Creative Ways To Say How Old You Are

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Here’s one I came up with:

I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

[David LaRue]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

True! I loved the feel of the DECwriter LA-36 II keyboard. The spacebar was
below the other keys, in the center where it should be, and no modifier keys
on that row.

I can remember when Radio Shack sold ICs (Integrated Circuits) and building
my first computer from components, like baton switches.

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by David LaRue

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

True! I loved the feel of the DECwriter LA-36 II keyboard. The spacebar was
below the other keys, in the center where it should be, and no modifier keys
on that row.

I had forgotten about the DECwriter!

Post by David LaRue
I can remember when Radio Shack sold ICs (Integrated Circuits) and building
my first computer from components, like baton switches.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by David LaRue

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

True! I loved the feel of the DECwriter LA-36 II keyboard. The spacebar was
below the other keys, in the center where it should be, and no modifier keys
on that row.

I had forgotten about the DECwriter!

I'll never forget when our ASR-33 was replaced with an LA-120. Three
times faster, and full-width greenbar.

[David LaRue]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by David LaRue

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

True! I loved the feel of the DECwriter LA-36 II keyboard. The
spacebar was below the other keys, in the center where it should be,
and no modifier keys on that row.

I had forgotten about the DECwriter!

I'll never forget when our ASR-33 was replaced with an LA-120. Three
times faster, and full-width greenbar.

For those of us who used dial-in connections, whistle the Break Command.
All together now!

[Freddy1X]

( Cuts )

I miss the connect sounds of my modem and how much it told you about what
your connection speed would be. And the blinky lights to back them up.

Freddy,
sounds of an auld fart.

[Freddy1X]

( cuts )

The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

Freddy,
also getting floppy....

[David LaRue]

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )
Freddy,
also getting floppy....

My first job had an IBM AT and two 10MB Bournouli drives. The sourse for my
project took a little over 17 minutes to compile. I often started that and
went next door to talk to my second line manager. He realized the waste and
upgrades happened pretty quickly.

They were very reliable and heavy!

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

Seek tests on the mainframe 3350 lookalikes, or the
air compressor kicking in on the Burroughs 5N Head-per-Track drives.

[Dan Espen]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

Seek tests on the mainframe 3350 lookalikes, or the
air compressor kicking in on the Burroughs 5N Head-per-Track drives.

The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.
But then I escaped to an IBM 1440 installation. The platters were about
20 inches across. The installation I was at did not pay for the direct
seek feature, so every arm movement started with the arm
retracting then it moved to the cylinder desired.

IBM 3350's were way later than that.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Dan Espen

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

Seek tests on the mainframe 3350 lookalikes, or the
air compressor kicking in on the Burroughs 5N Head-per-Track drives.

The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.
But then I escaped to an IBM 1440 installation. The platters were about
20 inches across. The installation I was at did not pay for the direct
seek feature, so every arm movement started with the arm
retracting then it moved to the cylinder desired.

Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before
my time. They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350
lookalikes (called 677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs
acquired at some point).

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Scott Lurndal
Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before
my time. They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350
lookalikes (called 677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs
acquired at some point).

The Memorex 677 was the 3330-11 clone, also used in the DEC RP06. I've
actually done a head alignment on one of those (and remember, I'm a software/
admin guy).

[Bob Eager]

Post by Rich Alderson

Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before my time.
They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350 lookalikes (called
677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs acquired at some
point).

The Memorex 677 was the 3330-11 clone, also used in the DEC RP06. I've
actually done a head alignment on one of those (and remember, I'm a software/
admin guy).

We had a load of those, rebadged as the ICL EDS200.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Rich Alderson

Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before my time.
They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350 lookalikes (called
677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs acquired at some
point).

The Memorex 677 was the 3330-11 clone, also used in the DEC RP06. I've
actually done a head alignment on one of those (and remember, I'm a software/
admin guy).

The IBM 3330-11 had two stacked drives for each unit in the
string. The 3350 is a washing machine style drive.

Loading Image...

The burrough equivalent was the 225 and later 235 disk subsystems.

The Burroughs/Memorex 677 was a washing machine-style top-loader
single drive.

$ wget https://mrxhist.org/docs/MRX%2019820607%20OEM%20Drives%20EN.pdf

" Rounding out the Memorex
display will be its M o d e l 677
removable-pack 14-inch drive.
The M o d e l 677 is a 300-Mbyte
drive with an SMD interface and
an average access time of 28 mil-
liseconds. OEM-quantity price
is said to be less than $10,000."

The pictures of the RP06 match the 677 style, not the 3330 dual stacked subsystem.

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Rich Alderson

Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before my time.
They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350 lookalikes (called
677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs acquired at some
point).

The Memorex 677 was the 3330-11 clone, also used in the DEC RP06. I've
actually done a head alignment on one of those (and remember, I'm a
software/ admin guy).

The IBM 3330-11 had two stacked drives for each unit in the
string. The 3350 is a washing machine style drive.

Not sure what you mean by "washing machine style", here. The 3350 is a
Winchester style 500MB drive; the DEC RP07 is an ISI clone of the 3350.

Post by Scott Lurndal
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_magnetic_disk_drives_3330%2B3333.png
The burrough equivalent was the 225 and later 235 disk subsystems.
The Burroughs/Memorex 677 was a washing machine-style top-loader
single drive.

OK, I see wherein lies the confusion.

Each of those bays in the big array in that picture is a separate drive. The
Memorex 677 is a single unit equivalent to one of those bays, i.e., a 3330-11
disk drive.

The 3330 and 3330-11 were also available in single drive assemblies from IBM,
for smaller installations.

Post by Scott Lurndal
$ wget https://mrxhist.org/docs/MRX%2019820607%20OEM%20Drives%20EN.pdf
" Rounding out the Memorex
display will be its M o d e l 677
removable-pack 14-inch drive.
The M o d e l 677 is a 300-Mbyte
drive with an SMD interface and
an average access time of 28 mil-
liseconds. OEM-quantity price
is said to be less than $10,000."
The pictures of the RP06 match the 677 style, not the 3330 dual stacked subsystem.

See above.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Rich Alderson
Not sure what you mean by "washing machine style", here.

Removable drive, I presume. They were all top-loaders.

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Rich Alderson
Not sure what you mean by "washing machine style", here.

Removable drive, I presume. They were all top-loaders.

The 3350/RP07 was NOT a top-loader. It was a Winchester.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Removable drive, I presume. They were all top-loaders.

The 3350/RP07 was NOT a top-loader.

All the removable ones were.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Rich Alderson

Post by Scott Lurndal
Burroughs had a number of early drives (Drum, HPT, etc) before
my time. They had a 3330 clone (called 235) and the 3350
lookalikes (called 677) actually came from Memorex (which Burroughs
acquired at some point).

The Memorex 677 was the 3330-11 clone, also used in the DEC RP06. I've
actually done a head alignment on one of those (and remember, I'm a software/
admin guy).

I programmed Univac gear, and one night while working in a 90/30 shop
I popped the back cover off an RP06 on an 11/70 sharing the same room.
Imagine my surprise when I saw an ISS / Sperry Univac plate inside.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I programmed Univac gear, and one night while working in a 90/30 shop I
popped the back cover off an RP06 on an 11/70 sharing the same room.
Imagine my surprise when I saw an ISS / Sperry Univac plate inside.

Interesting. I thought CDC was the main one for making disk drives for
others. I know some DEC drives were from CDC.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

I programmed Univac gear, and one night while working in a 90/30 shop I
popped the back cover off an RP06 on an 11/70 sharing the same room.
Imagine my surprise when I saw an ISS / Sperry Univac plate inside.

Interesting. I thought CDC was the main one for making disk drives for
others. I know some DEC drives were from CDC.

