XPost: alt.comp.microsoft.windows, alt.folklore.computers

On Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:02:42 -0400
Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 10/25/2024 9:11 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-10-25 07:35, Paul wrote:

Before hard drives came along, a "dream machine" was one with two floppy drives.

Yes. I could not afford a hard disk (didn't sufficiently know what it was, anyway), but I knew I needed two floppy drives on my first machine.

We originally started with hard drives, for departmental server level.
The cost could be spread over more desks that way.

Then the 3 inch high "chunks" of hard drives arrived (and the opportunity
to put one on each desktop had finally arrived). They
could be smaller than other equipment we'd worked on or evaluated.
But still the things struck you as "not very elegant" and
little better than "a floppy with a rigid platter". Just the
heads moving radially, and using a stepper motor to move in and
out, that wasn't elegant, when twenty feet away was equipment
using voice coil. It's not like the consumer technology at the time was aggressive.

And that stuff could be flaky. My initial reaction was not to take
one home with me :-) It would be a small bundle of trouble. If
you didn't have one, that's a good thing. The shock or vibration spec
was only about 2G's or so. Jumping on the floor could crash the heads.

The departmental server, the heads retracted out of the disc pack. The
heads didn't touch the platter when the drive was not in usage. Whereas the Seagate full height drive was CSS (contact start stop). And I don't think there was any retraction attempt -- if the power goes off, the heads
would just drop onto the platter where they were.

Not really all that attractive, for $1500 . Plus the cost of the controller card.
The drive itself was as dumb as a floppy. No SMART. SMART did not exist then. And Enhanced Secure Erase, consisted of dropping the drive on the floor.
No, we didn't drop any. But the first year, there might have been four failures.

And there was no email on there. Our email was on mainframes. Developer source
was stored on the departmental server. This meant, at least initially, the risk factors on the hard drive were minimal. I filled mine up with files,
but it took two years of usage, to fill a 10MB drive. Our file systems guy had
collected statistics, and the average file size back then was 2KB. And that's partly
because there were no graphics. Yet, we still did desktop publishing. The user
manuals were two feet thick.

Paul

A great place for this nostalgia is afc; note the xpost.
I imagine followup replies would be best directed there, i.e. dropping the xposts back to acow-10 and acmw.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

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