[rollei_list] Re: OT: Terrabyte hard drive.

  • From: "Robert Lilley" <54moggie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:53:54 -0400

I seem to recall that my K&E Log Log Duplex Trig didn't have any ram or hard
drive.  You had to move a wood bar and a bit of glass in consort with scales
to get a very simple answer denoted as a number. 

Rob 

-----Original Message-----
From: rollei_list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rollei_list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Knoppow
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 4:59 PM
To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: OT: Terrabyte hard drive.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Don Williams" <dwilli10@xxxxxxx>
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 1:19 PM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: OT: Terrabyte hard drive.


> At 06:47 AM 10/17/2008, you wrote:
>>That was about the time I bought a Commodore PC (IBM 
>>compatible) with
>>a whopping 10mb harddisk :-)
>>
>>Daniel
>
> That must have been about the same time my own company was 
> selling
> them.  We also sold them to schools, along with hardware 
> to link
> about 30 Commodore 64's to a single drive for grade 
> schools.
>
> DAW
>
     My introduction to computers was the first ones 
Hewlett-Packard made. These were meant to compete with the 
DEC stuff of the time. We used them in automated measurement 
systems, mainly spectrum analyzers and network analyzers. I 
had to learn the computer on my own. The ones I had to work 
with had core memory and no hard drive although tape and 
drum drives were available. The basic machine came with 8 Kb 
of ram. This could be expended to 64Kb with the additional 
memory in a separate rack. I think 64Kb was the limit but I 
would have to look through old catalogues to be sure. I 
mostly used punched paper tape for permanent memory. Most 
larger systems used nine track half inch tape. There were 
also drum memories available but I don't remember the specs 
and never saw one. We had one computer expert in our 
facility but he was a bit of a psychopath and hated me so I 
had no one readily available to learn from. This guy would 
take off at customers and management had to applogize to 
them on more than one occasion. He told someone at TRW or 
someplace that if they couldn't understand whatever they 
asked about they were too dumb to own a computer.  Very 
frustrating because I was fascinated with the things. These 
computers had a row of toggle switches and lamps on the 
front. It was necessary to enter about eight commands via 
the switches to wake it up enough to read from the paper 
tape drive. Anything more than the very simplest program had 
to be translated to machine language, processed, interpreted 
back to -hp- basic and would then could be read out no an 
ASR-33 Teletype or a plotter. That meant three spools of 
tape and three passes through the machine. Of course, the 
larger installations using magnetic tape machines would do 
this automatically but the RAM did not have enough capacity 
to hold the Basic interpreter and still have much room left 
for computation. I used to keep a basic binary bootstrap 
loop tape folded up in my wallet. This all seems to have 
happened in another life.

--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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