drive,
> 16megs of ram and could handle 17 to 500 users.
And, that 1.2 gig of disk was probably not on a single drive.
> When you see all those people in the Linux newsgroups asking if
> there is a distribution for "an old computer, 200MHz, 32Megs of ram,
> 2 gigs of hard drive", it makes you either wonder if they've been
> hoodwinked, or what miracles went into those old systems.
See: MicroSoft
Actually, some of what is happening is trading memory for speed.
Some algorithms can be coded for memory footprint, or speed.
More is caused by not needing to worry about minimizing the memory
usage. Why take time to reduce memory when it works right now?
Even more is caused by the addition of huge numbers of extra
'options'.
> If you look back, especially if you haven't been around computers
> all that long, I imagine it would be difficult to imagine a 512K
> hard drive. Someone can't see what the point would be, of
> putting all that effort and money into a harddrive that was so limited.
> Yet I can remember, mid-eighties, when a 10Meg hard drive would have
> easily held all the programs I had for my Radio Shack Color Computer
> (running OS-9). amd lots of space to spare. If people can't visualize
> computers that had only 64K (or even 512K) of memory, but worked fine,
> they sure can't imagine 512K hard drives.
Many of the early pdp-11's were limited to 18 bit memory address
(256kb?)
Later ones (11/70 on) has 22 bit memory addresses (4 mb).
Also remember that most of the initial Unix development was done on
the earlier versions (once it got off the pdp-7).
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
well in 68 it wasn't on a signle drive ... but by early '80s it was
getting much closes (20.1g/32) ... and by the time of triple density
3380s in the mid-80s it would have been 3*630 ... nearly 2gbyte/drive
2305 2314 3310 3330 3350 3370 3380
data
cap, mb 11.2 29 64 200 317 285 630
avg. arm
acc, ms 0 60 27 30 25 20 16
avg. rot
del. ms 5 12.5 9.6 8.4 8.4 10.1 8.3
misc. comparison
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#8 3330 Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#6 3330 Disk Drives
system 3.1L HPO change
machine 360/67 3081K
mips .3 14 47
pageable pages 105 7000 66
users 80 320 4
channels 6 24 4
drums 12meg 72meg 6
page I/O 150 600 4
user I/O 100 300 3
disk arms 45 32 4?perform.
bytes/arm 29meg 630meg 23
avg. arm access 60mill 16mill 3.7
transfer rate .3meg 3meg 10
total data 1.2gig 20.1gig 18
Comparison of 3.1L 67 and HPO 3081k
67/3081 refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#31 Big I/O or Kicking the Mainframe out the Door
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#43 Bloat, elegance, simplicity and other irrelevant concepts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#55 How Do the Old Mainframes Compare to Today's Micros?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#10 Virtual Memory (A return to the past?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#46 The god old days(???)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#4 IBM S/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#66 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#62 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercomputers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#68 Q: Merced a flop or not?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#40 MVS History (all parts)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#61 MVS History (all parts)
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | ly...@garlic.com - http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Paul Grayson
news:cb24ba4b.0111...@posting.google.com...
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
smaller?
On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable random-access
media?
Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they
held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
floppy.
The awfully badly designed Sinclair Microdrive, which was effectivly a
shrunken 8-track, had a capacity of approximatly 80KB, although this would
increase after multiple re-formats due to tape stretch! Luckily only ICL
outside of Sinclair used these things.
Elliott Roper
a...@spies.com (Al Kossow) wrote:
........
> summer about the DF32 and RF08.
>
> The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
> it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
> were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
>
> I also found out the DF32 and RF08's were designed by people with
> no previous disc design experience!
Thanks, Al. I guess I'll score one for not quite faded memory.
.....which kicked in a reminiscence that might not be out of place here.
The first machine I worked on had a drum with less than 1 million bits
on it. It was about 15" diameter and about 12" high. It was sufficient
to collect, store and distribute realtime share trading data to every
broker's desk in Australia (or anywhere for that matter, it's entire
contents were broadcast every revolution to any number of 'slave
outputs' which fed four 'data retrievers', each of which could talk
serial to 16 premises, where up to 64 desk units were located.) It was
Reuters/Ultronic Systems Corporation (what a name!) Stockmaster service.
It was a complete hardware only system. Took its feed from a Honeywell
200 at the Sydney Stock Exchange. The competition at the time was
Quotron, fed from Melbourne Stock Exchange's PDP-10.
The slave output watched the SICs (stock codes) whistle past on five
tracks. If 'coincidence' was preserved for four bit times (the SIC was 4
characters, each 5 bits), then the next four bit times would select BCD
data from 3 of 30 tracks, yielding 3 digits of stock price data to be
sent serially over 1200 Baud modems to the brokers' premises.
Their desk units, which looked like old fashioned adding machines,
displayed the result on three Nixie tubes where the roll of paper would
have been. The keyboards had four columns each with 32 alphabetically
labelled keys and one column of 10 price selector keys. Slotted bars
under the keys leant on microswitches, whose states were scanned to
assemble the next request to be serialised back to the data centre where
the drum was.
The desk unit memory was three Beam-X tubes. They were GT size metal
covered cans, inside which were 10 anodes hiding behind a 10 cylindrical
magnets, themselves standing in a cylindrical arrangement (think
Stonehenge). If you kicked the grids with the right voltage all the
current would go to only one of the anodes until it was kicked again.
One Beam-X, one Nixie. Memories are made of this!
Only three digits per price? We left it to the brokers to put the
decimal point in the right place. For trading volume the LSD was the
exponent!
It was a sensation in its day. Helped in no small way to ramp up the the
infamous 'Mining Boom' in the Australian market in the very early 1970's.
The whole design was so incredibly bit efficient. All the serial stuff
was full duplex, practically unheard-of at the time. Timing and coding
all fell elegantly into place. The Ultronics engineers seemed to have a
penchant for recycling army surplus hardware, like those Beam-X and
nixie tubes. A later desk unit controller (Videomaster) used surplus
WW2 teletype 'stunt box' acoustic delay lines for memory. A little out
of place amid hardware using start-of-the-art [1] TI 7400 gates and
Fairchild 9300 shift registers.
The Stockmaster logic was all constructed from logic boards containing
either 12 3-NORs or 6 flip-flops. Every transistor was a 2N404.
In the very early days, I remember the Australian Post Office (as it was
then called) issuing a press release that there were 110 modems in
operation in Australia. 100 of them were for us.
Somehow I conned my boss into buying two PDP8-e's to use Stockmaster's
data to typeset the share tables in the newspapers and that got me out
of the hardware before they found me out.
[1] It was a typo, but I like it.
Peter Ibbotson
news:9srltf$fku$1...@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net...
I have now been given the algorithm for
stopping the microdrive motor. It goes
ONNNNNNNN OFF ONNNNNN OFF ONNNN OFF ONN OFF
ON OFFFFFFFFFFFFF Got it. - N Terry
--
Work pet...@lakeview.co.uk.plugh.org | remove magic word .org to reply
Home pe...@ibbotson.co.uk.plugh.org | I own the domain but theres no MX
glen herrmannsfeldt
<vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
>smaller?
The ST-506 interface that was popular for many years was named
for a Seagate 5MB drive. (6MB unformatted, the last digit of the number.)
I believe that was the beginning of the 5.25 inch drives.
(Or at least the first of the 5.25in to sell in reasonable numbers.)
Before that were 8 and 14 inch drives, both of which started small
and grew to larger capacities. The earliest I remember using was an
IBM 2314, which was 29MB, that is, 200 cylinders, 20 tracks/cylinder,
7294 bytes/track (if you wrote 7294 byte blocks) on 14 inch diameter
disks. Disk space was allocated to users by tracks, and I had about
20 tracks for my use.
-- glen
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> well in 68 it wasn't on a signle drive ... but by early '80s it was
> getting much closes (20.1g/32) ... and by the time of triple density
> 3380s in the mid-80s it would have been 3*630 ... nearly 2gbyte/drive
and the double density 3380 (that came between the two) would have been
just slightly over 1.2gbyte.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Michael Black <blac...@gloria.cam.org> wrote:
> And is it safe to say that the physical size of a hard drive
> decreases as the capacity increases?
It sure seems that way.
> It's interesting how people in retrospect think older systems
> and equipment are limited (and small). I was recently reading a book
> about Unix administration from 1986, and a small system was
> defined as supporting 1 to 4 people, had a 40MB hard drive, and 1meg
> of ram. He defined a large system as having 1.2gigs of hard drive,
> 16megs of ram and could handle 17 to 500 users.
Sounds just like an Altos brochure from the time :)
> When you see all those people in the Linux newsgroups asking if
> there is a distribution for "an old computer, 200MHz, 32Megs of ram,
> 2 gigs of hard drive", it makes you either wonder if they've been
> hoodwinked, or what miracles went into those old systems.
