[ale] OT - Portable Drive

[Jeff Lightner]

I remember the first IBM PC XTs I worked on.  One had dual 5 ?" full height floppies (720k) and the "upgraded" one had one of those and the 10 MB hard drive.  We'd back up the hard drive every week to around 26 floppies (manually having to swap them out of course).

 

At a prior job I worked on the old Data point hardware that had the removable disk packs - they were 5 MB each.

 

The first "portable" disks I saw were the old Bernoulli disks that were 10 MB each and were about the length of a legal pad and a couple of inches thick.

 

It was amazing to me that years after the original IBM PC XT experience I worked for a company that had one chain of customers running Xenix on 286 PCs and backing up the hard drives to floppy.   When I later asked the guy who'd been involved with setting up that particular cluster flock he said the Queen of Mean (who thought only little people pay taxes) had forced them to do it to meet original pricing after AT&T dumped the original line they'd based the bid on.   Some people think they save money by cheeping out on equipment and never seem to realize how much it costs them to have someone sit there and do a manual task every night to overcome the hardware limitations.

 

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Ned Williams
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 9:42 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] OT - Portable Drive

 

The WEIRD thing about this thread is that I am currently working on a job site in Detroit and I walked past a cube this morning with the PAN Am pic of the HDD enclosure on the fork lift stuck up on the cube wall...weird I tell ya. 

 

ON a slightly humourous and potentially unintentional flame bait note...The IBM history page on the 305 notes it was created to eliminate punch card drums...so perhaps with all the hooplah over the current electronic voting systems and verifiably paper trails..we should just tear em out and haul in a few 305's..that way we can actually WATCH the individual votes being written to the disc platters. 

 

gives a new meaning to "fork lift upgrade"

 

Ned



 

On 12/10/07, Geoffrey <lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote: 

List wrote:
> Here's IBM's page on the device which includes a pretty good picture of
> the head assembly: 
> http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html
>
> Perhaps more startling is to think that the first available hard disks 
> for PC usage were 10MB.  I had a dual unit, from TallGrass Technologies
> (amazingly, they are still in business), and let me tell you, having
> 20MB of storage on a single little PC was the cat's ass.  We really did 
> not know what to do with that much storage.  We had mini-computers
> running whole medium sized businesses with a single 9.6MB hard drive.
>
> Can't hardly load a browser in that much storage these days... 

You must be older then me and I'm older then dirt... ;)

--
Until later, Geoffrey

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. 
- Benjamin Franklin
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