Dunno about drives (I don't know where ISS came from), but CDC made lots
of disk packs for various drives. Packs for the 8416 and 8418 drives
used on the Univac 90/30 were in short supply. Univac insisted that
everyone should use Univac-branded packs but couldn't supply nearly
enough, so most shops used CDC packs. If a head crash happened, there
was a lot of finger-pointing.

If you have a head crash, the only safe action is to immediately
quarantine both the drive and the pack where it happened. Some
operators weren't too bright, though; they'd move the crashed
pack from drive to drive, then try other packs. A few shops
were completely wiped out that way.

As much as people (especially Univac) liked to bad-mouth CDC packs,
it was just the first mount that you had to worry about. If the
pack mounted once, it would work forever. On the other hand, I
once mounted a brand-new pack and started formatting it. The
spindle bearing in this drive had always been noisy, so I didn't
hear anything amiss until most of the way through the pack, when
nasty noises were getting louder. I shut down the drive, removed
the pack, quarantined both, and started re-configuring the system
to work without the crashed drive while waiting for the CEs to
show up. One surface of the pack was ground right down to bare
aluminum.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
Dunno about drives (I don't know where ISS came from), but CDC made lots
of disk packs for various drives.

Oh yeah. Their drive model names were types of birds, e.g. “Wren” is one I
remember.

Post by Charlie Gibbs
If you have a head crash, the only safe action is to immediately
quarantine both the drive and the pack where it happened. Some
operators weren't too bright, though; they'd move the crashed pack from
drive to drive, then try other packs. A few shops were completely wiped
out that way.

I had a similar thing happen when my G3 Mac’s Zip drive was hit by the
dreaded “Click Of Death”.

There is a document online, a Computer Centre newsletter from an Aussie
university from the 1970s sometime. Users could allocate their own disk
packs, but they could not bring them from outside -- they had to use ones
supplied by the Computer Centre. Obviously this was to avoid head-crash
infections being brought in from outside.

Post by Charlie Gibbs
As much as people (especially Univac) liked to bad-mouth CDC packs,
it was just the first mount that you had to worry about. If the pack
mounted once, it would work forever.

Not so sure. Something has to trigger that first failure.

Nowadays I understand better why removable disk packs went out of fashion.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?

The central computer facility where I worked had I think only one tape
drive, used only for backup. By that time they were “streaming” drives,
which meant, if you fed them fast enough (which you could, since the disks
were big enough and fast enough), they could run flat out, with no start-
stop-start-stop. So I never saw that in the flesh, so to speak.

[Dan Espen]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?

Yep. Tapes spinning and sometimes cards being read.

After I worked at my first system with disk drives I tried to avoid
using tapes but they were around for many years. At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Dan Espen
At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

Oh yes. There was an actual sort algorithm, called “merge sort”, that
depended on reading/writing the records on multiple tape drives at once --
the more the merrier. Bidirectionality was important to avoid wasting time
waiting for the whole tape to rewind. But you had to remember that the
order of the records was now reversed.

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

Oh yes. There was an actual sort algorithm, called “merge sort”, that
depended on reading/writing the records on multiple tape drives at once --
the more the merrier. Bidirectionality was important to avoid wasting time
waiting for the whole tape to rewind. But you had to remember that the
order of the records was now reversed.

In my data structures class, one assignment was to write a tape sort.
Ugh.

[John Dallman]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom
In my data structures class, one assignment was to write a tape sort.

I wrote a tape-style sort for MS-DOS in 1988. 640KB of RAM was the limit,
but we needed to sort 650MB of variable-length records regularly, because
we were an early CD-ROM publishing company.

We had a 1.2GB disc array, and a modified MS-DOS that could treat it as a
single FAT12 volume with very large sectors. You had to configure MS-DOS
quite carefully, because it was easy to have too many sector buffers and
be unable to run any programs until you rebooted off a floppy.

So classic sort-merge was the right thing to do. I found a serious book
about doing this with equations about optimising performance. Those
required non-obvious numbers about the hardware, and that was waaay
beyond the comprehension of the disc array company's support organisation.
They were a pretty small company and had one guy who knew everything, but
was very busy.

I managed to get a booking for a phone call with him, late at night UK
time. When I got through and explained my question he was all "Wow, that
book sounds really useful! Who's the author?" He did know the practical
answer: do as wide a merge as you can get into memory, so I did that.

It was quite a good merge: the drive light stayed on continuously with no
flickering. The company was still using it a decade later, having ported
it to better operating systems.

John

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by John Dallman
It was quite a good merge: the drive light stayed on continuously with no
flickering. The company was still using it a decade later, having ported
it to better operating systems.

"The documentation said, 'Requires Windows XP or better,' so I used Linux."

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

Oh yes. There was an actual sort algorithm, called “merge sort”, that
depended on reading/writing the records on multiple tape drives at once --
the more the merrier. Bidirectionality was important to avoid wasting time
waiting for the whole tape to rewind. But you had to remember that the
order of the records was now reversed.

I once came up with a wonderfully perverted use of the "read backward"
command. I had a tape that was written with a block size of 9600 bytes,
while the drives available to me could handle a block size of 8192 bytes
at the most. I wrote a program that would read a partial block (ignoring
length errors), followed by a read backward to get the remaining bytes.
Since this left you back at the start of the block, you'd have to then
issue a forward space command to skip over the block. Lather, rinse,
repeat. The drive sounded as if it was about to explode, but it did
successfully read the tape.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once came up with a wonderfully perverted use of the "read backward"
command. I had a tape that was written with a block size of 9600 bytes,
while the drives available to me could handle a block size of 8192 bytes
at the most. I wrote a program that would read a partial block
(ignoring length errors), followed by a read backward to get the
remaining bytes. Since this left you back at the start of the block,
you'd have to then issue a forward space command to skip over the block.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The drive sounded as if it was about to
explode, but it did successfully read the tape.

I’m trying to imagine what that sounded like, and I just can’t ...

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once came up with a wonderfully perverted use of the "read backward"
command. I had a tape that was written with a block size of 9600 bytes,
while the drives available to me could handle a block size of 8192 bytes
at the most. I wrote a program that would read a partial block
(ignoring length errors), followed by a read backward to get the
remaining bytes. Since this left you back at the start of the block,
you'd have to then issue a forward space command to skip over the block.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The drive sounded as if it was about to
explode, but it did successfully read the tape.

I’m trying to imagine what that sounded like, and I just can’t ...

The UNISERVO VI-C tape drives I was using were noisy at the best
of times. In normal operation the vacuum pump shrieked like a
jet engine. I seem to recall that the drive was making a lot of
hissing noises as the tape shuttled back and forth under the heads,
and the reel motors were working like mad to keep the vacuum columns
half full. I got the tape copied, but it was a Timex torture test.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once came up with a wonderfully perverted use of the "read
backward" command. I had a tape that was written with a block size
of 9600 bytes, while the drives available to me could handle a
block size of 8192 bytes at the most. I wrote a program that would
read a partial block (ignoring length errors), followed by a read
backward to get the remaining bytes. Since this left you back at
the start of the block, you'd have to then issue a forward space
command to skip over the block. Lather, rinse, repeat. The drive
sounded as if it was about to explode, but it did successfully
read the tape.

I’m trying to imagine what that sounded like, and I just can’t ...

The UNISERVO VI-C tape drives I was using were noisy at the best of
times. In normal operation the vacuum pump shrieked like a jet engine.
I seem to recall that the drive was making a lot of hissing noises as
the tape shuttled back and forth under the heads, and the reel motors
were working like mad to keep the vacuum columns half full. I got the
tape copied, but it was a Timex torture test.

Nothing like a chainsaw, then?