You can still run 1 to 4 people on a 40Mb hard drive with 4Mb of
RAM, provided they use 9600 baud ASCII terminals and run simple text
mode applications. Users these days expect high resolution, 24 bit colour
displays with all sorts of fancy graphical interactions going on, this
sort of thing eats resources even when done efficiently, and it usually
isn't. A simple example, the screen I am looking at now accounts for some
six megabytes of memory and (because it uses AGP shared memory) is hitting
my main memory for a stunning 400 *megabytes* per second constantly. And
that's before we count the software layers dealing with overlapped windowing,
font rendering, network transparency ... Oh yes networking - seen the size
of a TCP/IP stack ? Those 1986 boxes usually didn't have one - oops there
goes another megabyte of RAM (stack, drivers, buffers et al).
Sometimes I play MP3s, this is a fearsome use of computing resources
but there is so much capacity to spare that it can be done while running
large compilations (yes with that 400 megabyte per second base loading on
the memory bus). Much is expected of modern desktops, most of it frivolous.
Even driving the printer has become a major operation, 600 dpi, 24 bit A4
bitmaps take quite some resources to push out to the printer fast enough
even with compression. Generating them also takes some computation. Compare
this to just shoving ASCII text out at 9600 and mostly having to queue data
for the printer because it's busy.
A modern desktop system spends about as much CPU time on eye candy
as a 1970s weather forecasting system dedicated to the job AFAICT (more when
running xlockmore). You have to strip all the cruft away and tune a PC
properly to see what one can really do compared to a PDP-11 or a 360. The
ftp.freesoftware.com record of 2 terabytes of ftp traffic in one day is
indicative of what a PC (500MHz Xeon) can do.
Of course many linux distributions don't just throw in the kitchen
sink, they supply the entire catalogue of sinks. This can make 2Gb tight :)
> hard drive. Someone can't see what the point would be, of
> putting all that effort and money into a harddrive that was so limited.
Show them 512k of core and ask them to imagine how much it sould
cost to make today.
--
C:>WIN | Directable Mirrors
The computer obeys and wins. |A Better Way To Focus The Sun
You lose and Bill collects. | licenses available - see:
| http://www.sohara.org/
Ifor Gaukroger
"Paul Grayson" <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9srltf$fku$1...@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net...
> shrunken 8-track, had a capacity of approximatly 80KB, although this would
> increase after multiple re-formats due to tape stretch! Luckily only ICL
> outside of Sinclair used these things.
I remember those, they could also be stringed together so that you could
have about ?8? of them connected at any one time.
Not that I had eight, the one I did have worked fine until it didn't, it
then went back to the shop. Back to tape, screeching noises and serial-ish
access :-(
Rofi
George R. Gonzalez
> I also found out the DF32 and RF08's were designed by people with
> no previous disc design experience!
Not too surprising to those few folks that ever used one.
I used one for a few months before the DF-32 was replaced by a HUGE
(by then-days standards) RKO5.
The DF-32 had just enough room for a really minimal disk system,
leaving just enough room for a copy of FOCAL, an editor, an assembler,
and maybe 8K or so to hold your source code. Amazing what could
be done in the days before code bloat!
It did have a few neat features: it was word-addressable, so you could
ask for anything from ONE word, to 4K words, starting at any word.
And DMA'ed too, none of this PIO stuff still extant on PC's.
It was a bit kludgy-- they didnt include head-lifters, so if it ever powered
down,
the heads would touch the disk surface, often erasing several words with the
head's remaining magnetic field.
The interface was "haphazard"-- there once was a multi-page article in some
DECUS mag, whereing a guy explored the command interfaces and found plenty
of "undefined" and "you can't get there from here" states. Pages of stuff
something like: "if you read the photocell before checking for error,
you could get a false reading, otherwise if you check for error first,
the photocell data may be wrong if an error occurs while you're reading it."
Not that I could do any better for a first design, just mighty little
performance per $.
Regards,
George
Charlie Gibbs
ro...@localhost.localdomain (Joel Gallun) writes:
>My first Linux system ('93?) was a 386/20 with 6 megs of RAM and a
>60MB hard drive. It was massive overkill. Even with a 10MB partition
>with DOS on it to do embedded x86 development, I had plenty of free
>space. No X though.
I'm still maintaining an SCO port of our software on a 386/40 with
4 megs of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. I recently dug up an ISA
NIC and the machine is now happily living on my LAN (it's much
easier to FTP the source code to it than to use sneakernet).
--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.
Charlie Gibbs
rogg...@inamme.com (Roger Blake) writes:
>On Tue, 13 Nov 2001 01:04:55 -0500, Michael Black
><blac...@gloria.cam.org> wrote:
>
>> When you see all those people in the Linux newsgroups asking if
>> there is a distribution for "an old computer, 200MHz, 32Megs of ram,
>> 2 gigs of hard drive", it makes you either wonder if they've been
>> hoodwinked, or what miracles went into those old systems.
>
>They're just young and stupid for the most part. At this point I'd
>wager to say the most computer users are not only completely clueless
>about anything that came before the IBM PC, but most don't even know
>of anything that existed prior to Win95.
And Microsoft is quite happy to keep it that way.
It's fun telling these people about my first job. It was at a
service bureau, where we ran payrolls, accounts receivable, etc.
for many small companies around town - on a Univac 9300 with 16K
(not megs, I tell them, but K) of memory, and zero disk space -
we did it all on cards. When we upgraded to 32K of memory we
didn't know what to do with all that space - although hanging
a couple of disk drives (2314 clones) on the machine helped.
We were able to do _lots_ more with a couple of 20MB drives
online - enough that it was worth the $20K or so that they
each cost.
Can we start the Four Yorkshiremen skit now?
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Joel Gallun <ro...@localhost.localdomain> wrote:
> We had this discussion in the office a few days ago. We decided that
> bundling the X window system with Unix was the big knee in the code
> bloat curve for Unix.
It isn't bundled with all UNIX, not even all open source unix
or even all Linux for that matter. It is quite seperable from the core
in most systems.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
"Paul Grayson" <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> <vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:cb24ba4b.0111...@posting.google.com...
>
> > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
> smaller?
>
> On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable random-access
> media?
Hmm, first thought was 78K Apple ][ discs, then I though about it
a bit more and remembered the EPROM burner on the CHAMP which was rather
less than 1Kb.
> Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they
> held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
> floppy.
IIRC 80Kb to 2Mb was the range for 8" floppies.
> The awfully badly designed Sinclair Microdrive, which was effectivly a
Go on, you design a *cheaper* mechanism.
> shrunken 8-track, had a capacity of approximatly 80KB, although this would
> increase after multiple re-formats due to tape stretch! Luckily only ICL
> outside of Sinclair used these things.
ICL got them from Sinclair - the OPD was a QL inside. Given that
ICL did a lot of board layout business in those days, I smell a Sinclair
classic outlay saving deal in there.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
g...@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) wrote:
>
> <vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
> >smaller?
>
> The ST-506 interface that was popular for many years was named
> for a Seagate 5MB drive. (6MB unformatted, the last digit of the number.)
I remember installing one - the *only* one we had at Torch. The
care we took in handling and fitting that drive would have probably been
more appropriate to nitroglycerine. They were not cheap, and we were only
allowed one to develop the hard disc model with.
> I believe that was the beginning of the 5.25 inch drives.
> (Or at least the first of the 5.25in to sell in reasonable numbers.)
I think you are right, it was certainly the first I saw or heard
of.
> Before that were 8 and 14 inch drives, both of which started small
ISTR a 15" Priam on a big MP/M box and the delightful command
priamoff which tended to slow the system down a tad.
CBFalconer
>
> Michael Black wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Dennis Ritchie wrote:
> >
> > > vz24_...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there
> > > > ever any smaller?
> > >
> > > Plenty.
> > >
> > > Digital RS64, ca. 1970, 128KB.
> > > Digital RS11, 512KB.
> > >
> > > We didn't have the first, but the second was the first
> > > disk we were able to get for our first PDP-11.
> > >
About 1978 or so I published a proposed specification for a 16 bit
bus, with a 24 bit addressing field, in Dr. Dobbs. The idea was
to prevent an abortion like the S100 bus arising for the newer
round of chips. At the time I thought I was providing for
essentially unlimited memory addressing.
--
Chuck F (cbfal...@yahoo.com) (cbfal...@XXXXworldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
(Remove "XXXX" from reply address. yahoo works unmodified)
mailto:u...@ftc.gov (for spambots to harvest)
CBFalconer
> ever any smaller?
>
> On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable
> random-access media?
>
> Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten
> how much they held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of
> a single-sided 5 1/4" floppy.
As used in CP/M, in standard IBM format, they held 241 K after
reserving two tracks for the boot system load. That was single
sided, single density. Double density double sided, never a
standard, held a staggering megabyte. Access and transfer times
were about 1/2 that of 5" drives, about 32 microsec per byte
single density. Double density 5" matched single density 8"
fairly well.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
> I'm still maintaining an SCO port of our software on a 386/40 with
> 4 megs of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. I recently dug up an ISA
> NIC and the machine is now happily living on my LAN (it's much
> easier to FTP the source code to it than to use sneakernet).
