I recall hearing about a UNIVAC shipboard computer where the drum ripped loose from the deck when the ship was maneuvering quickly. And I as there when an IBM 2305 did drivek, after multiple power failures, let out a scream like the wailing of the damned and left nicely polished disks and a pile of brown dust. IBM promised that they would have it up in an absurdly short (but still too long) time - and did.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Gabe Goldberg <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2019 5:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: DASD nostalgia I mentioned a while ago remembering a friend's long-ago story about disk head crashes at DEC, resolved by rotating drive cabinet so platters aligned with loading dock of old mill building (rather than rotating perpendicular to dock's orientation). Problem had been head crashes when trucks backed into loading dock and hit/shook building. I asked my friend Who Was There (and who spent his career in storage architecture/design/etc.). His response: The disk story is, in fact, true. The disks were from Burroughs, single-platter and huge (3 foot diameter) with a head per track, if I recall - no seeking. They were in Building 5, just under the loading docks. They each held about 10MB. We also received another disk from Burroughs (multiple huge horizontal platters, seek arms like boxer's arms, heat exchanger) that was so huge, the freight elevator took it down to the basement lab for testing but couldn't bring it back up again after - we had to partially disassemble it and bring it up in pieces. I think it held 50MB. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