I mention that because I tried once, out of curiosity, to find out what
track 1 on a CD-ROM sounded like on an audio CD player. It sounded like a
chainsaw was cutting my speakers in half. I stopped it pretty quickly.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once came up with a wonderfully perverted use of the "read
backward" command. I had a tape that was written with a block size
of 9600 bytes, while the drives available to me could handle a
block size of 8192 bytes at the most. I wrote a program that would
read a partial block (ignoring length errors), followed by a read
backward to get the remaining bytes. Since this left you back at
the start of the block, you'd have to then issue a forward space
command to skip over the block. Lather, rinse, repeat. The drive
sounded as if it was about to explode, but it did successfully
read the tape.

I’m trying to imagine what that sounded like, and I just can’t ...

The UNISERVO VI-C tape drives I was using were noisy at the best of
times. In normal operation the vacuum pump shrieked like a jet engine.
I seem to recall that the drive was making a lot of hissing noises as
the tape shuttled back and forth under the heads, and the reel motors
were working like mad to keep the vacuum columns half full. I got the
tape copied, but it was a Timex torture test.

Nothing like a chainsaw, then?

No, more like a demented steam engine.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I mention that because I tried once, out of curiosity, to find out what
track 1 on a CD-ROM sounded like on an audio CD player. It sounded like a
chainsaw was cutting my speakers in half. I stopped it pretty quickly.

The sounds generated by the tape drive were mechanical, not electronic.
I did once hear a late-model tape drive being tested by the CEs - it
was writing short blocks fast enough to create low-frequency tones.
I would love to have had some time alone with it - I'd have written
a program that would make it sing.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
The sounds generated by the tape drive were mechanical, not electronic.
I did once hear a late-model tape drive being tested by the CEs - it was
writing short blocks fast enough to create low-frequency tones.
I would love to have had some time alone with it - I'd have written a
program that would make it sing.

Can’t have done much for the lifespans of those mechanical parts ...

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Dan Espen

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?

Yep. Tapes spinning and sometimes cards being read.
After I worked at my first system with disk drives I tried to avoid
using tapes but they were around for many years. At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

One of the applications we shipped with the Burroughs MCP was a sort
utility. It was orignally designed for doing sort/merges using the
7- and 9-track tape drives. We had one system with a string of 16
tape drives that was used to test the sort utility. The programmer
who wrote the utility leveraged the read-backwards capability of
the tape units to speed up the sort process.

[John Levine]

Post by Scott Lurndal
7- and 9-track tape drives. We had one system with a string of 16
tape drives that was used to test the sort utility. The programmer
who wrote the utility leveraged the read-backwards capability of
the tape units to speed up the sort process.

That was a standard trick that sort programs used, but to pick a nit, it sped up
the merge process, not the sort process. When a file was too big to sort in
memory, which was pretty much always in those days, first it read the input(s)
in batches that it sorted in memory and wrote out sorted "runs" of records
alternately to the intermediate output devices. (The runs could be larger than
memory using a trick we'll save for the advanced seminar.) Then it merged the
runs from one group of intermediate devices to another into ever larger runs
until it ended up with one big sorted run.

Originally they rewound the intermediate tapes after each merge phase but
someone, more likely several someones, realized they could just read the tapes
backward and reverse the sort comparisons, producing runs in reverse order that
could be read backward in the next phase, producing forward order runs. There
was about a 50% chance that the final run would end up reversed, requiring one
more pass to read it backwards and write out a forward version, but the time
saved not rewinding made it worthwhile. Or I suppose it could realize that it
had written one run onto each of the intermediate tapes so the next merge would
be the last, and if needed rewind and merge forward for the last pass.

There was a lot of really clever programming in sort programs. Most were sort
generators that precompiled the sort comparison rules into a machine code
comparison routine that it could call during the sort passes rather than
interpreting the rules on the fly.

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by John Levine

Post by Scott Lurndal
7- and 9-track tape drives. We had one system with a string of 16
tape drives that was used to test the sort utility. The programmer
who wrote the utility leveraged the read-backwards capability of
the tape units to speed up the sort process.

That was a standard trick that sort programs used, but to pick a nit, it sped up
the merge process, not the sort process. When a file was too big to sort in
memory, which was pretty much always in those days, first it read the input(s)
in batches that it sorted in memory and wrote out sorted "runs" of records
alternately to the intermediate output devices. (The runs could be larger than
memory using a trick we'll save for the advanced seminar.) Then it merged the
runs from one group of intermediate devices to another into ever larger runs
until it ended up with one big sorted run.
Originally they rewound the intermediate tapes after each merge phase but
someone, more likely several someones, realized they could just read the tapes
backward and reverse the sort comparisons, producing runs in reverse order that
could be read backward in the next phase, producing forward order runs. There
was about a 50% chance that the final run would end up reversed, requiring one
more pass to read it backwards and write out a forward version, but the time
saved not rewinding made it worthwhile. Or I suppose it could realize that it
had written one run onto each of the intermediate tapes so the next merge would
be the last, and if needed rewind and merge forward for the last pass.
There was a lot of really clever programming in sort programs. Most were sort
generators that precompiled the sort comparison rules into a machine code
comparison routine that it could call during the sort passes rather than
interpreting the rules on the fly.

I remember seeing in computer class sort algorithms of large data,
although we used hard disks.

[Peter Flass]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by John Levine

Post by Scott Lurndal
7- and 9-track tape drives. We had one system with a string of 16
tape drives that was used to test the sort utility. The programmer
who wrote the utility leveraged the read-backwards capability of
the tape units to speed up the sort process.

That was a standard trick that sort programs used, but to pick a nit, it sped up
the merge process, not the sort process. When a file was too big to sort in
memory, which was pretty much always in those days, first it read the input(s)
in batches that it sorted in memory and wrote out sorted "runs" of records
alternately to the intermediate output devices. (The runs could be larger than
memory using a trick we'll save for the advanced seminar.) Then it merged the
runs from one group of intermediate devices to another into ever larger runs
until it ended up with one big sorted run.
Originally they rewound the intermediate tapes after each merge phase but
someone, more likely several someones, realized they could just read the tapes
backward and reverse the sort comparisons, producing runs in reverse order that
could be read backward in the next phase, producing forward order runs. There
was about a 50% chance that the final run would end up reversed, requiring one
more pass to read it backwards and write out a forward version, but the time
saved not rewinding made it worthwhile. Or I suppose it could realize that it
had written one run onto each of the intermediate tapes so the next merge would
be the last, and if needed rewind and merge forward for the last pass.
There was a lot of really clever programming in sort programs. Most were sort
generators that precompiled the sort comparison rules into a machine code
comparison routine that it could call during the sort passes rather than
interpreting the rules on the fly.

I remember seeing in computer class sort algorithms of large data,
although we used hard disks.

IBM OS/360 SORT had about five algorithms for tape sorts, which would
default of be selectable by the user. Now there’s only BLOCKSET for disk
sorts

[Peter Flass]

Post by Dan Espen

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?

Yep. Tapes spinning and sometimes cards being read.
After I worked at my first system with disk drives I tried to avoid
using tapes but they were around for many years. At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

There were a lot of neat things done with tape. Tape sorts were fun, too.

[Dan Espen]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by Dan Espen

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?

Yep. Tapes spinning and sometimes cards being read.
After I worked at my first system with disk drives I tried to avoid
using tapes but they were around for many years. At one site someone
decided to try assigning the compile work files to tape instead of disk.
That slowed down compiles considerably but it was the first time I got
to see a program that read tape files forward and backward.

There were a lot of neat things done with tape. Tape sorts were fun, too.

Personally I had a lot more fun with disks.
The 1440 site I worked in only had 2 1311 drives. I had to update a
master file that required 10 packs. I organized the file as split
cylinder. One run the updates went top to bottom, next run bottom to
top.