If you have a BSD x86 box on the net you could run the build under
SCO emulation, it might be a tad faster.
Bob Powell
smaller?
>
Have some platters here from a Univac hard drive, early 60's I think, that
were 250K bytes per side. You used one side at a time -- took the cartridge
out of the drive and flipped it over to use the other side. Square
cartridge about 16" per side, 1" thick. Looked like a jumbo version of the
modern 3.5" diskette, with a little metal door that opened to expose the
platter when inserted into the drive. The platters were ground chrome or
such, with optical properties about like a laboratory front-surface mirror.
Have used them as wall mirrors for the last 20 years.
Chris Hedley
> It's fun telling these people about my first job. It was at a
> service bureau, where we ran payrolls, accounts receivable, etc.
> for many small companies around town - on a Univac 9300 with 16K
> (not megs, I tell them, but K) of memory, and zero disk space -
> we did it all on cards. When we upgraded to 32K of memory we
> didn't know what to do with all that space - although hanging
> a couple of disk drives (2314 clones) on the machine helped.
> We were able to do _lots_ more with a couple of 20MB drives
> online - enough that it was worth the $20K or so that they
> each cost.
>
> Can we start the Four Yorkshiremen skit now?
Probably! But moving on a few years, I had my first "home computer"
(as PCs were called back then) with that enormous 32K of memory; I
somehow doubt that the kiddies of today who've grown up with their
ridiculously overspecced multimedia PCs would believe that my rather
modest system could do a reasonable speech simulation with a 4K (I
think) program running on a 894KHz processor (no, not a typo, for any
youngsters reading, I do mean kilo) through a 6 bit D to A convertor.
Nice machine, only let down by the fact that its ROM contained MICROS~1
Basic; they were already causing problems even before the PC was launched.
I'd loved to have been able to afford a floppy disc system for it and
Flex or OS/9 but they were just too far out of my reach at the time...
Chris.
Bob Willard
>
> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
>
> Steve
Sure - the first system I programmed had a 64KB disk (12.8Kwords), to
supplement the 5KB (1Kword) Williams-tube RAM.
As for GPRs -- sure, the system had one; how many do you need? And,
as my instructor (Jim Snyder) noted - floating point hardware is
only needed by lazy programmers.
--
Cheers, Bob
Arargh!
>I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
Sure, an IBM 1311 was 2,000,000 chars in move mode, and 1,800,000
chars in load mode. That's just barely less than 2 meg. And these
are 6 and 7 bit chars, not 8. :-)
And an IBM 650 had a 2000 word {10 digits and sign} DRUM for memory.
At 4 bits per digit, that would be about 10,000 bytes. Of course, this
is a hard DRUM, not a hard disk. :-)
ISTR that a diablo 33? was less than 2 meg, but on that I am not sure.
I know that a Diablo 44 is 5+5, so that doesn't count.
The smallest Seagate drive I can find a reference for is a ST-406
which is a 5 meg MFM drive. Hmm, Seems that an ST-506 is the same.
--
Arargh (at enteract dot com) http://www.arargh.com
Paul Guertin
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2001 17:39:59 -0000
> "Paul Grayson" <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable random-access
> > media?
>
> Hmm, first thought was 78K Apple ][ discs
Apple II 5 1/4-inch disks were 35 tracks x 13 sectors x 256 bytes, or
113.75K under the first versions of Apple DOS, later upgraded to 16
sectors per track for 140k.
Paul Guertin
p...@sff.net
Foobar T. Clown
>
> You can still run 1 to 4 people on a 40Mb hard drive with 4Mb of RAM,
> provided they use 9600 baud ASCII terminals and run simple text mode
Four is not impressive. Forty is impressive, but for that you're
gonna need front-end processors.
-- Foo!
Don Quixote
>Thanks, Al. I guess I'll score one for not quite faded memory.
>
>.....which kicked in a reminiscence that might not be out of place here.
>
>The first machine I worked on had a drum with less than 1 million bits
>on it. It was about 15" diameter and about 12" high. It was sufficient
>to collect, store and distribute realtime share trading data to every
>broker's desk in Australia (or anywhere for that matter, it's entire
>contents were broadcast every revolution to any number of 'slave
>outputs' which fed four 'data retrievers', each of which could talk
>serial to 16 premises, where up to 64 desk units were located.) It was
>Reuters/Ultronic Systems Corporation (what a name!) Stockmaster service.
This was some sort of license from GTE, or the other way around?
>It was a complete hardware only system. Took its feed from a Honeywell
>200 at the Sydney Stock Exchange. The competition at the time was
>Quotron, fed from Melbourne Stock Exchange's PDP-10.
Quotron must have been very young at the time, yes? At the time I worked for
GTE, then MTTR, then ADP, they were not much competition for Quotron. The
few large houses left were sweetheart deals. Except maybe Bache, GTE was quite
entrenched there.
>The slave output watched the SICs (stock codes) whistle past on five
Was this the infamous SGS, or Second Generation Slave, or a predecessor?
>tracks. If 'coincidence' was preserved for four bit times (the SIC was 4
>characters, each 5 bits), then the next four bit times would select BCD
>data from 3 of 30 tracks, yielding 3 digits of stock price data to be
>sent serially over 1200 Baud modems to the brokers' premises.
ARRRRGH!
I had killed those brain cells!
>Their desk units, which looked like old fashioned adding machines,
>displayed the result on three Nixie tubes where the roll of paper would
>have been. The keyboards had four columns each with 32 alphabetically
>labelled keys and one column of 10 price selector keys. Slotted bars
>under the keys leant on microswitches, whose states were scanned to
>assemble the next request to be serialised back to the data centre where
>the drum was.
>The desk unit memory was three Beam-X tubes. They were GT size metal
>covered cans, inside which were 10 anodes hiding behind a 10 cylindrical
>magnets, themselves standing in a cylindrical arrangement (think
>Stonehenge). If you kicked the grids with the right voltage all the
>current would go to only one of the anodes until it was kicked again.
>One Beam-X, one Nixie. Memories are made of this!
I saw one 'ticker', a wall mounted scrolling display of NYSE still in use at
a PB office, 610 Fifth in New York I think it was. This was 1983 or 1984, and I
was told it was the last in *mumble*. Certainly the last in New York. It was
all Nixie tube, none of that air flipped stuff the Dow Jones (Was Reuters,
right?) used!
>Only three digits per price? We left it to the brokers to put the
>decimal point in the right place. For trading volume the LSD was the
>exponent!
>
>It was a sensation in its day. Helped in no small way to ramp up the the
>infamous 'Mining Boom' in the Australian market in the very early 1970's.
>
>The whole design was so incredibly bit efficient. All the serial stuff
>was full duplex, practically unheard-of at the time. Timing and coding
>all fell elegantly into place. The Ultronics engineers seemed to have a
>penchant for recycling army surplus hardware, like those Beam-X and
>nixie tubes.
>A later desk unit controller (Videomaster) used surplus
>WW2 teletype 'stunt box' acoustic delay lines for memory. A little out
>of place amid hardware using start-of-the-art [1] TI 7400 gates and
>Fairchild 9300 shift registers.
It was my unfortunate displeasure to work on several of these. It seemed a
tight system, but due to a strike and subsequent loss of employees and
knowledge, no one knew what the hell to do. Plug and chug for several months
until clue settled in.
The only delay line I recall was prone to cause display errors, and I kept
a handful of them at a site downtown, but I cannot recall the name of the
brokerage. The failure of this component would cause incorrect symbols
to be displayed on the VDU. FS-1 (and by then FS-1 Phase II) had replaced all
but a handful of the Videomaster units. Most due to cost, the FS-1 being more
expensive. Eventually the VM-1 became more expensive to maintain when
MTTRs were not met, so those few were replaced at little to no cost, except
for this one firm. A few months after it was replaced the first production
Convergent NGENs were on desktops: ADP and PB had been testing them for a year
or two by then I think. It was 1998 or so when I sold my last NGEN (known by
then almost exclusively as a Burroughs B25), but I still have my blue book for
the FS-1!
>The Stockmaster logic was all constructed from logic boards containing
>either 12 3-NORs or 6 flip-flops. Every transistor was a 2N404.
I liked a lot of those systems, I could actually fix them.
>In the very early days, I remember the Australian Post Office (as it was
>then called) issuing a press release that there were 110 modems in
>operation in Australia. 100 of them were for us.
>
>Somehow I conned my boss into buying two PDP8-e's to use Stockmaster's
>data to typeset the share tables in the newspapers and that got me out
>of the hardware before they found me out.
>
>[1] It was a typo, but I like it.
So did I.
Thank you, you Bastard.
Now I shall have to drink, and search for my blue book.
CBFalconer
In 1974 we ran 16 terminals, a mixture of 110, 300, and 2400 baud,
on an HP3000 with 50M disk and 128kb memory. Sometimes things got
slow.
