[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
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