On the 1440 there were no access methods, you just wrote 100 character
blocks at consecutive block addresses. The I/O routine was 500
character long.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?
The central computer facility where I worked had I think only one tape
drive, used only for backup. By that time they were “streaming” drives,
which meant, if you fed them fast enough (which you could, since the disks
were big enough and fast enough), they could run flat out, with no start-
stop-start-stop. So I never saw that in the flesh, so to speak.

But if you couldn't feed them data fast enough, they'd revert to start/stop
mode. A 100-ips streaming drive would run at 12.5 ips in start/stop mode -
much slower than conventional start/stop drives, which were available in
speeds from 25 to 200 ips, depending on how deep your pockets were.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Dan Espen
The first systems I worked on used multiple tape drives.

Remember how computers used to be portrayed in movies and TV, well into
the 1980s, with banks of multiple tape drives where the reels would go
start-stop-start-stop?
The central computer facility where I worked had I think only one tape
drive, used only for backup. By that time they were “streaming” drives,
which meant, if you fed them fast enough (which you could, since the disks
were big enough and fast enough), they could run flat out, with no start-
stop-start-stop. So I never saw that in the flesh, so to speak.

But if you couldn't feed them data fast enough, they'd revert to start/stop
mode. A 100-ips streaming drive would run at 12.5 ips in start/stop mode -
much slower than conventional start/stop drives, which were available in
speeds from 25 to 200 ips, depending on how deep your pockets were.

I was testing a double-buffered load algorithm, that loaded from 9-track
to disk. I found a bug when loading from a 200ips 6250bpi drive to
one of the supported disk drives - that old drive was actually slower than
the tape drive which caused the algo to overwrite the disk buffer while
it was being written. Added the missing wait for the disk write to complete
before starting the tape read and all was good.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Scott Lurndal
I was testing a double-buffered load algorithm, that loaded from 9-track
to disk. I found a bug when loading from a 200ips 6250bpi drive to
one of the supported disk drives - that old drive was actually slower than
the tape drive which caused the algo to overwrite the disk buffer while
it was being written. Added the missing wait for the disk write to complete
before starting the tape read and all was good.

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips.
I did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't
seem right somehow.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Scott Lurndal
I was testing a double-buffered load algorithm, that loaded from 9-track
to disk. I found a bug when loading from a 200ips 6250bpi drive to
one of the supported disk drives - that old drive was actually slower than
the tape drive which caused the algo to overwrite the disk buffer while
it was being written. Added the missing wait for the disk write to complete
before starting the tape read and all was good.

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips.
I did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't
seem right somehow.

The tape transfered at 1.25MB/sec, this was with a 9000-byte[*] blocksize.

The model 207 disk drive was limited to 1MB/sec (perhaps by the older
controller it was on, I never dug deeper into it).

[*] A useful multiple of the disk (100-byte) and pack (180-byte) sector size.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips. I
did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't seem
right somehow.

Head-movement latency probably explains that.

There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head. I remember a paper from a collection from a conference
on OS design, saying that, if you want to implement paging, don’t use
disks, use drums. (The date “1973” comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure
drums were obsolete by then.)

I think disks won out for cost/benefit reasons (and being more compact).
And then economies of scale led to them being improved more and more.

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Head-movement latency probably explains that.
There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head. I remember a paper from a collection from a conference
on OS design, saying that, if you want to implement paging, don’t use
disks, use drums. (The date “1973” comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure
drums were obsolete by then.)
I think disks won out for cost/benefit reasons (and being more compact).
And then economies of scale led to them being improved more and more.

I took two credit hr intro to fortran/computers and at the end of the
semester was hired to rewrite 1401 MPIO (unit record front end fo 709)
in assembler for 360/30. The univ was getting 360/67 replacing
709/1401 and temporarily got 360/30 replacing 1401 (360/30 had 1401
emulation but was part of also getting 360/30 experience). The
univ. shutdown datacenter on weekends and I would have it all to
myself, although 48hrs w/o sleep made monday classes hard. I was given
a pile of hardware & software manuals and got to design and implement
my own monitor, device drivers, interrupt handlers, storage
management, etc and within a few weeks had 2000 card assembler
program. I then added use of os/360 system services with assembler
option that either assembled stand-alone version or os/360
version. The stand-alone version took 30mins to re-assemble but the
os/360 version took an hour (each DCB macro taking 5-6mins).

Within a year of taking intro class, the 360/67 arrived and I was
hired fulltime responsible for os/360 (and continued to have my 48hrs
weekend dedicated time, TSS/360 never came to production, so ran as
360/65). Student fortran ran less than sec on 709 tape->tape, but more
than minute w/os360. I install HASP and it cuts time in half and then
redoing stage2 SYSGEN to carefully place datasets and PDS members to
optimize arm seek and multi-track search, cutting another 2/3rds to
12.9secs. It never got better than 709 until I install univ. of
waterloo WATFOR.

IBM Cambridge Science Center comes out to install CP67/CMS (3rd
installation after CSC itself and MIT Lincol Labs). I mostly got to
play with it during my dedicated weekend time, initially rewritting
lots of pathlengths running OS/360 in virtual machine. Test stream ran
322secs on bare machine but 856secs in virtual machine). After a
couple months I got CP67 CPU down to 132secs (from 534). I then redo
scheduling, dispatching, page replacement, I/O, ordered arm seek disk
queuing (replacing FIFO), 2301 drum (fixed head per track) replace
FIFO single page transfer I/O (about 70/sec) to multiple 4k transfers
optimized for max. transfer/revolution (peak 270/sec).

trivia: 2303 & 2301 drums were similar ... except 2301 transferred four
heads in parallel with four times the transfer rate (1/4 number of
"tracks", each four times larger)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_2301_drum

decade later (after having graduated, joined IBM and) transferred to san
jose research and get to wander around ibm and non-ibm silicon valley
datacenters including disk bldg 14/engineering and 15/product-test
across the street. They are doing 7x24, pre-scheduled stand-alone test
... mentioned that they had recently tried MVS but it had 15min MTBF (in
that environment) required manual re-ipl. I offer to rewrite I/O
supervisor to make it bullet proof and never fail, allowing any amount
of concurrent ondemand testing (greatly improving productivity)
... downside they keep calling wanted me to increasingly spend my time
playing disk engineer.

Note 3350 disk drives had a few fixed-head/track cylinders (3350FH)
similar to the 2305 all fixed-head/track disks. The 2305 controller
supported "multiple-exposure", eight subchannel addresses allowing eight
active channel programs ... with hardware optimizing which one gets
executed. I wanted to add multiple exposure support for 3350FH ...
allowing transfers overlapped with disk arm seek movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_2305
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3350

Then the VULCAN (electronic disk for paging) group in POK get it
canceled because they were concerned that it would impact their market
forecast. However they were using standard processor memory chips
... and got told that IBM was already selling every chip they could make
for processor memory at a higher market ... and they got canceled
... however it was too late to resurrect multiple exposure for
3350FH feature.

3350 Direct Access Storage, Models A2, A2F, B2, B2F, C2F
https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/ibm/dasd/3350/GX20-1983-0_3350_Reference_Summary_Card_197701.pdf

bldg15 would get early engineering system models and get 1st engineering
3033 outside POK engineering floor. Testing only took percent or two of
testing, so we scrounge up 3830 controller and string of 3330 disk
drivers for private online service. Somebody was run air bearing
simulation (part of thin-film head design, originally used for 3370FBA,
then later 3380s), but were only getting a couple turn-arounds/month of
the SJR 370/195. We set it up on the bldg15 3033 (only half MIPs of 195)
and could get several turn-arounds/day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head#Thin-film_heads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3370
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3380

trivia: original 3380 had 20 track spacings between each data
track. They cut the spacing between data tracks in half (doubling data
capacity, cylinders, and tracks) ... and then cut spacing again
... tripling data capacity. Then father of 801/risc wants me to help him
with idea for "wide" disk head; parallel transfers with sets of 16
closely-spaced data tracks (with servio tracks on either side of
16-track set). A problem was it would have had 50mbyte/sec transfer at a
time mainframes only supported 3mbyte/sec.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips. I
did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't seem
right somehow.