Charles Richmond
(hundred...not thousand) chip in it. The full-height floppy drive
allowed you to store 70kb on a single-sided 5 1/4" floppy disk.
Also, it only allowed you to store 16 files...no more. It had a fixed
directory structure that only allowed 16 files.
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Charles and Francis Richmond <rich...@plano.net> |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Hank Oredson
"Paul Grayson" <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9srltf$fku$1...@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net...
> news:cb24ba4b.0111...@posting.google.com...
>
> > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
> smaller?
>
> On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable random-access
> media?
>
> Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they
> held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
> floppy.
Standard 8" SSSD floppy held 241k of data.
Atari format 5-1/4 was 88k AFAIR.
Have a whole bunch of each ... that I can no longer read ...
> The awfully badly designed Sinclair Microdrive, which was effectivly a
> shrunken 8-track, had a capacity of approximatly 80KB, although this would
> increase after multiple re-formats due to tape stretch! Luckily only ICL
> outside of Sinclair used these things.
--
... Hank
Let loose the cats of war,
sleek and fast and strong.
They will seek and kill,
the evil we have found.
Hank Oredson
"CBFalconer" <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3BF1852A...@yahoo.com...
> Paul Grayson wrote:
> >
> > <vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> >
> > > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there
> > ever any smaller?
> >
> > On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable
> > random-access media?
> >
> > Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten
> > how much they held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of
> > a single-sided 5 1/4" floppy.
>
> As used in CP/M, in standard IBM format, they held 241 K after
> reserving two tracks for the boot system load. That was single
> sided, single density. Double density double sided, never a
> standard, held a staggering megabyte. Access and transfer times
> were about 1/2 that of 5" drives, about 32 microsec per byte
> single density. Double density 5" matched single density 8"
> fairly well.
DSDD 8" could hold 1.38 MB when formatted 1024 byte sectors,
9 sectors/track. I have a few formatted at 1.6 MB, have forgotten
the details of short inter-sector gap, use of more than 77 tracks, etc.
There are dozens of oddball DSDD formats for the 8" disks.
Peter Ibbotson
news:9srtpa$1e2$1...@laurel.tc.umn.edu...
> It did have a few neat features: it was word-addressable, so you could
> ask for anything from ONE word, to 4K words, starting at any word.
> And DMA'ed too, none of this PIO stuff still extant on PC's.
Actually very little is done with PIO nowadays, the original reason for
using it was because PIO (rep insw) was faster than the DMA system fitted to
the original AT.
jrla...@shell.golden.net
Paul Grayson <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they
>held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
>floppy.
256KBytes if I remember correctly. Actually 2002 sectors of 128 bytes
each. This was on an Intel MDS system (blue box). As I typed this I
realized that was the double sided version. That would make the single
sided version 128KBytes.
--
john R. Latala
jrla...@golden.net
Elliott Roper
<hnp3vtcs216ncpvr9...@news.fishead.meowkitty.com>,
Don Quixote <spam...@whitehouse.gov.invalid> wrote:
> Elliott Roper might have said:
<snip>
>>It was Reuters/Ultronic Systems Corporation (what a name!)
Stockmaster service.
>
> This was some sort of license from GTE, or the other way around?
I think it was the other way round. GTE bought Ultronics about 1973 I
think.
I spent a few weeks at Mt Laurel working on message assembler software
for the 2GS about that time. The Ultronics people were a fabulous crowd.
They were looking at an RCA processor that was part of the deal to
replace the Univacs (tourist gossip, I was nowhere near the
discussions). That was close to the last serious work I did at Reuters.
I joined DEC soon after that.
> Quotron must have been very young at the time, yes?
So were we all! The quotron desk unit spat out strips of paper with
prices on 'em. Oh how we laughed!
At the time I worked
> for
> GTE, then MTTR, then ADP, they were not much competition for Quotron. The
> few large houses left were sweetheart deals. Except maybe Bache, GTE was
> quite
> entrenched there.
>
> > If 'coincidence' was preserved for four bit times (the SIC was 4
> >characters, each 5 bits), then the next four bit times would select BCD
> >data from 3 of 30 tracks, yielding 3 digits of stock price data to be
> >sent serially over 1200 Baud modems to the brokers' premises.
>
> ARRRRGH!
>
> I had killed those brain cells!
Yeah. I thought I had too.
As I wrote the post, more and more of it came back.
>
<snip>
> >A later desk unit controller (Videomaster) used surplus
> >WW2 teletype 'stunt box' acoustic delay lines for memory. A little out
> >of place amid hardware using start-of-the-art [1] TI 7400 gates and
> >Fairchild 9300 shift registers.
>
> It was my unfortunate displeasure to work on several of these. It seemed a
> tight system, but due to a strike and subsequent loss of employees and
> knowledge, no one knew what the hell to do. Plug and chug for several months
> until clue settled in.
AARGH! You remember the fiendish character generation logic? The
interline gaps held data for another VDU. I thought I had killed those
brain cells.
>
> The only delay line I recall was prone to cause display errors, and I kept
> a handful of them at a site downtown, but I cannot recall the name of the
> brokerage. The failure of this component would cause incorrect symbols
> to be displayed on the VDU. FS-1 (and by then FS-1 Phase II) had replaced
> all
> but a handful of the Videomaster units. Most due to cost, the FS-1 being
> more
> expensive. Eventually the VM-1 became more expensive to maintain when
> MTTRs were not met, so those few were replaced at little to no cost, except
> for this one firm. A few months after it was replaced the first production
> Convergent NGENs were on desktops: ADP and PB had been testing them for a
> year
> or two by then I think. It was 1998 or so when I sold my last NGEN (known by
> then almost exclusively as a Burroughs B25), but I still have my blue book
> for
> the FS-1!
That would have been just after my time. Some of my colleagues in London
went on to develop the original Reuters 'Monitor' machines. The very
early trading things based on PDP8-A. In a very HAL like aluminium box.
>
>
> >The Stockmaster logic was all constructed from logic boards containing
> >either 12 3-NORs or 6 flip-flops. Every transistor was a 2N404.
>
> I liked a lot of those systems, I could actually fix them.
Yep, they were neat. We used to fix Terminii on site with a high
impedance earphone instead of lugging a 'scope about.
> Thank you, you Bastard.
>
> Now I shall have to drink, and search for my blue book.
You're welcome.
>
>
jmfb...@aol.com
"Paul Grayson" <mu0...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>smaller?
>
>On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable random-access
>media?
>
they
>held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
>floppy.
>
>shrunken 8-track, had a capacity of approximatly 80KB, although this would
>increase after multiple re-formats due to tape stretch! Luckily only ICL
>outside of Sinclair used these things.
DECtapes.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Foobar T. Clown
>
> Can we start the Four Yorkshiremen skit now?
*FOUR* Yorkshiremen? You were lucky! Back in my day we only had ONE
Yorkshireman, and *HE* had Alzheimer's.
-- Foo!
jchausler
Chris Hedley wrote:
> > Can we start the Four Yorkshiremen skit now?
What's this?
> Probably! But moving on a few years, I had my first "home computer"
> (as PCs were called back then) with that enormous 32K of memory; I
> somehow doubt that the kiddies of today who've grown up with their
> ridiculously overspecced multimedia PCs would believe that my rather
> modest system could do a reasonable speech simulation with a 4K (I
> think) program running on a 894KHz processor (no, not a typo, for any
> youngsters reading, I do mean kilo) through a 6 bit D to A convertor.
At the risk of further polluting this thread MY first home computer had
less that 1 KB and then I upgraded it to a whole 8KB. In this I ran
editor's, assembler's, basic and some games..........."Offline" storage
for this system was audio cassette and paper tape. It was several
years before I could afford floppys and a "real" OS for this 6800
based system.
In the early 70's at my first "real job" we had a DG Nova 1200 with a
512KB (but referred to as 256Kword) fixed head disk made by IIRC
Alpha Data. Shortly thereafter these were replaced by DG's own
"dreaded" NovaDisk which IIRC was about the same size. This was
a multi platter sealed unit with a high failure rate.
Chris
AN GETTTO$;DUMP;RUN,ALGOL,TAPE
$$
Kevin Handy
...
>
> A modern desktop system spends about as much CPU time on eye candy
> as a 1970s weather forecasting system dedicated to the job AFAICT (more when
> running xlockmore). You have to strip all the cruft away and tune a PC
> properly to see what one can really do compared to a PDP-11 or a 360. The
> ftp.freesoftware.com record of 2 terabytes of ftp traffic in one day is
> indicative of what a PC (500MHz Xeon) can do.
If you want an odd comparison, emulating a PDP-11 (using Bob Supnik's
simh)
on a 1Ghz Linux box is much faster than running a real 11/83.
> Of course many linux distributions don't just throw in the kitchen
> sink, they supply the entire catalogue of sinks. This can make 2Gb tight :)
>
> Show them 512k of core and ask them to imagine how much it sould
> cost to make today.
