Adventures in old computers

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The REAL Real Man
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by The REAL Real Man »

This evening I pulled the drive out of the Toshiba Tecra 8000. It's a 6GB hard drive. Six. Gigabytes, not terabytes.

Man, this makes me feel old.

Oh, and if that's not enough, it's a 3.5" double-height drive. Oy.

I have a few old 3.5" drives sitting around that I'm hoping might work -- a 30GB from one of the Macbooks i owned and a 100GB of about the same vintage. There might be some others floating around or living in other computers.

Six gigabytes. Man, oh man. For some reason, that's more culture shock than the 20MB drive I'm expecting to find inside the Librex.

Aaron

The REAL Real Man
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by The REAL Real Man »

I looked on eBay to see if I could find a dongle for the Xircom card. Yes, for around twelve bucks -- but it looks like PCMCIA WiFi cards are even cheaper, less than ten bucks! What a country!

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Tdarcos
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Re: Adventures in old computers

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You think a 5 1/2" double-height drive with "only" 6 GB in it is a huge drive with very little capacity, I have a story for you.

The main computer for the City College I went to was a Univac 90/60 mainframe, with a very large hard drive. About the size and shape of a washing machine, the drive supported removable packs, about 2' tall and the diameter of a dinner plate, they held, get this, 100 megabytes. And we supported the entire school and all the programming classes on this one machine with four of these drives and 512K of real memory. K, not Meg, or GB. And we supported about 20 simultaneous terminal users and about 400 using punch cards.

And I have my story, titled "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

After IBM, back in the 1970s, the second largest computer company was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was generally considered expensive; more than one customer was known to say, "I'd love to have an all-DEC shop," (all the terminals, disks, and peripherals DEC-branded), "but I can't afford it."

DEC's hard drive was similar to the one above, i.e. washing machine sized, with removable packs the circumference of dinner plates, and 2' tall. The drive cost $27,000 in 1976 dollars (about $140,835.13 today). It may have come with one removable 100 MB pack; extra packs cost $700 each (about $3,651.28 today). While DEC did make good, reliable drives, the best manufacturer of drives in the world was Control Data Corporation. They also made a washing machine-sized hard drive which supported removable 100MB packs. The disk packs cost the same, $700, but Control Data's drives were $7,000 (about $36,512.81 today). You could use them on a DEC computer, you just needed an adapter card which cost $300 (about $1,564.83 today).

At one DEC shop, the system administrator got permission to add two drives. One was a brand-new DEC drive, the other was a CDC drive with adapter card (DEC drives didn't need one). Since he had to open the drives up to install them, he decided to find out why DEC's drives were so much more expensive. He installed the card in the CDC, and checked the connections. When looking over the DEC drive, he realized part of the extra cost was that the DEC drive has a built-in controller card. DEC makes smart drives that do all the translation work; CDC makes stupid drives where the computer does the disk location conversion work, thus the reason for the controller card.

After inspecting both drives carefully, he discovered the difference. The card, that's all. DEC was actually buying CDC drives, adding their own built-in proprietary interface card, putting their own housing on them, then rebadging them as DEC drives, and charging about $20,000 more for the DEC logo.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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raecoffey
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by raecoffey »

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 7:18 pm
raecoffey wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 6:23 pm I have a really old apple laptop rigged with windows 10 on it. I haven't opened it up in 2 years and am without a charger, but if Eric had followed through and hired me I was gonna buy a simple old apple charger. Otherwise I'm connecting on my phone πŸ“±, a decent $250 number called Samsung Galaxy A13.
That's really unfortunate about Eric. I guess some people just can't be counted on.
Yeah :(

He's been ignoring me for weeks because he couldn't afford the catheter bags I asked him for. But all that I said was "don't worry about the catheter bags if you can't help, we must keep our lines of communication open if I'm gonna work for you."

And "Eric, please don't ignore me, it hurts, we were friends."