Head-movement latency probably explains that.
There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head.

Which was followed by head-per-track disk. Burroughs had several models
culminating with the 5N storage subsystem. Single platter, vertically
mounted, pneumatically loaded heads on both sides of the platter.

No seek time component in the access time. Used for the MCP and
for high-speed access to temporary files. One of our production
machines had a string of those and they were used until 1991
(in part due to performance, in part due to the need to test
backward compatibility with newer MCPs).

[John Levine]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head.

Which was followed by head-per-track disk. Burroughs had several models
culminating with the 5N storage subsystem. Single platter, vertically
mounted, pneumatically loaded heads on both sides of the platter.

Drum storage is remarkably old, invented in Austria in 1932. I believe it was
adapted from grinding drums which had already been developed to spin at high
speed with very tight tolerances.

They were used for main storage in some computers in the 1950s including the
Electrodata 205, which has come up in other discussion here, and the very
popular (for the time) IBM 650.

The 650's drum spun at 12,500 RPM which even by current standards was really
fast. But it wasn't very dense, only 1000 to 4000 ten digit memory words.

IBM started working on disks in the early 1950s and shipped the moving head
RAMAC 305 in 1956. I think fixed head disks came later, an obvious combination
of head per track drums and lighter cheaper disks.

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips. I
did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't seem
right somehow.

Head-movement latency probably explains that.
There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head. I remember a paper from a collection from a conference
on OS design, saying that, if you want to implement paging, don’t use
disks, use drums. (The date “1973” comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure
drums were obsolete by then.)
I think disks won out for cost/benefit reasons (and being more compact).
And then economies of scale led to them being improved more and more.

Around 1970, Sperry Univac had a monster called the "FastRand II", a
very large drum (weighed about a ton). It was mechanically a drum, but
with moveable heads. IIRC it required a 400Hz mains power supply (or was
that just the mainframe?). At RECKU (Copenhagen University academic
computer center) both the Fastrand and the motor/generator set that did
the power conversion were in the basement of the computer center. Much
later, we got the CDC-built disk drives. Since they were built for use
with IBM computers, they had 8-bit bytes, while the 1106 mainframe used
36-bit words. So two words made 9 bytes on the disk drive (and also on
the 9-track drives).

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

I never did get to use 6250-bpi drives, or ones that ran at 200 ips. I
did find it interesting that such drives could boast transfer rates
faster than those of the disk drives of the day. That just didn't seem
right somehow.

Head-movement latency probably explains that.

That was a separate factor. The transfer rate usually quoted in the
specifications was independent of that, being the speed that the data
actually flowed once the heads had been positioned to the proper track
and the disk had rotated enough to place the desired record under the
head (head selection, being electronic, took neglegible additional time).

Given the subject of this thread, I'll show off how old I am by
remembering data transfer rates for several drives of the day:

IBM 2311 - 156 KB/s
IBM 2314 - 312 KB/s
IBM 3330 - 806 KB/s
Univac 8416 and 8418 - 625 KB/s
These drives were based on de-rated IBM 3330 technology -
same voice coil actuator but the disk packs were a short
stack (7 tracks per cylinder) and rotated at 2800 RPM
as opposed to the 3330's 3600 RPM. Univac's did offer
a clone of the IBM 3330 - which they called the 8430 -
but the 8416 and its follow-on, the 8418, were priced
significantly lower.

A 6250-bpi tape drive running at 200 ips transfers data at
1.25 MB/s - again, disregarding other factors such as start/stop
time and inter-record gaps. Subsequent models of disk drives
got up to multiple megabytes per second, but for a while tape
had the lead - as long as you disregard rewind time. :-)

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
There was an earlier technology, called “magnetic drums”, where each track
had its own head. I remember a paper from a collection from a conference
on OS design, saying that, if you want to implement paging, don’t use
disks, use drums. (The date “1973” comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure
drums were obsolete by then.)

The 360/67 at the university had a drum for virtual memory paging.
There was no waiting for heads to move; rotational delay was still
there, but overall transfer time was a lot faster than disk.
The 360/67 and drum (plus a second one when they added another
CPU) were still there when I left in 1971.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I think disks won out for cost/benefit reasons (and being more compact).
And then economies of scale led to them being improved more and more.

Tape storage was much cheaper than disk - you could get as much data
on a $20 reel of tape as you could on a $200 disk pack that was the
height of half a dozen reels of tape. And the original washing-machine
drives weren't that much smaller than tape drives. However, disk was
so much faster than tape that it eventually won out for general use,
although tape hung on for some time afterwards for backup - and a
reel or two of tape was easier to carry to another installation
than a disk pack.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

... and a reel or two of
tape was easier to carry to another installation than a disk pack.

What were the standards for tape formats? There was an official “ANSI D
format” (not sure about A, B or C), but as far as I know only DEC
supported that.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

... and a reel or two of
tape was easier to carry to another installation than a disk pack.

What were the standards for tape formats? There was an official “ANSI D
format” (not sure about A, B or C), but as far as I know only DEC
supported that.

The machines I worked on were IBM 360 clones, so they had their own set
of formats. All data was coded using EBCDIC, not ASCII. A standard
labeled tape had the following format:

VOL1 label (80 bytes, contained volume ID, etc.)
HDR1 label (80 bytes, contained file name, etc.)
HDR2 label (80 bytes, optional, not used that often)
Tape mark
First file's data blocks
Tape mark
HDR1 label for second file, if present
Second file's data blocks, if present
Tape mark
Tape mark (Two consecutive tape marks indicated the end of all data.)

You could write unlabeled tapes, which was usually easier if you
were transferring data between machines with different architectures.

Record and block sizes were at the discretion of the programmer.
Like so many other things in those days, it was a trade-off between
memory usage and speed (the longer the block, the fewer the number
of times the tape had to start and stop). Inter-block gaps were
0.75 inches on the old 7-track tapes (200, 556, or 800 bpi), and
0.6 inches on 9-track tapes (800 and 1600 bpi). I think 6250-bpi
tapes shortened the gap to 0.3 inches, but I never worked with them.
As you can see, if you write short blocks, storage becomes inefficient;
at 800 bpi you could store 480 bytes in the 0.6 inches taken up by the
inter-block gap, so if you could spare the memory for big blocks (over
4K, for instance), the amount of data a tape could hold would increase
greatly. For instance, if you wrote card images (80 bytes) unblocked,
each record would require 0.7 inches (0.1 for data, 0.6 for the gap).
A blocking factor of 50 (4000-byte blocks) would need 5 inches for
the data, plus 0.6 inches for the gap. So a 2400-foot tape at 800
bpi could hold 41,000 unblocked records, while with a blocking factor
of 50 that same tape could hole 250,000 records. Typical block sizes
were about 2K in the small shops where I worked, where memory was
scarce and expensive. In the early '70s, when IBM was bringing out
the 370 line, I remember reading in a trade rag how they rocked the
industry by slashing the price of a megabyte of memory from $75,000
to a mere $15,000. (And those were 1970 dollars.)

[John Levine]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

... and a reel or two of
tape was easier to carry to another installation than a disk pack.

What were the standards for tape formats? There was an official “ANSI D
format” (not sure about A, B or C), but as far as I know only DEC
supported that.