Many PCs today have more RAM than many business systems had disk.
An RD54 drive (Digital) was about 400MB. Most people were happy
with one, or maybe two of these (for disk space, but they would
complain when the drives started to screech after a few years).
Michael Roach
CBFalconer <cbfal...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>"Foobar T. Clown" wrote:
>>
>> Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
>> >
>> > You can still run 1 to 4 people on a 40Mb hard drive with 4Mb of RAM,
>> > provided they use 9600 baud ASCII terminals and run simple text mode
>> > applications. [...]
>>
>> Four is not impressive. Forty is impressive, but for that you're
>> gonna need front-end processors.
>
>In 1974 we ran 16 terminals, a mixture of 110, 300, and 2400 baud,
>on an HP3000 with 50M disk and 128kb memory. Sometimes things got
>slow.
From 1972 to 1977 (and a little beyond) we used TSS/8 on a PDP-8/I
connected to middle and high schools in the school district. 15
teletypes and one VT05, connecting via modem at 110 baud through a DC08,
16kb (12 bit) core and I don't quite remember the disk or capacity
(RF08?) I never learned any details about the DC08 and don't know what
it's processing capabilities are. Sometimes things got slow during
the school day, though keyboard response rarely suffered.
--
Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.
glen herrmannsfeldt
>>
>>> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
>>smaller?
>>
>>On a related note, what was the smallest capacity removable
>>random-access media?
>>
>>Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten
>>how much they held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of
>>a single-sided 5 1/4" floppy.
Original, single side single density floppies would be about 300k.
Double side or double density 600k, and double side double density 1200k.
(snip)
>DECtapes.
Yes, a real direct access storage device. I heard someone once used
one for swapping on a PDP-10 just to see if it could do it.
(Not for very long, though.)
-- glen
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Ooops memory error - something was 78k about then.
Karl Kleine
[........]
>>DECtapes.
> Yes, a real direct access storage device. I heard someone once used
> one for swapping on a PDP-10 just to see if it could do it.
> (Not for very long, though.)
> -- glen
I once put a 6th edition Unix filesystem on a DECtape. Made a nice view
with the tape travelling between the inode area and the data blocks.
The Unix box was a PDP-11/45, of course, which usually ran with 2 RK05s
for file system space and an RF11 for swap (and /tmp ? i don't recall).
Timeframe: 1977 / 78.
The DECtape made you really understand the parts of the file system,
from the superblock to the use of inode area and access of data blocks.
"Now let's do a find /dectape -exec wc {} \; to make it spin..." :-)
kl
Eric Smith
> Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they
> held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4"
> floppy.
The most common soft-sectored 8-inch floppy formats were:
sect bytes
per total chan. per total
sides tracks track sect code sect bytes
----- ------ ----- ----- ----- ----- -------
SSSD 1 77 26 2002 FM 128 256256
SSDD 1 77 26 2002 MFM 256 512512
DSDD 2 77 26 4004 MFM 256 1025024
There were also less common variants like DSSD, and larger sector sizes
(mostly on DD disks) such as 512 and 1024 bytes.
There were some oddball formats like M2FM on Intel development systems,
and modified MFM data with FM marks on DEC RX02s. These had the same
capacity as standard SSDD format but were not interchangeable.
And there were *really* oddball formats like the Ohio Scientific stuff,
which used a UART as a disk controller. That's right, every byte on the
disk had start and stop bits!
Michael Roach
Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Nov 2001 20:16:55 -0500
>Paul Guertin <p...@sff.net> wrote:
>
>> Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>> > Hmm, first thought was 78K Apple ][ discs
>>
>> Apple II 5 1/4-inch disks were 35 tracks x 13 sectors x 256 bytes, or
>> 113.75K under the first versions of Apple DOS, later upgraded to 16
>> sectors per track for 140k.
>
> Ooops memory error - something was 78k about then.
Northstar hard sectored 5 1/4 floppies?
--
Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking
distance.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
"Foobar T. Clown" <fu...@gazonk.del> wrote:
> *FOUR* Yorkshiremen? You were lucky! Back in my day we only had ONE
> Yorkshireman, and *HE* had Alzheimer's.
You had a Yorkshire ? Damn lucky! All we had was Telford.
Chris Hedley
> You had a Yorkshire ? Damn lucky! All we had was Telford.
Okay, you were entitled to get your own back after my "student" remark,
but did you have to mention bloody Telford?! I think I've suddenly
become more depressed.
Chris.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
never...@panics.com.invalid (Michael Roach) wrote:
> > Ooops memory error - something was 78k about then.
>
> Northstar hard sectored 5 1/4 floppies?
Now there's a memory - especially the one that got spray painted
for an extra hundred quid because it was a 'special model' we had in
'the other place' and we could get it 'run over' in a couple of hours :)
They were pricy boxes but they moved out of CCS at a steady
rate. There was one in the window of the shop for a while, until it
got stolen on a busy saturday afternoon.
William Robison
Goran Larsson wrote:
>
> In article <qhitcdry...@ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
> Eric Smith <eric-no-s...@brouhaha.com> wrote:
>
> > There were also less common variants like DSSD, and larger sector sizes
> > (mostly on DD disks) such as 512 and 1024 bytes.
>
> Some disks were DSDD but had the first one or two tracks in single
> density. This was done so they could be used to boot systems without
> support for double density in the boot proms.
>
> --
> Göran Larsson hoh AT approve DOT se
Heh,(chuckle) that brings back memories...
DSDD format with 2740 format on track 0,
1K sectors on track 1 with 2-76 being any
format that was convenient for the job at
hand... Usually 1K sectors as that was all
the memory available on the controller for the
sector buffer...
ot the single sided format with track 1
setup with four 4K sectors (that controller
didn't have a sector buffer and wasn't limited)...
But for really big cabinets, why hasn't anyone
mentioned Fastrand or FH423...
-Willy
John Savard
wrote, in part:
>Don Chiasson wrote:
>> <vz24_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>> news:cb24ba4b.0111...@posting.google.com...
>> > I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any
>> smaller?
>> The LGP30 used a drum with no moving heads (not a disk) of 2048
>> 32 bit words as its
>> main storage rather than core memory. The machine first came out in the
>> late 1950's and cost
>> about $50k. A couple of sites turned up on a search:
>> http://www.computer-museum.org/collections/royal_tube.html
>> http://world.std.com/~reinhold/early.computers.html#LGP-30
>> First computer I ever used.
>There are a couple of LGP-30 manuals on Al Kossow's WEB site:
> <http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/royal/>
>Take a look...it might be "deja vu" all over again...
I never used one, but I did see one - it was preserved as a museum
piece at the University of Alberta computer center, because one of
them was their first computer.
And that computer is somewhat famous, because a weather simulation
running on one turned out to be the first clue that led to chaos
theory.
Brian Inglis
3 DH-11(+DM-11BB) modem control 16 line muxes on a DEC PDP-11/70
used to do the trick for our VT100 based accounting dept. back
then. DH-11s have a 15 character+status FIFO IIRC at least for
output, not sure about input.
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
--
Brian....@CSi.com (Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca)
fake address use address above to reply
tos...@aol.com ab...@aol.com ab...@yahoo.com ab...@hotmail.com ab...@msn.com ab...@sprint.com ab...@earthlink.com ab...@cadvision.com ab...@ibsystems.com u...@ftc.gov
spam traps
Heinz W. Wiggeshoff
>
> Telford? Luxury. All we had was Leicester Market and they had
> nothing to sell but fish gone stale.
Funny, I was just reading about that in All You Can Eat, by Linda
McQuaig. Lampreys, in fact.
Fubar T. Clown
computers: [...]
O.K., This is not impressive, but it is obscure: Sometime in the mid-
to-late 1980's I used to work for one of two companies that shared a
UNIX box. The machine was an authentic IBM-PC/AT with two interesting
ISA bus adaptors in it. One adaptor was a fairly straightforward 16-
port serial card. The other one had a Motorola 68000 processor and,
IIRC, 8 Megabytes of memory. UNIX ran on the 68000, while the PC ran
an MS-DOS program that effectively turned it into an I/O processor for
the UNIX system.
The company that owned the system was using it to cross-compile
software for a 68020-based computer that they were designing.
I worked for a consulting company about a mile up the road. We had a
leased line and some Black Box networking equipment to connect our
terminals to their system at 9600 baud.
I don't know how many people ever actively used the thing at one time
but there were eight or nine of us with terminals connected to it,
and I don't remember anyone ever complaining about the response time.
-- Foo!
Mel Wilson
"Foobar T. Clown" <fu...@gazonk.del> wrote:
>Yorkshireman, and *HE* had Alzheimer's.
And Alzheimer never forgave him for that.
Mel.
David Gesswein
Al Kossow <a...@spies.com> wrote:
>
>I had a long talk with one of the designers at DECWorld this past
>summer about the DF32 and RF08.
