[rollei_list] Re: OT: Terrabyte hard drive.
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:59:18 -0700
----- 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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