The machines I worked on were IBM 360 clones, so they had their own set
of formats. All data was coded using EBCDIC, not ASCII. A standard
VOL1 label (80 bytes, contained volume ID, etc.)
HDR1 label (80 bytes, contained file name, etc.)
HDR2 label (80 bytes, optional, not used that often)
Tape mark
First file's data blocks
Tape mark

I'm reasonably sure there was a label group at the end of the file:

EOF1 label (80 bytes, like HDR1)
EOF2 label (80 bytes, optional)
Tape mark

Post by Charlie Gibbs
HDR1 label for second file, if present

Tape mark

Post by Charlie Gibbs
Second file's data blocks, if present
Tape mark

EOF1
Tape mark

Post by Charlie Gibbs
Tape mark (Two consecutive tape marks indicated the end of all data.)

If the file was too big for one tape, there was EOV1 and EOV2 at the end
of all but the last tape instead of EOF1 and EOF2.

For all the gory details, see Appendix E:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/os/R01-08/C28-6541-1_Control_Program_Services_Apr66.pdf

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

My Linux hard drives were all /dev/hda etc.

[Mike Spencer]

Post by Carlos E.R.
The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

The stuttery static on my radio as it attempted to reproduce the e-m
emanations from my Osborne I?

(Never went down the rabbit hole of trying to get the O-I to produce
musical effects on the radio.)

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Mike Spencer
(Never went down the rabbit hole of trying to get the O-I to produce
musical effects on the radio.)

When I was a callow lad on a data centre tour, I saw an IBM 1620 demo
that did this. Later, in my first real job, I wrote a similar program
for the Univac 9300. A cow orker would often react to an unreasonable
change request by complaining, "What do they want us to do, make the
machine sing Old MacDonald?" Once I got the program working (which I
had done on the q.t.), I hid a transistor radio inside the machine near
the backplane, called him over to the machine, and ran the program,
which of course played Old MacDonald. The results were gratifying.
I wrote the program to read tune specifications from a card deck
so I could make it play anything.

When I was at the University of Copenhagen in 1970, Regnecentralen (the
manufacturer of the GIER "mini" computers, of which I worked with 3
exemplars) had developed a compiler that would play music on the console
speaker (which as I remember it was connected to the overflow bit of the
accumulator register). You simply transcribed the sheet music (one
letter for the note, possibly with a flat or sharp modifier added)
followed by a duration indicator (1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16) with at
metronome beats/minute at the top, and it could play anything you
wanted; the console typewriter povided percussion, if desired.

I particularly remember "Für Elise", "Jesu bleibet meine Freude", "Happy
Birthday" - and for shock value, the "Horst Wessel Lied".

Later, I encountered the IBM program that played music on the 1403 line
printer, but it did not sound nearly as good.

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Mike Spencer
The stuttery static on my radio as it attempted to reproduce the e-m
emanations from my Osborne I?
(Never went down the rabbit hole of trying to get the O-I to produce
musical effects on the radio.)

This was about a decade and a half before we really worried about EMC
(Electromagnetic Compatibility). RF interference was rampant, but out of
computers and into them.

When we set up the regional academic computer center at Copenhagen
University (RECKU) at the Niels Bohr Institute on Blegdamsvej, our shiny
new Univac 1106 would not run. Some investigation revealed that this was
because of a Medium Wave AM transmitter for the Danish Broadcasting
service was located a couple of blocks away, The "cure" was to wallpaper
the computer room with a layer of (grounded) copper foil. (1971?)

It was a good decade later that I learned about the "Tempest" security
concern. And just a couple of years after that, that these concerns came
into the office world with PCs, and PCB designers learned how to lay out
motherboards so that they would be "EMC clean".

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lars Poulsen
It was a good decade later that I learned about the "Tempest" security
concern.

As I recall, you could buy at least some TEMPEST-certified gear on the
open market, but the TEMPEST spec itself was classified.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

The clicks and buzzes of the hard disk step motor on my PC.

Or just type "floppy drive music" into YouTube's search bar.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Freddy1X
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8"
of cource )

The first Apple Mac from 1984 had those variable-speed single-sided 400K
drives. 128K of RAM wasn’t enough to hold an entire MacPaint document in
RAM, so it had to swap bits in and out every time you scrolled. The drive
would whir into life and give off this musical hum that changed pitch
depending on the position of the head on the disk -- quite a soothing
sound, almost playing a tune while you waited for the next part of your
document to appear.

Then two years later the Mac Plus came out, with a whole mebibyte of RAM.
Remember, this was when the IBM PC world was still struggling with the
640kiB limit. And also new, faster, double-sided 800K floppy drives.

But ... they didn’t hum any more. They were still variable-speed, but you
could no longer hear that musical hum from the drive motor: there was only
the “uh-uh-uh” grunt from the head stepper as it switched tracks. Faster,
I think, and more capacious, definitely, but not as soothing any more.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

I once saw an IBM 1130 in action. Nice sounds from its disk drive too.

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Freddy1X
( cuts )
The clicks and buzzes of your floppy drives as they trundled along.( 8" of
cource )

I once saw an IBM 1130 in action. Nice sounds from its disk drive too.

IIRC, that was the IBM 2311 disk drive. The DEC RP02 was based on the
same mechanism, but I think it was twice the density. IIRC, the RK02 was
2.5MB per pack. A few years later, Sony double-side, double density
floppy discs were 1.2MB. But when I was hired as an IBM 1130 computer
operator, that was what was affordable for a minicomputer.

[John Levine]

Post by Lars Poulsen

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once saw an IBM 1130 in action. Nice sounds from its disk drive too.

IIRC, that was the IBM 2311 disk drive.

Probably not. The 1130 had a built in 2310 single platter drive. As
one of the many comprimises to make the 1130 cheap, the heads were
moved by a stepper motor that buzzed as it moved the head back and
forth slowly across the disk. You could add up to two more 2310s
or two 2311s, but I never saw an 1130 with 2311 drives.

According to the manual, the 2311 looked to the CPU like 3 or 5
single platter disks, depending on the model. I think the 1316
disk packs were physically the same as were used on S/360 but
they were formatted in fixed sized sectors, not CKD.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by John Levine

Post by Lars Poulsen

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once saw an IBM 1130 in action. Nice sounds from its disk drive too.

IIRC, that was the IBM 2311 disk drive.

Probably not. The 1130 had a built in 2310 single platter drive. As
one of the many comprimises to make the 1130 cheap, the heads were
moved by a stepper motor that buzzed as it moved the head back and
forth slowly across the disk. You could add up to two more 2310s
or two 2311s, but I never saw an 1130 with 2311 drives.

Indeed, it was a 2310 drive. I remember the cartridges.

Post by John Levine
According to the manual, the 2311 looked to the CPU like 3 or 5
single platter disks, depending on the model. I think the 1316
disk packs were physically the same as were used on S/360 but
they were formatted in fixed sized sectors, not CKD.

I think all cartridge drives had fixed sectors; CKD was an
IBM mainframe thing. (I had a lot of fun writing channel
programs.)

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by John Levine

Post by Lars Poulsen

Post by Charlie Gibbs
I once saw an IBM 1130 in action. Nice sounds from its disk drive too.

IIRC, that was the IBM 2311 disk drive.

Probably not. The 1130 had a built in 2310 single platter drive. As
one of the many comprimises to make the 1130 cheap, the heads were
moved by a stepper motor that buzzed as it moved the head back and
forth slowly across the disk. You could add up to two more 2310s
or two 2311s, but I never saw an 1130 with 2311 drives.

On further research, I think the 1130 disk drive was indeed a 2310 drive
with a 2315 disk cartridge.

The similar DEC drive was the RK02 which was a rebadged Diablo model 30.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

... the heads were moved by
a stepper motor that buzzed as it moved the head back and forth slowly
across the disk.