>
>The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
>it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
>were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
>
My manual says nickel cobalt, looks like chrome. They tried yet another
material? I think PC hard drives used nickel cobalt at least for a while
after the iron oxide days.
If people are interested in seeing one I have pictures and info at
http://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/dfds32.shtml
No IC's used.
David Gesswein
http://www.pdp8.net/ -- Run an old computer with blinkenlights
Have any PDP-8 stuff you're willing to part with?
Zane H. Healy
> My first Linux system ('93?) was a 386/20 with 6 megs of RAM and a
> 60MB hard drive. It was massive overkill. Even with a 10MB partition
> with DOS on it to do embedded x86 development, I had plenty of free
> space. No X though.
My first was a 486/33 w/8MB RAM, and a 20MB partition in January of '92, a
short time later I added a 2nd 200MB HD so I could have more space for
Linux, and bought a 14.4k modem so I could download software for Linux
faster. In '93 I upped the RAM to an amazing 20MB! The whole reason for
the RAM upgrade was X-Windows.
What was painful is when I had to switch to my old 386sx/16 laptop with 4MB
RAM in '94 (I traveled a lot for three years). I did add a Math Coprocessor
and a 340MB HD to it. The amazing thing is I was running X-Windows part of
the time on that thing! Though basically the only X app I used was Xdvi so
I could preview before printing. Thankfully a year later I was able to
upgrade to a Pentium 90 laptop.
These days I don't run Linux on a system with less than 256MB RAM, but then
I don't tend to swap either.
Zane
Nico de Jong
glen herrmannsfeldt skrev i meddelelsen <9su9og$a...@gap.cco.caltech.edu>...
>Original, single side single density floppies would be about 300k.
>Double side or double density 600k, and double side double density 1200k.
>(snip)
---
The original IBM 3741 had 73 track * 26 sectors * 128 bytes which amounts
to 242944 bytes.
It had some 5 spare trackes, but they were accessible only through the ERMAP
sector on track 0 (segment 5 ? ) which was used as a redirection feature.
>
>Yes, a real direct access storage device. I heard someone once used
>one for swapping on a PDP-10 just to see if it could do it.
>(Not for very long, though.)
---
I once used a single sided single density floppy as an overlay device for a
local-authority application (writing cheques etc.) The system was a Philips
P6000, with 2 single sided floppies and 32K bytes core memory. It also
featured an ECMA-34 audio cassette 2-track drive, with 250K on a cassette.
It was so clever, that it would change direction automatically !
Nico
>
jmfb...@aol.com
It was a special run on a 48K (36-bit words) machine.
Every word of memory had to be freed up for the data.
I suspect a lot of -10s spent their midnight hours
using a DECtape for their SYS:.
jmfb...@aol.com
c...@ieya.co.REMOVE_THIS.uk (Chris Hedley) wrote:
>According to Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net>:
>> You had a Yorkshire ? Damn lucky! All we had was Telford.
>
>Okay, you were entitled to get your own back after my "student" remark,
<snip>
Oh, but that was such a brilliantly funny line. I'm still
chuckling because of that one.
jmfb...@aol.com
d...@pdp8.net (David Gesswein) wrote:
>In article <aek-131101...@il0502a-dhcp193.apple.com>,
>Al Kossow <a...@spies.com> wrote:
>>
>>I had a long talk with one of the designers at DECWorld this past
>>summer about the DF32 and RF08.
>>
>>The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
>>it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
>>were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
>>
>My manual says nickel cobalt, looks like chrome. They tried yet another
>material? I think PC hard drives used nickel cobalt at least for a while
>after the iron oxide days.
>
>If people are interested in seeing one I have pictures and info at
>http://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/dfds32.shtml
>No IC's used.
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about (although
the cybercrud does not twang any memories), I'm using a platter
as a coaster on one of my bookcases. IIRC, I may even have two
of them.
Elliott Roper
> In article <aek-131101...@il0502a-dhcp193.apple.com>,
> Al Kossow <a...@spies.com> wrote:
> >
> >I had a long talk with one of the designers at DECWorld this past
> >summer about the DF32 and RF08.
> >
> >The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
> >it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
> >were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
> >
Aye. We had to lick Rhodium clean wit' t'tounge!
>
> If people are interested in seeing one I have pictures and info at
> http://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/dfds32.shtml
> No IC's used.
That's the one I remember. ARggh! I think we got PS/8 running off it.
It started life as a swap disk for TSS/8
But soon the RK01s arrived. 1.2MB, mechanical head actuators. RK05 size
cartridge.
Looxury!
David Given
Giles Todd <g...@localhost.at-dot.org> writes:
[...]
> Telford? Luxury. All we had was Leicester Market and they had
> nothing to sell but fish gone stale.
You had fish? Pah! All *we* had were little wriggly invertebrates. And
they were EVIL!
--
+- David Given --------McQ-+ Q. How many surrealists does it take to change a
| Work: d...@tao-group.com | lightbulb?
| Play: d...@cowlark.com | A. Fish.
+- http://www.cowlark.com -+
Al Kossow
> In article <aek-131101...@il0502a-dhcp193.apple.com>,
> Al Kossow <a...@spies.com> wrote:
> >
> >I had a long talk with one of the designers at DECWorld this past
> >summer about the DF32 and RF08.
> >
> >The disc was Rhodium plated (blueish colored) until they found out
> >it was coming off the surface and caused the filters to clog. They
> >were then just chrome plated surfaces, which were waxed.
> >
> My manual says nickel cobalt, looks like chrome. They tried yet another
> material?
They tried Rhodium covering before Nickel Cobalt. The blueish-colored
discs didn't survive in the field very long.
Michael Roach
David Given <d...@pearl.tao.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <cv76vtokihpfll3rf...@4ax.com>,
> Giles Todd <g...@localhost.at-dot.org> writes:
>[...]
>> Telford? Luxury. All we had was Leicester Market and they had
>> nothing to sell but fish gone stale.
>
>You had fish? Pah! All *we* had were little wriggly invertebrates. And
>they were EVIL!
Oh we used to DREAM of EVIL little wriggly invertebrates!
--
.. But we've only fondled the surface of that subject.
-- Virginia Masters
glen herrmannsfeldt
>glen herrmannsfeldt skrev i meddelelsen <9su9og$a...@gap.cco.caltech.edu>...
>>Original, single side single density floppies would be about 300k.
>>Double side or double density 600k, and double side double density 1200k.
>>(snip)
>---
>The original IBM 3741 had 73 track * 26 sectors * 128 bytes which amounts
>to 242944 bytes.
>It had some 5 spare trackes, but they were accessible only through the ERMAP
>sector on track 0 (segment 5 ? ) which was used as a redirection feature.
When did they go to 77 tracks? That is what all the ones I know of use.
-- glen
Gene Wirchenko
>Elliott Roper might have said:
[snip]
>>A later desk unit controller (Videomaster) used surplus
>>WW2 teletype 'stunt box' acoustic delay lines for memory. A little out
>>of place amid hardware using start-of-the-art [1] TI 7400 gates and
>>Fairchild 9300 shift registers.
[snip]
>>[1] It was a typo, but I like it.
>
>So did I.
As did I. I submitted it to ahbou and the moderator who read it
liked it, too.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.
K.J. Seefried
wrote:
>vz24_...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>> I have heard of 2 and 5 megabyte hard disks, but were there ever any smaller?
>
>
>Digital RS64, ca. 1970, 128KB.
>Digital RS11, 512KB.
>
Were not the RSxx drives drums rather than disks, with fixed heads, or
am I thinking of something else?
Ken
Tim Shoppa
Physically they always were 77 tracks. What Mr. de Jong is
referring to is the IBM filesystem on the floppy and how the
77 physical tracks were mapped by the error map into 73 logical tracks.
DEC called this IBM filesystem "Interchange Format", and RT-11
EXCHANGE is able to read and write it. I believe it may have
even gotten an ANSI standard number.
Tim.
Brian Inglis
wrote:
>glen herrmannsfeldt <g...@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>
> [........]
>
>>>DECtapes.
>
>> Yes, a real direct access storage device. I heard someone once used
>> one for swapping on a PDP-10 just to see if it could do it.
>> (Not for very long, though.)
>
>> -- glen
>
>I once put a 6th edition Unix filesystem on a DECtape. Made a nice view
>with the tape travelling between the inode area and the data blocks.
>The Unix box was a PDP-11/45, of course, which usually ran with 2 RK05s
>for file system space and an RF11 for swap (and /tmp ? i don't recall).
>Timeframe: 1977 / 78.
>
>The DECtape made you really understand the parts of the file system,
>from the superblock to the use of inode area and access of data blocks.
>"Now let's do a find /dectape -exec wc {} \; to make it spin..." :-)
That's just sick! ;^>
Anyone remember how many tracks they had, and were they
duplicated, or is there info at some URL?
Huw Davies
> Many PCs today have more RAM than many business systems had disk.
> An RD54 drive (Digital) was about 400MB. Most people were happy
> with one, or maybe two of these (for disk space, but they would
> complain when the drives started to screech after a few years).
