[PLUG] Re: Classic Gaming site / Computer History
Alan Batie
alan at batie.org
Mon Apr 22 07:48:14 UTC 2002
On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 09:56:37PM -0700, Greg Long wrote:
> I had no idea that hard disk drives actually date back to 1956
> - my hunch would have been mid-1970's.
I was *using* computers with hard disks in the mid-1970's... In fact, I
have the platter from one of them downstairs. It's a 26" platter from a
600MB drive on a CDC 3300 mainframe that dates to the late 50's or early
60's. There were two spindles of 36 platters in a cabinet about
8'w x 3'd x 6'h (might have been a little higher, my memories are vague).
The head reads 6 tracks at once (makes sense since it was a 24 bit machine
that used 6bit "bytes"); you can see the little rectangles for the read
heads about 1mm apart or so in a about 3/4" square metal block.
I also have a plane of core memory from it --- 4KB about 10" square and
a half inch thick.
It was decommissioned about the time I graduated from OSU and I was working
at the computer center at the time and lucked into a few pieces.
It ran a virtual memory operating system written at OSU; my memory is
vague, it seems like it had 128K memory, but I remember user mode programs
could address 32K because the instruction set used 15bit indexing. It
would start bogging down with around 25-30 users and played a great game
of super star trek.
--
Alan Batie ______ www.rdrop.com/users/alan Me
alan at batie.org \ / www.qrd.org The Triangle
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