I'm really hurt by this, I've known him since 2000.
Lorelie Kraus the 1st

The REAL Real Man
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by The REAL Real Man »

Tdarcos wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 12:16 am You think a 5 1/2" double-height drive with "only" 6 GB in it is a huge drive with very little capacity, I have a story for you.
Well, to be fair, it's a 2.5" (but it is taller than current ones). My first-ever HD was a 5 MB 5.25"FH, and Jonsey will remember all to well (if not the drive, the stories of it) my 10 GB 5.25" MFM on which I ran Stacker, which gave me 17 MB. It was literally nearly as slow as my floppy drives. Jonsey, was it my good experience that led you to allow Perry to put Stacker on your HD? (Or was it the hard card that ran the BBS?) Because I remember the quote: "No! Don't point the Stacker at me!"

Anyway --

Loved, loved, loved the DEC/CDC drive story -- and the $20,000 controller card. Way back when, pre-Jonsey, I had a friend who worked in the computer room for... crap, can't remember, some mammoth organization in Rochester. He said there was a floor tile that you couldn't step on; if you did, it'd screw up the connection to the drive, which ran underneath, and no one got around to fixing it. They'd run payroll and it would take all night, and they knew simply which tile to walk around. But standard new-person hazing was to tell them that you had to stay in your seat during the whole payroll run; any magnetic interference over the floor tiles, or some BS like that, could throw the whole job off.

First place I worked in Los Angeles had a proper raised-floor computer room. The mainframe was gone, and now corporate IT worked there (I worked for a division, strange rivalry), and they had servers and a couple of AS/400s and some network gear. Me, my servers (and the one AS/400, which was corporate's not mine) lived in closets. Anyway, they left the A/C intact, and when the corp IT guy would step out of his room -- right across from my door, inevitably open -- he'd say, "Ugh, humidity."

That guy was a consultant and acted accordingly. We had problems with their token rings (which intersected with ours), and when I went in to report a problem, he'd try to teach me something. I'd tell him one of their machines was beaconing (for those unfamiliar: Dying a very Shakespearean death), and he'd explain how token rings worked. I'd tell him I knew how token ring networks worked, I had two plus his, so he'd explain beaconing, which I already understood. Finally I realized the fastest way to deal with him was to tell him my problem and let him teach me something I already knew. Sigh.

I did miss out on the good old days, though, of washing machine-sized hard drives!

Aaron

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

STACKER
The REAL Real Man wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:02 pm Jonsey will remember all to well (if not the drive, the stories of it) my 10 GB 5.25" MFM on which I ran Stacker, which gave me 17 MB. It was literally nearly as slow as my floppy drives. Jonsey, was it my good experience that led you to allow Perry to put Stacker on your HD? (Or was it the hard card that ran the BBS?) Because I remember the quote: "No! Don't point the Stacker at me!"
Ohhhhh you all had good experiences. Wonderous tales. TALES OF WONDER. Every single one of you snakes had a good time having Stacker compress your drives, to give more drive space at the cost of performance.

So I let the pit of vipers into my home.

In a story that will surprise exactly none of you, we ran the hard drive compression application "Stacker" on the original Jolt Country BBS hard drive, and Stacker failed and destroyed all of the bulletin board's data. It was a Great Moment in Computer Programming from decades ago.

To this day I won't run hard drive encryption on my game PC.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

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raecoffey
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Re: Adventures in old computers

Post by raecoffey »

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 7:43 pm STACKER
The REAL Real Man wrote: ↑Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:02 pm Jonsey will remember all to well (if not the drive, the stories of it) my 10 GB 5.25" MFM on which I ran Stacker, which gave me 17 MB. It was literally nearly as slow as my floppy drives. Jonsey, was it my good experience that led you to allow Perry to put Stacker on your HD? (Or was it the hard card that ran the BBS?) Because I remember the quote: "No! Don't point the Stacker at me!"
Ohhhhh you all had good experiences. Wonderous tales. TALES OF WONDER. Every single one of you snakes had a good time having Stacker compress your drives, to give more drive space at the cost of performance.

So I let the pit of vipers into my home.

In a story that will surprise exactly none of you, we ran the hard drive compression application "Stacker" on the original Jolt Country BBS hard drive, and Stacker failed and destroyed all of the bulletin board's data. It was a Great Moment in Computer Programming from decades ago.

To this day I won't run hard drive encryption on my game PC.
ICJ, please read my above new comment above about Eric. It may have gotten lost in all of the computer talk.
Lorelie Kraus the 1st

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