On Thursday 14 November 2024 16:48:56 GMT Dale wrote:

I remember seeing old drives that had I think 14" platters. They had
large motors to spin them. The controller was a separate thing too. I
think their capacity was like 30 or 40MBs or so. It usually took two
people to move one of those things. The company I worked for upgraded systems twice in the five years I worked for them. Their fastest one
ran at a blazingly fast 25MHz. It was RISC based, I think I spelled
that right.

"Reduced instruction set computing." Hyphenate as you like.

In the 70s and 80s the national grid control centre in this country used three 2MB disks, any one or two of which could be online at any time. I can't tell you the platter size, but they were mounted in cabinets about 5' long, 3'6" tall and 2' wide. Each. Our training included servicing the air circulation system and its filters. I still remember the aluminium-alloy casings.

The two computers were Ferranti Argus 500 minis, one on-line, one hot standby, with 16MB of 2-microsecond core store, with the applications written in-house. The operating system was primitive compared with today, also written by us. Nothing relocatable; programs and data lived in strictly defined regions. They drove (I think) 24 analogue vector-drawing displays (no raster to modulate) in the control room upstairs. They never could display a perfect circle - there was always a tiny gap. The D/A converters were big beasts. The systems had
been developed from earlier ones in nuclear submarines. We didn't have their big, circular consoles though.

I hate to think how many miles of 8-hole tape I wound and rewound. Thank goodness we didn't have to cope with 80-column punched cards (Hollerith?) as the ivory-tower, batch-processing mainframe people did.

We used to show visitors around, some from American utility companies, who always asked "yes, nice display driver, but where are your main machines?

Great things be could achieved with assembler and first-class people. More efficient than just throwing money at a problem until it gives in.

Those were the days tho.

Indeed, the best. Mind you, nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

Time for bed, said Zebedee.

--
Regards,
Peter.

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Peter Humphrey:
...

I hate to think how many miles of 8-hole tape I wound and rewound. Thank goodness we didn't have to cope with 80-column punched cards (Hollerith?) as the ivory-tower, batch-processing mainframe people did.

...

Hollerith was the founder of the company which later became IBM.
There are two things named as Hollerith, the cards which later
developed into the IBM 80-col. card, and the constants representing
text/strings/characters in early fortran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollerith

Fortran was my first language, I still have unpunched cards left,
perfect as bookmarks.

///

Old style secondary storage (boxes of punched cards):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_Federal_Records_Center,_Alexandria,_Virginia_(34877725360).jpg

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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On 15/11/2024 00:18, Peter Humphrey wrote:

In the 70s and 80s the national grid control centre in this country used three
2MB disks, any one or two of which could be online at any time. I can't tell you the platter size, but they were mounted in cabinets about 5' long, 3'6" tall and 2' wide. Each. Our training included servicing the air circulation system and its filters. I still remember the aluminium-alloy casings.

When I started in the early 80s, the company I worked for had those 19" platters. We had one drive cabinet with one fixed and one removable
platter, 16MB each for a 32MB drive. And, iirc, an 80MB drive.

When we got one of those 300MB drives with "19 platters" disk packs, wow!

If anybody thinks those sizes don't quite make sense, I think the
platters actually stored 16MB/side, but one side per pack was used for
tracking data. So the 80BM drive had 3 physical platters (5 usable
sides), and the the 300MB had 10 physical platters (19 usable sides).

I got contracted out to an oil exploration company that had a Perkin
Elmer mainframe and a room of those 300 MB drives ...

And wrote a plotting program - in Fortran - that plotted rock
cross-sections. My programs always forced explicit declaration, but
stuck with the implicit conventions, so when I wanted variables "left"
and "right" I was wondering what to call them. I settled on SINIST and
DEXTER, and of course, when my boss at the client looked at my code he'd studied latin ... those were the days ...

Great things be could achieved with assembler and first-class people.
More efficient than just throwing money at a problem until it gives
in.

The problem with that is that it forces everyone else to just throw
money at it too ... We're using Oracle and BigQuery at work, and oh my
god do I hanker for Pick. 32 users hammering a 1GB database, with a
MIPS3000 processor in the database server (the same chip that powered
the Playstation 1). Even when the hard disk was going 19 to the dozen,
the users never complained that it was slow - they might have remarked,
because it was noticeable, but not at the "go make a cup of tea" level...

Indeed, the best. Mind you, nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

Of course...

Cheers,
Wol

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