(semi OT) For those that remember (and those that don't)

[eculbert]

I used to 'fry and cry', er, work at Honeywell
computers as a test tech. I remember working the
'refurb' area where there were these about 15 inch
square 4K memory boards that those 350's fed way back
when.

The company tried to 'fully load' a 8000 full scale
unit and had litterly hundreds of those big units and
the newer ones hooked up and never got the cpu more
than about 50 percent loaded. There was controllers
also that took up some room, System controller units,
i/o units...basically the perverbial 'room full' Oh,
yeah, those tape controllers, big as 25 foot home
refrigerators or even bigger and the 'tape room'
needed to store them! 

maintaince was constantly repairing broken floor tiles
from the heavy duty  rollers they were mounted on as
we moved them throughout the plant.

the cabinet that was the memory module was about 1/2
as wide and almost as deep as a refrig in the kitchen.
The CPU was double wide!

When the 'virtual memory unit' finally got 'approved/
in about 82/3, there was a mad house of bringing the
'modern' units back through the plant and a side note
follows. We used 'spare' field service techs to help
out as there was about 500 units plus current build to
cycle through the plant. Overtime city!! Big
paychecks!!

One of the Field Service Tech's that was helping from
back east somewhere made a comment about one customers
memory module. Seems that the plant that it was in was
'remodeled' and walls moved etc. They finally had a
power failure that the 'no break' failed to pick up
and keep the system running. It would NOT reboot
smoothly. Kept giving 'memory not found' errors. He
finally chased cables till one disappeared into a wall
not to reappear anywhere he could find!! Someone had
walled the memory unit into a 'cubby' hole that had NO
DOORS into it. They had to bust the walls and go
UPSTAIRS to the very small room it was in. The
remodeling had been in place for over 3 years!! 

Theret was a 'flooding year ' back east that year or
the year before and some of the stories about units
being flooded in basements (typical place for the old
large systems) and just drying them out and working
with anywhere from no to small failures were common. 


--- Mark Jarvis <mark.jarvis at pvmail.maricopa.edu>
wrote:

> Found on slashdot:
> 
> Hardware: The 305 RAMAC — First Commercial Hard
> Drive
> Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 10,
> @03:15PM
> from the looking-back-for-perspective dept.
> Data Storage
> Captain DaFt writes "Snopes.com has an article that
> gives an interesting 
> look back at the first commercial hard drive, the
> IBM 350. Twice as big 
> as a refrigerator and weighing in at a ton, it
> packed a whopping 4.4MB! 
> Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us
> have on our keychains 
> today."
> 
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Ed/ke7feg

Did I mention, 2/23/07 the FCC dropped all cw (ADA Morse code) testing for any class of license as a ham? Just pass the written and "U's a ham"!! Many sites test online, but you have to go for the real test. $14 for as high as you can climb in one session.


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