The first VAX I manged (an 11/780 in 1982) had 4Mb of memory and
a total of 120Mb of disk (two RM03s). I like to point out that
my iPAQ has tens (if not hundreds) times more processing power,
more memory and lots more disk and I can carry it (try that with
an 11/780). Better graphics too!
--
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.D...@kerberos.davies.net.au
| "If God had wanted soccer played in the
| air, the sky would be painted green"
Huw Davies
> DECtapes.
But unlike the Sinclair tape these were engineered (they came
from Digital after all), reliable, block structured, fun to watch
and SLOW!!!!
Ignatios Souvatzis
Huw Davies <cc...@adslgw.davies.net.au> writes:
> The first VAX I manged (an 11/780 in 1982) had 4Mb of memory and
> a total of 120Mb of disk (two RM03s). I like to point out that
> my iPAQ has tens (if not hundreds) times more processing power,
> more memory and lots more disk and I can carry it (try that with
> an 11/780). Better graphics too!
Sure. But does it have a better I/O Bandwidth?
-is
jmfb...@aol.com
<8D2EF5CC0604F713.C210CE50...@lp.airnews.net>,
Huw Davies <cc...@adslgw.davies.net.au> wrote:
>jmfb...@aol.com wrote:
>
>> DECtapes.
>
>But unlike the Sinclair tape these were engineered (they came
>from Digital after all), reliable, block structured, fun to watch
>and SLOW!!!!
Faster than cards. Besides, you could stomp on them, drop them
in the mud, throw them in your trunk subjecting them to very hot
and very cold temps and you still could read them.
Another advantage, that AFAICT only I was able to do, was I could
carry about 2 dozen of them by putting them on my arm as bracelets.
That left my hands free for listings and other stuff. Pencils
were always behind my ears.
jmfb...@aol.com
That's what I thought, too, but this cybercrud side of the biz
was always a weak point in my memory banks. I don't think I
ever heard of an RS64. The only one I think I've met is
an RS04.
John Francis
Brian Inglis <Brian.do...@SystematicSw.ab.ca> wrote:
>On 14 Nov 2001 18:18:41 GMT, Karl Kleine <kle...@fh-jena.de>
>wrote:
>>
>>from the superblock to the use of inode area and access of data blocks.
>>"Now let's do a find /dectape -exec wc {} \; to make it spin..." :-)
>
>That's just sick! ;^>
>Anyone remember how many tracks they had, and were they
>duplicated, or is there info at some URL?
(Assuming you are talking about DECtapes)
I think they were three tracks, duplicated. Folklore certainly
suggested that you could, with the appropriate software, recover
data successfully from a DECtape even after burning a hole in it
with a cigarette. I never came across anyone with first-hand
knowledge of this, but heard the story from multiple sources.
Then there was the default block interleave factor for files ...
Prof Karl Kleine
> Kevin Handy <k...@srv.net> wrote:
[.......]
> The first VAX I manged (an 11/780 in 1982) had 4Mb of memory and
> a total of 120Mb of disk (two RM03s). I like to point out that
> my iPAQ has tens (if not hundreds) times more processing power,
> more memory and lots more disk and I can carry it (try that with
> an 11/780). Better graphics too!
But does your iPAQ have a fan like that of the 11/780 ??? :-))
Karl Kleine
[PS: and 'my' 780 in 78 had just 1 or 2MB (I don't recall) and 2 RM03s]
jchausler
jmfb...@aol.com wrote:
> Another advantage, that AFAICT only I was able to do, was I could
> carry about 2 dozen of them by putting them on my arm as bracelets.
> That left my hands free for listings and other stuff. Pencils
> were always behind my ears.
Geeze Barb, your hands must be small, I just took one and tried to
put my hand through it. Even with it squeezed together as much as
possible, I can just my hand through to the point that the tip
of my thumb is out the other side.
In the 70's when I got my first "real job" I was always pissed off
that my employer was using DG NOVA's rather than DEC
PDP-11's as DG didn't have anything as neat as DECtapes.
They did briefly have digital Phillips cassette tapes (as I
believe did DEC) but they never worked that well and of
course when floppies came along all both the cassettes and
DECtapes became history quickly. When I finally got them
switched over to the 11, (early 1980) it was too late.
Chris
AN GETTO$;DUMP;RUN,ALGOL,TAPE
$$
John Francis
Prof Karl Kleine <kle...@fh-jena.de> wrote:
>Huw Davies <cc...@adslgw.davies.net.au> wrote:
>> Kevin Handy <k...@srv.net> wrote:
>[.......]
>> The first VAX I manged (an 11/780 in 1982) had 4Mb of memory and
>> a total of 120Mb of disk (two RM03s). I like to point out that
>> my iPAQ has tens (if not hundreds) times more processing power,
>> more memory and lots more disk and I can carry it (try that with
>> an 11/780). Better graphics too!
>
>But does your iPAQ have a fan like that of the 11/780 ??? :-))
Fan? You want a fan? You should have seen the fans on the prototype
Alpha boxes - they looked (and sounded) like something that might have
come off a Vax (and I don't mean the computer ...)
Michael Wojcik
In article <3BF32DE5...@gazonk.del>, "Fubar T. Clown" <fu...@gazonk.del> writes:
>
> O.K., This is not impressive, but it is obscure: Sometime in the mid-
> to-late 1980's I used to work for one of two companies that shared a
> UNIX box. The machine was an authentic IBM-PC/AT with two interesting
> ISA bus adaptors in it. One adaptor was a fairly straightforward 16-
> port serial card. The other one had a Motorola 68000 processor and,
> IIRC, 8 Megabytes of memory. UNIX ran on the 68000, while the PC ran
> an MS-DOS program that effectively turned it into an I/O processor for
> the UNIX system.
I've run across a couple other variants. Somewhere I have a SRItech
thing that's two ISA-bus cards connected by a ribbon cable. One has
a National Semi 16032 CPU and I think a math coprocessor, plus some
other logic; the other has 8MB RAM. It has a very low serial number
(single or maybe double-digit). I fished it out of someone's waste-
basket at IBM CSC. I once found a listing for it in a _PC Tech
Journal_ hardware guide, but when I called SRItech they claimed to
have no knowledge of it. "Probably ran UNIX", the sales rep guessed.
I assume it used the AT's 286 as a slave processor for I/O.
Then there was IBM's own Outrigger, an MCA card that turned a PS/2
into a PC RT running AOS (BSD 4.2 or 4.3). I don't believe the
Outrigger ever made it to market, but we used them while developing
XGKS and similar products for TCS (Technical Computing Services).
--
Michael Wojcik michael...@microfocus.com
Comms Development, Micro Focus
Department of English, Miami University
Only the obscene machine has persisted
jerky and jockeying and not knowing why
I have never existed. Nor should. -- George Barker
jrla...@shell.golden.net
Huw Davies <cc...@adslgw.davies.net.au> wrote:
>
>> DECtapes.
>
>But unlike the Sinclair tape these were engineered (they came
>from Digital after all), reliable, block structured, fun to watch
>and SLOW!!!!
Way back in the old days I used to beat up on a PDP-12 that had two
DECtapes. Between the front panel lights and the motion of the tapes you
could tell if your compile worked or not.
The -12 used to have a neat program called MAGSPY, or something like that.
It would scroll the data off the DECtape like a Times Square sign. You
could use the ten turn analog input pots to control speed and direction.
One of the programs I was working on sampled a lot of data which got
written to the tape. You could use magspy to examine the data like on a
scrolling oscilloscope.
Fun machine.
--
john R. Latala
jrla...@golden.net
jrla...@shell.golden.net
Huw Davies <cc...@adslgw.davies.net.au> wrote:
>
>The first VAX I manged (an 11/780 in 1982) had 4Mb of memory and
>a total of 120Mb of disk (two RM03s). I like to point out that
>my iPAQ has tens (if not hundreds) times more processing power,
>more memory and lots more disk and I can carry it (try that with
>an 11/780). Better graphics too!
We used to use an 11/780 for developing some recognition software. It
didn't have any trouble keeping up with all two dozen developers at all.
Let's see you do that with your iPAQ!
Charlie Gibbs
writes:
[DECtapes.]
>Another advantage, that AFAICT only I was able to do, was I could
>carry about 2 dozen of them by putting them on my arm as bracelets.
The rest of us had to do it with 9-track tapes.
--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.
I don't read top-posted messages. If you want me to see your reply,
appropriately trim the quoted text and put your reply below it.
John Francis
>
>Way back in the old days I used to beat up on a PDP-12 that had two
>DECtapes. Between the front panel lights and the motion of the tapes you
>could tell if your compile worked or not.
Were they DECtapes or LINCtapes? I thought most PDP-12s had LINCtapes
(look pretty much like a DECtape, except they are left-right reversed).
Tracy Nelson
news:Pine.LNX.4.10.101111...@gloria.cam.org...
