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

[Robert N. Eaton]

eculbert wrote:
> 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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>   
Many people think the space program didn't pay for itself. But it 
provided the impetus for modern computing.

One could carry a Babbage Difference Engine on a ship of war, and an IBM 
350 on a very large plane. But the space program's need for smaller, 
lighter, and sturdier made the computers we enjoy today possible.

Bob Eaton