OT: In 15 years, hard drives will seem as quaint as reel-to-reel tape recorders

All operating systems will be stored in MRAM:

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Reply to
Tommy Grand
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Fools have been claiming that for decades now. Hasnt happened and it wont this time either.

Reply to
Rod Speed

When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?

Reply to
John

or bubble memory.

Me too ;-)

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

John wrote

And what stores the OS is a tiny part of total storage anyway.

Yes. You should do the decent thing and top yourself forthwith.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Do you recall programming them by running a wire through them?

Reply to
VWWall

Does nipping off severeal dozen diodes on a PDP8 bootcard count?

Reply to
Folkert Rienstra

Folkert Rienstra wrote

Wota wimp, those came later, some of us memorised the boot loader and toggled it in thru the front panel switches.

And those diode boards aint magnetics anyway.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Could be ! I remember when my PDP11 with RT11 got upgraded from 32K to 64K, I wondered what I'd do with all that extra space for my programs.

Toom

Reply to
Toom Tabard

Could be ! I remember when my PDP11 with RT11 got upgraded from 32K to 64K, I wondered what I'd do with all that extra space for my programs.

Toom

Reply to
Toom Tabard

I didn't do it myself but I've worked with WANG 600 calculators which had the OS in a manually assembled ferrite ROM.

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DG

Reply to
Derek ^

..and not all that slow, apparently it could do factorial 69 in about 1 second.

Try pressing 69 x! on your pocket calculator, and its slower...!

Reply to
Mike Redrobe

I'm guessing you just wrote everything twice! 8)

Reply to
chrisv

Disk drives have the same advantage that core had. It was persistant after a power failure. Back in the old 1401 or 360 days a well written program could be restarted with the power on and "set IC button (or PSW restart in the case of 360). There is something reassuring about bits in oxide.

Reply to
gfretwell

Derek ^ wrote

Microcode, actually, it doesnt have an OS.

Reply to
Rod Speed

For a programming class, I wrote a program in PDP11 assembler to play "The Game of Life." It ran in an emulation on a Dec-20. Did you ever see the game of life printed out on a teletype? That was fun!

BTW, reel-to-reel recorders are being used for long lasting backup. Nothing else does as well except maybe hieroglyphics ;-)

Al

Reply to
Al

One of the first mini-computers I worked on was a GEC 4080 with core store. You could turn that off and back on again with several people logged in, and it just carried on. The only indication you got that this had happened was:

!!

output on the terminal, to warn you that any incompleted line you were typing in on the terminal had been lost from the terminal controller. No one was logged out, or had their running commands interrupted.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

There are some optical disk solutions that are supposed to last 100 years or longer. The problem is the machine that reads them won't. Open reel tapes have a print through problem and after a couple decades they will usually be useless. Again, the real problem might be finding a machine that reads that tape. Not a lot of 7 track tape drives around but I imagine you can still find 9 track units that could read NRZI.

Reply to
gfretwell

Al wrote

Oh bullshit. Plenty of stuff written on paper etc has lasted a hell of a lot longer than magnetic tapes ever will. In spades with being able to read it for centurys.

Reply to
Rod Speed

I have a reel-to-reel recorder. It's a Roberts from the 60's. Transistorized yet! My tapes from that era sound just as good as they did then. But, then again, my ears are that much older also. Print thru is alleviated by winding the tapes loosely. At least it works for me.

Al

Reply to
Al

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