Another way to say how old you are: you remember the noise a floppy drive
made when it hit an I/O error. One of the first things the OS driver would
do to try to recover was ensure the head was on the right track, and then
try the I/O again. But, to keep costs down, the drive hardware didn’t
actually keep track of which track it was on. So you fed in enough step
pulses to ensure the head was all the way back to the rest position,
before stepping back to the position you thought you were on.

Since the head was more than likely already somewhere in the middle of all
the tracks, there would be leftover step pulses that did nothing more than
just bang the head against the stop. This bang-bang-bang was typically
fast enough to sound like a buzzing. So if you heard this, you knew there
was trouble.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by David LaRue

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by David LaRue

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

True! I loved the feel of the DECwriter LA-36 II keyboard. The
spacebar was below the other keys, in the center where it should be,
and no modifier keys on that row.

I had forgotten about the DECwriter!

I'll never forget when our ASR-33 was replaced with an LA-120. Three
times faster, and full-width greenbar.

For those of us who used dial-in connections, whistle the Break Command.
All together now!

@ X P
NO CARRIER

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
NO CARRIER

I can remember when a common Usenet meme† was to cut off a posting and end
with “NO CARRIER” as a joke indication that the Men In Black had just
broken in and spirited you away before you could reveal something That The
World Was Not Ready To Know ...

†Only we didn’t (yet) call them memes in those days.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
NO CARRIER

I can remember when a common Usenet meme† was to cut off a posting and end
with “NO CARRIER” as a joke indication that the Men In Black had just
broken in and spirited you away before you could reveal something That The
World Was Not Ready To Know ...
†Only we didn’t (yet) call them memes in those days.

Don't let your dog off leash! Oh no, he's headed for the road...

NO TERRIER

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
Don't let your dog off leash! Oh no, he's headed for the road...
NO TERRIER

That’s terrible.

It’s worthy of some of the postings on Bluesky.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
NO CARRIER

I can remember when a common Usenet meme† was to cut off a posting and
end with “NO CARRIER” as a joke indication that the Men In Black had
just broken in and spirited you away before you could reveal something
That The World Was Not Ready To Know ...
†Only we didn’t (yet) call them memes in those days.

Don't let your dog off leash! Oh no, he's headed for the road...
NO TERRIER

“PHP!? I refuse to work with such a crap language--”

NO CAREER

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2024 00:05:23 -0000 (UTC)

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
NO CARRIER

I can remember when a common Usenet meme† was to cut off a posting and
end with “NO CARRIER” as a joke indication that the Men In Black had
just broken in and spirited you away before you could reveal something
That The World Was Not Ready To Know ...
†Only we didn’t (yet) call them memes in those days.

Don't let your dog off leash! Oh no, he's headed for the road...
NO TERRIER

“PHP!? I refuse to work with such a crap language--”
NO CAREER

"Your parcel was undeliverable"

NO COURIER

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I can remember when mice still had balls.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when mice still had balls.

I suppose I could have said “wheels”, but, you know, going for maximum
fnarr-fnarr and all that ...

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when mice still had balls.

I suppose I could have said “wheels”, but, you know, going for maximum
fnarr-fnarr and all that ...

I have a couple of trackballs, one a Kensington and the other a Logitech Marble
Mouse. They got balls, big one!

I'm using a left-handed upright mouse right now. Gave the right-handed one to
my daughter.

But I avoid the mouse as much as possible.
--
To be happy one must be a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in
Zion, b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's
fellow men, and c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste.
It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country
in the world wherein a man constituted as I am -- a man of my peculiar
weaknesses, vanities, appetites, and aversions -- can be so happy as he can
be in the United States. Going further, I lay down the doctrine that it is
a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in the United States
and not be happy.
-- H. L. Mencken, "On Being An American"

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2024 22:54:38 -0000 (UTC)

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when mice still had balls.

I suppose I could have said “wheels”, but, you know, going for maximum
fnarr-fnarr and all that ...

The original? IBM PC mouse had a single ball. A colleague wrote a
procedure for de-fluffing the 2 tracker wheels to ensure smooth
operation. It was a masterpiece of innuendo.

[John Dallman]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when mice still had balls.

The MkI Microsoft mouse had a 1" steel ball-bearing as its ball. This was
quite nice to use, but you had to keep them away from people who got
angry. If you threw one of those mice at a CRT, you had decent odds of it
going through the screen.

John

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.

(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

I remember when computers used a TV for display, on an empty channel.

[David LaRue]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

I remember when computers used a TV for display, on an empty channel.

My roommate at college and I both had large Apple }{+ systems with the TV
monitors. The resulting braodcasts on different 3/4 channels allowed us to
see each others screens from across the room. Both of us weren't allowed to
use our computers during the schools football games because our computer
transmissions bled onto the Color TV down the hall in the Rec Room where the
house was watching the game.

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by David LaRue

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

I remember when computers used a TV for display, on an empty channel.

My roommate at college and I both had large Apple }{+ systems with the TV
monitors. The resulting braodcasts on different 3/4 channels allowed us to
see each others screens from across the room. Both of us weren't allowed to
use our computers during the schools football games because our computer
transmissions bled onto the Color TV down the hall in the Rec Room where the
house was watching the game.

LOL.

I was at a student residence, and I think they had bought maybe three
Spectrums. I went with the director on his car buying second hand B/W TV
sets from people in the city.

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

That's why, when I bought an Atari ST, I opted for it's monochrome monitor.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.

CGA vs. MDA (or Hercules if you wanted to do really beautiful monochrome).
The other drawback to CGA was that it was _slow_. The word processor
package we used (Samna Word III, IIRC) ran slowly enough that a good
typist could stay a word ahead of the display.

When our office got our first personal computers (XT clones from Univac,
about $5K each), we got CGA cards in all of them because management
wanted pretty colours. The secretarial staff who actually used them
hated them, and we soon replaced the slow, fuzzy CGA displays with fast,
razor-sharp Hercules displays - except for the one machine used by the
engineers, who were the only people who actually needed colour graphics.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

That was a totally different world.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.

CGA vs. MDA (or Hercules if you wanted to do really beautiful
monochrome).

Here’s the thing: IBM saw no market for a monochrome adapter that could do
graphics, so theirs was text-only. If you wanted a graphics display from
IBM, you had to go colour as well.

Hercules saw the gap in the market and went for it, bringing out a
monochrome adapter that could do graphics. And did quite well out of it,
for a few years.

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
(Excluding expensive high-end workstation stuff, of course.)

That was a totally different world.

Was it “The Great Gatsby” that begins with the line “The rich are
different from you and me” ...

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when you could either get a colour monitor, or a monitor
that showed text you could read.

CGA vs. MDA (or Hercules if you wanted to do really beautiful monochrome).
The other drawback to CGA was that it was _slow_. The word processor
package we used (Samna Word III, IIRC) ran slowly enough that a good
typist could stay a word ahead of the display.

The CGA in my first computer, an Amstrad PC 1512 DD, was fast, certainly
much faster than what you describe.

[Trog Woolley]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

I talk about punch cards and paper tape. Sometimes I ask if they have
seen old sci-fi films with the big tape wheels going around in the
background, and say I used to work with those.

[Freddy1X]

Post by Trog Woolley

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

I talk about punch cards and paper tape. Sometimes I ask if they have
seen old sci-fi films with the big tape wheels going around in the
background, and say I used to work with those.

Were those tape drives anything like the Lost in Space ones that had bubble
heads and flex duct arms with clamp manipulators on the ends?

After all, there MUST have been SOME basis for the drives shown on the TV
show.

Freddy,
creative license

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Freddy1X

Post by Trog Woolley

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

I talk about punch cards and paper tape. Sometimes I ask if they have
seen old sci-fi films with the big tape wheels going around in the
background, and say I used to work with those.

