Real Woody

I picked up one last spring. Nifty little gadget, except not supported by NT. And that's what's on my desktop at work, so I can't use it to shuffle stuff back and forth. Still, it's got more memory than I used to have disk storage on many systems. So does my PDA...

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

When I was in highschool, we referred to our computer science teacher as "built like a disk drive". Modern students would have no idea what that meant. I used to help run a system that supported the *entire* zoology research community at U of Toronto with a single Calcomp 2314-like (~30M) disk. It was the size of a washing machine.

space inserted for clarity

The PDP-11-70 computer at Cal Poly in 1977-83 had several washing machine sized "fixed discs" and several refrigerator sized "tape backup" machines.

It served perhaps 300 dumb terminals campuswide whicih were busy 24/7 with about an 80% duty cycle.

Printing was done locally on "line printers" onto approximately 14 inch wide green striped paper.

Batches could be run and picked up later at the computing center but those batches were run once a day at about 2am completion time so of course there was a long line at 2am every day at that building.

One wonders why they didn't simply do those batches at some other time of day given the CPU usage was only down by about 30% at that time of night.

I suppose it was a form of hazing :)

Jerry

With Henry Spencer?

I fondly recall those monster disk packs. Top loading stack of 5-15 14" platters. We refered to them as "Maytags" except they saw a lot more of their repairman than any Maytag I've ever owned. My computer museum collection has several of those 14" platters (and other platters from 39" to

3.5") with assorted Saturn-ring etchings...

Tours of the computer and/or rocket museums are available on request to any one passing through the Chicago area...

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

An NT workstation? Not you Bob... say it ain't so 8*(

Not my choice. If I had my pick, it would be a nice VMS workstation. Or at worst, a LINUX platform on the same hardware I got now...

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

I still have the platters from several massive Control Data 15450 Winchester drives that I scavanged for the aluminum. Doesn't look like they'd hold up real well as blast deflectors. What are they typically made of?

tah

According to Marcus Leech :

About that. I was working in utzoo [partially] under John Kornatowski for several years before John hired Henry (who was trying to finish his MSc), and Henry eventually replaced John.

You were just the punk teenage highschool kid bugging the Bio 110 TAs ;-)

[I was a BIO110 TA for a couple of years before working under John's supervision on various programming jobs for grad students. Henry started working at UTZOO during the last year I was at U of T, or the year after. Or thereabouts.].

Those drives you saw in John/Henry's lab were the new ones. Prior to that, they were all RL01's and similar.

The one drive I saw bigger than an RL01 (aside from the mainframe drives. At U of Toronto's Computer Research Group lab) was a 25Mb pack drive almost the size of a washing machine. The controller for the beast hanging off the 11/45 was three times _bigger_.

According to Bob Kaplow :

Especially when you consider his desk is less than 10 feet from mine.

Marcus essentially introduced me to rocketry[*].

But, despite having built some of his motors and manufactured a few parts for his prototypes I've never actually flown one yet. Even tho I'm level 3 (Canadian, "J") now, I've never flown electronics.

That's changing. My son was going to fly one of his motors for junior highpower (I motor), but we chickened out because we were flying electronics (a MAD) for the very first time, and he wanted the motor ejection backup and CTI reliability for insurance.

Our future plans now revolve about high altitude w/electronics, so that's changing.

[*] I built a rocket in highschool (early 70's) but never got to fly it. So, I'm probably not a BAR.

I like that, "bugging". A very polite description of a process that involved "eyes bugging out" as I recall :-)

Actually, these were RKO5s from a different life, Chris. Utterly unrelated to my time at utzoo.

According to Marcus Leech :

Yours or mine? ;-)

I think our postings are out of sync.