> I was recently reading a book
> about Unix administration from 1986, and a small system was
> defined as supporting 1 to 4 people, had a 40MB hard drive, and 1meg
> of ram. He defined a large system as having 1.2gigs of hard drive,
> 16megs of ram and could handle 17 to 500 users.
Wow, I guess I was spoiled and didn't know it! My first job out of college
was as a systems admin (and developer, and mechanic, and...) on an Altos
3068 box (68020 processor with a custom MMU, 1M of memory and a pair of 90M
disks). I supported 8 users and the main complaint was that the printer was
slow. Of course, we were running a simple character-based application
running against a simple database (anybody remember Unify?), but the
response was pretty speedy.
Don Quixote
>I think it was the other way round. GTE bought Ultronics about 1973 I
>think.
Yes, you are correct, alcohol has sparked a few dead synapses into life
and it all comes tumbling back to me. The nurse will be around with my
shot any moment now, I'm sure...
They (GTE) also bought the knowledge and equipment for the FS-1: it was
a Tempo, perhaps from a company of the same name.
> I spent a few weeks at Mt Laurel working on message assembler software
>for the 2GS about that time. The Ultronics people were a fabulous crowd.
>They were looking at an RCA processor that was part of the deal to
>replace the Univacs (tourist gossip, I was nowhere near the
>discussions). That was close to the last serious work I did at Reuters.
Being a lowly Field Circus person, I never got to join in any reindeer
games. I just got to sort them out when they failed on the street, you know?
>I joined DEC soon after that.
The FS-1 top to bottom was:
Big Blue (Forgot model)
BB FEPS (3705? Then 25?)
DEC 11/*mumble*
Umpty FS-1s, in a spread round robin
>> Quotron must have been very young at the time, yes?
>So were we all!
*sighs*
Yes.
>The quotron desk unit spat out strips of paper with
>prices on 'em. Oh how we laughed!
I never saw one doing it, but I saw the paper kept by makers (loser and winners)
commemorating the moment.
>> ARRRRGH!
>>
>> I had killed those brain cells!
>Yeah. I thought I had too.
>As I wrote the post, more and more of it came back.
You obviously don't drink enough. Or too much, maybe.
>AARGH! You remember the fiendish character generation logic? The
>interline gaps held data for another VDU. I thought I had killed those
>brain cells.
With pleasure, sir.
*fiendish grin*
>That would have been just after my time. Some of my colleagues in London
>went on to develop the original Reuters 'Monitor' machines. The very
>early trading things based on PDP8-A. In a very HAL like aluminium box.
Was this the begriming of the, oh, amalgamated perhaps, systems? I can't
recall the name of the manufacturer I want, but they had feeds from any exchange
you wanted, GTE, Telerate, Quotron, DJNS, Reuters, (and others) and their box
emulated them all, and presented a unified or any of several displays?
>> I liked a lot of those systems, I could actually fix them.
>Yep, they were neat. We used to fix Terminii on site with a high
>impedance earphone instead of lugging a 'scope about.
I can say I've done that, but for many years I could take the earpiece
out from a 500 telephone, lay it across any of Dow Jones, NYSE, or ASE
wires and tell if the feed was good or not. Err, not data, but level
and noise, k?
>> Thank you, you Bastard.
>>
>> Now I shall have to drink, and search for my blue book.
>
>You're welcome.
I found the blue book, now I am looking for my personally colour coded with
pencil logic and data flow fold out cheat sheet for the ATT model 40 printer.
I coloured it in a moment of inspiration when I understood not only it but
the add-on logic GTE shoved in there.
I think my father still has the two I left in Virginia in his garage.
--
'Those who can't write, write help flies.'
The Big Pig, in rec.humor
David Gesswein
>>from the superblock to the use of inode area and access of data blocks.
>>"Now let's do a find /dectape -exec wc {} \; to make it spin..." :-)
>
>That's just sick! ;^>
>Anyone remember how many tracks they had, and were they
>duplicated, or is there info at some URL?
>
http://www.pdp8.net/tu56/tu56.shtml (Pictures, some info and a video of
operation)
A section of the maintenance manual for the TC08 controller explaining format.
Scanned document in PDF, about 700k.
http://www.pdp8.net/pdp8cgi/query_docs/tifftopdf.pl/pdp8docs/dec-08-h3da-d-300dpi.pdf?pages=17-33
David Gesswein
http://www.pdp8.net/ -- Run an old computer with blinkenlights
Have any PDP-8 stuff you're willing to part with?
David Gesswein
David Gesswein <d...@pdp8.net> wrote:
>A section of the maintenance manual for the TC08 controller explaining format.
>Scanned document in PDF, about 700k.
>http://www.pdp8.net/pdp8cgi/query_docs/tifftopdf.pl/pdp8docs/dec-08-h3da-d-300dpi.pdf?pages=17-33
>
http://www.pdp8.net/pdp8cgi/query_docs/tifftopdf.pl/pdp8docs/dec-08-h3da-d-300dpi.pdf?pages=17-23
Bernd Felsche
When I were a lad ...
Had a Cromemco CS300 running Unix System V (none of that V.x for
us). CPU was 68010 @ 10MHz with a whopping custom MMU in front of
2MB of core memory. One 45MB hard disk for 6 users running custom
engineering apps (as well as their development), Q-One word
processing and a Today-based accounting application using C-ISAM
files for a database.
Used UUCP to backup critical data to a CS100 with 1MB or RAM.... and
a floppy-tape locally. UUCP was also used for email.
Of course, that was a luxury compared to the previous multi-user
system I used at the University Computer Club. That was an
AM100-based (WD-16 processor at around 200kHz IIRC) S100 system
featuring 64 kilobytes of bank-switched RAM ("top" 32kB was
bank-switched) and a twin 8" floppy (Persci) drive. I think we had
up to 4 users connected at a time; limited somewhat by terminals and
available space in the room.
--
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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X against HTML mail | Copy me into your ~/.signature|
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Eric Smith
> (Assuming you are talking about DECtapes)
> I think they were three tracks, duplicated. Folklore certainly
> suggested that you could, with the appropriate software, recover
> data successfully from a DECtape even after burning a hole in it
> with a cigarette. I never came across anyone with first-hand
> knowledge of this, but heard the story from multiple sources.
Mostly right. There were ten tracks total, which were five
duplicate pairs. Three of the pairs were for data, one pair
for the mark, and one pair for the clock. The mark track stored
codes that delineated the block boundaries, end zones, etc.
The pairs of heads were wired together in parallel, so there was no
way in software to select one head or the other of a pair. The
intent was to handle dropouts; if there was a dropout that affected
one head, it probably wouldn't get the other, due to the physical
arrangement of the tracks. A hole in the tape (if it wasn't *too*
big) had the same effect as a dropout.
jmfb...@aol.com
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
>In article <9t342c$52$2...@bob.news.rcn.net> jmfb...@aol.com (jmfbahciv)
>writes:
>
>[DECtapes.]
>
>>Another advantage, that AFAICT only I was able to do, was I could
>>carry about 2 dozen of them by putting them on my arm as bracelets.
>
>The rest of us had to do it with 9-track tapes.
>
it had to do with sharp edge..maybe being metal had something
to do with it.
jmfb...@aol.com
jchausler <jcha...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
>jmfb...@aol.com wrote:
>
>> Another advantage, that AFAICT only I was able to do, was I could
>> carry about 2 dozen of them by putting them on my arm as bracelets.
>> That left my hands free for listings and other stuff. Pencils
>> were always behind my ears.
>
>Geeze Barb, your hands must be small, I just took one and tried to
>put my hand through it.
I don't think my hands are small.
> .. Even with it squeezed together as much as
>possible, I can just my hand through to the point that the tip
>of my thumb is out the other side.
No, no. Just keep your hand elongated and curl up the knuckles.
But, then again, you probably shouldn't try it just in case
you can't get it off. Having to cut of a rare DECtape would
cause tears.
I did have to be careful to not have any over my elbow area.
Bending an elbow encased in a DECtape tended to cause elbow
damage.
>In the 70's when I got my first "real job" I was always pissed off
>that my employer was using DG NOVA's rather than DEC
>PDP-11's as DG didn't have anything as neat as DECtapes.
Yea, well. Perhaps they couldn't quite copy that design.
DG were ex-DECcies before my time.
>They did briefly have digital Phillips cassette tapes (as I
>believe did DEC) but they never worked that well and of
>course when floppies came along all both the cassettes and
>DECtapes became history quickly. When I finally got them
>switched over to the 11, (early 1980) it was too late.
When floppies came our way, none of us were impressed. You couldn't
even write on the label without damaging them.
jmfb...@aol.com
He might not know the difference if that's all he ever used.
Besides, shouldn't have asked if they were lime-green tapes? ;-)
jrla...@shell.golden.net
I was going to say they were DECtapes but I can't really remember.
Thinking about it now I'm inclined to agree that they probably were
LINCtapes because on the -12 they were standard equipage.