Nice!
The IBM System/36 at my first real job had a disk cabinet the size of a washing machine with platters that must have been 20" across. The chassis had a ratcheting mechanism to raise the disk pack up to get at the belt for replacement. Good times. -sc From: Kim Longenbaugh [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 9:51 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: OT RE: HP drive sleds I have a paper weigh sitting on my desk right now. It's the hard drive from an Altos multi-user system that ran Xenix. It had a whopping 16K of ram (in dozens and dozens of discrete drams), an 8 inch floppy, and an 8 inch tape drive in a separate cabinet. Both cabinets were crafted from 1/16" aluminum. The power supply would work as a PS for any scientific instrument requiring stable and well-regulated DC. The hard drive is a Quantam 5 Meg drive, and the quality-control sheet still with it says it was tested in 1984. It used a belt to drive the two 8" platters, it has an AC motor for power, and the starting capacitor would work in my washing machine today. The arm supporting the heads looks like a gantry supporting an Atlas missile... I like to spin the disks occasionally to see the giant heads wipe the dust off the platters. I got it too late to try and integrate it with my Vic-20 to replace the cassette drives. ________________________________ From: Angus Scott-Fleming [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 10:45 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OT RE: HP drive sleds On 4 Dec 2009 at 15:42, Sean Rector wrote: > My 1st HD was a 20MB Apple for my ][GS - back in 1987. My first HDD was a $399 20mb Full Height 5-1/4" Seagate for my Zenith Z-152 desktop, probably at the end of '87 or '88. I paid $3k for that machine with 320k of RAM, dual 5-1/4" floppies (no HDD), a green monochrome monitor, and an Okidate ML-92 9-pin printer (which I still have). I souped it up from 4.77 MHz to 7 MHz with a V-20 chip and added RAM to 1 megabyte. Also souped up my modem from a 1200-baud external to a 2400-baud external, after which I could no longer read the Compuserve forums as they downloaded -- had to get OzCIS to download the forums and read them off-line. I ran a Wildcat BBS on that machine for many years .... finally gave it away to my kid's preschool with a bunch of learning games after upgrading it to CGA ;-) -- Angus Scott-Fleming GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona 1-520-895-3270 ~! ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