Were those tape drives anything like the Lost in Space ones that had bubble
heads and flex duct arms with clamp manipulators on the ends?
After all, there MUST have been SOME basis for the drives shown on the TV
show.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space>

Computers and tape drives were often depicted in various episodes using
the Burroughs 205 commercial products.


→
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation#References_in_popular_culture>

References in popular culture

Burroughs B205 hardware has appeared as props in many Hollywood
television and film productions from the late 1950s. For example, a B205
console was often shown in the television series Batman as the Bat
Computer; also as the flight computer in Lost in Space. B205 tape drives
were often seen in series such as The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea.[19][20] Burroughs equipment was also featured in the
movie The Angry Red Planet.


4. ^ab Sawyer, T.J., "Burroughs 205 HomePage"


→ <https://tjsawyer.com/B205Home.htm>

It Sure Looked Like a Computer

On September 15, 1965, I settled down at home in front of our
Hallicrafters black and white television set to watch the premier
episode of Lost in Space. The tension is building as we are introduced
to the Robinson family and we fear for their lives as we discover the
diabolical intentions of Dr. Smith. As the camera pans around the
spacecraft, three Burroughs 205 consoles come into view controlling the
Jupiter 2. Can you say, "Rolling on the Floor, Laughing Out Loud?"

→ <http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=45#73>

{there are some photos, of the consoles}

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Freddy1X

Post by Trog Woolley

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

I talk about punch cards and paper tape. Sometimes I ask if they have
seen old sci-fi films with the big tape wheels going around in the
background, and say I used to work with those.

Were those tape drives anything like the Lost in Space ones that had bubble
heads and flex duct arms with clamp manipulators on the ends?
After all, there MUST have been SOME basis for the drives shown on the TV
show.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space>
Computers and tape drives were often depicted in various episodes using
the Burroughs 205 commercial products.
→
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation#References_in_popular_culture>
References in popular culture
Burroughs B205 hardware has appeared as props in many Hollywood
television and film productions from the late 1950s. For example, a B205
console was often shown in the television series Batman as the Bat
Computer; also as the flight computer in Lost in Space. B205 tape drives
were often seen in series such as The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea.[19][20] Burroughs equipment was also featured in the
movie The Angry Red Planet.

One of the reasons was that the Electrodata (later Burroughs) plant
was in Pasadena, just a few miles from the major studio lots.
(460 Sierra Madre Villa, Pasadena Californa). The plant building
is still there but no longer part of Unisys.

Both the 205 and 220 were electrodata products.

[Freddy1X]

Post by Freddy1X

Post by Trog Woolley

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

I talk about punch cards and paper tape. Sometimes I ask if they have
seen old sci-fi films with the big tape wheels going around in the
background, and say I used to work with those.

Were those tape drives anything like the Lost in Space ones that had
bubble heads and flex duct arms with clamp manipulators on the ends?
After all, there MUST have been SOME basis for the drives shown on the TV
show.

( cuts, neat media use of real computers information. )

I guess that my question was a bit ambigious. I was really asking about the
'basis' for the bubble heads and arms. And might as well add their ability
to move about threatenly. ;)

Freddy,
fictional computer realities.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Carlos E.R.
Computers and tape drives were often depicted in various episodes using
the Burroughs 205 commercial products.

Actually, the company making them was originally Electrodata, until they
were acquired by Burroughs. You only see these comparatively small
tabletop boxes with the control panels, though I think the actual
computers were bigger than that.

The most famous one is likely the IBM AN/FSQ-7, built for the multi-
billion-dollar Air Force SAGE system, that was supposed to provide warning
of the approach of Soviet nuclear bombers. The entire system was
commissioned, operated for about ten years, and then retired and
dismantled, without once being used in anger. (And some suggested it would
never have worked anyway.)

But movie/TV art directors looking for techy/computery bits at bargain
prices bought loads of the components, and you could spot them in a great
many productions for years afterwards.

[Carlos E.R.]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Carlos E.R.
Computers and tape drives were often depicted in various episodes using
the Burroughs 205 commercial products.

Actually, the company making them was originally Electrodata, until they
were acquired by Burroughs. You only see these comparatively small
tabletop boxes with the control panels, though I think the actual
computers were bigger than that.
The most famous one is likely the IBM AN/FSQ-7, built for the multi-
billion-dollar Air Force SAGE system, that was supposed to provide warning
of the approach of Soviet nuclear bombers. The entire system was
commissioned, operated for about ten years, and then retired and
dismantled, without once being used in anger. (And some suggested it would
never have worked anyway.)
But movie/TV art directors looking for techy/computery bits at bargain
prices bought loads of the components, and you could spot them in a great
many productions for years afterwards.

Hard to imagine moving robots with tape drives, though. Even back then,
methinks.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Carlos E.R.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
But movie/TV art directors looking for techy/computery bits at bargain
prices bought loads of the components, and you could spot them in a
great many productions for years afterwards.

Hard to imagine moving robots with tape drives, though. Even back then,
methinks.

Not robots, but control panels around a control room or the like.

The (fictional) robots of the time tended to look pretty clunky.

Speaking of which, I’ve been looking at some of those AI-generated retro-
sci-fi and steampunk clips that have been popping up on YouTube lately.
Breathtaking, hilarious, and a bit disconcerting in spots, all at the same
time. The 1950s-style ones have robots that look like 1950s-period kitchen
appliances -- bright colours, chrome strips, shiny shiny. If only the
movie robots had looked like that ...

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Carlos E.R.
On September 15, 1965, I settled down at home in front of our
Hallicrafters black and white television set to watch the premier
episode of Lost in Space. The tension is building as we are introduced
to the Robinson family and we fear for their lives as we discover the
diabolical intentions of Dr. Smith. As the camera pans around the
spacecraft, three Burroughs 205 consoles come into view controlling the
Jupiter 2. Can you say, "Rolling on the Floor, Laughing Out Loud?"
→ <http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=45#73>
{there are some photos, of the consoles}

I like those consoles! The BCD light displays of the registers are
really quite timeless.

I suppose that Burroughs lent out their stuff for free in return for the
implicit endorsement tht these are the computers of the future.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lars Poulsen
I suppose that Burroughs lent out their stuff for free in return for the
implicit endorsement tht these are the computers of the future.

No, I think by that time this was already old, decommissioned gear, with
the blinkenlights rewired for show purposes.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Lars Poulsen
I suppose that Burroughs lent out their stuff for free in return for the
implicit endorsement tht these are the computers of the future.

No, I think by that time this was already old, decommissioned gear, with
the blinkenlights rewired for show purposes.

The Burroughs pasadena plant was used frequently for promotional
purposes, including broadcasting national election results from the
fishbowl[*] one year (68? 72? somewhere in that vintage). Being
just a few miles from the major studios, they were often the
receipiant of obsolete gear.


[*] Machine room directly behind receptionist desk at the
Sierra Madre Villa entrance. Floor to ceiling glass wall;
special model of B4800 with smoked glass skins rather than
the standard steel skins - showing all the blinkenlighten;
string of 9-tracks (model 5E and some rebadged STC drives),
disks, card-reader, the whole shebang.

[s|b]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

If my memory serves me right it was 64 KB.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by s|b

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I can remember when spacebars were longer, because there were fewer
modifier keys on computer keyboards.

If my memory serves me right it was 64 KB.

Things paused at 64K for a while - it took the industry some time
to break the 1-micron barrier in integrated circuits.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I can remember when friendly error messages were a new thing.

I remember encountering LOGO on an Apple II. When it hit an I/O error on
the floppy, instead of the usual message about an “I/O error”, it said
“I’m having trouble reading the disk”.

It was like a breath of fresh air.

You had to be there, I guess ...