Does anyone recall the Wang Labs model 710 disk for the 720 programmable
calculator?
It used 14" brown oxide removable hard disk platters, we lifted the lid
like a top loading washing machine, took a platter out of its paper
sleeve, wiped any dust off with an alcohol pad, placed the platter on
the spindle, closed the cover and pressed the on/off switch to spin it up.
It worked fine, and IMHO was more reliable (and WAY faster) than the
built-in cassette tape drive on the 720.
So if you find a plain 14" brown platter, could be from a Wang 710.
-Robert
On 7/13/26 8:06 AM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
On 7/13/26 02:29, Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 9 Jul 2026, Michael Thompson wrote:
On Jul 9, 2026, at 4:06?AM, Mark Linimon via cctalk
<[email protected]> wrote:
There were a number of manufacturers early on. Rice University
may have had a Bryant (sp?) drive at one time. When I arrived
in 1973 there was a spare platter collecting dust in a storage
area.
Bryant made early drives for CDC, the 6603 if I remember right.
Those have quite large platters.
And Burroughs, too. They also built large fixed-head disk drives for
OEMs (e.g. Telefunken TSP 500)
Years ago I traded some stuff and got a HUGE fixed-head disk (I think
made by VTC) that had a 3 foot diameter single platter that ran at
1200 RPM. It had banks of 8 heads on large ceramic sliders and the
disk was on a linear bearing so that flyweights could load the platter
onto the heads when up to speed. Some experimenting with it (I had
ZERO docs with it) indicated I would have some difficulty getting more
than about a megabyte on it. I forget whether it had 32 or 64
tracks. The max capacity was 256 tracks.
It was used with an accounting/billing system that looked like a
desktop calculator made by Mohawk Data Sciences. I think it was
called a mem-O-ree. This thing was all wire-wrapped and pre-computer.
Jon
