X-no-Archive:yes
Actually, the Winchester drive came from IBM.  They developed that type of
drive and the original one had 2 platters of 30MB each.  It was called the
30-30.  Nicknamed Winchester after the rifle of that caliber.

Sad to see you go, do stay in touch,

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
[log in to unmask]                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Jeff Dowsley [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Wednesday, December 03, 1997 5:51 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Winchester Disc Drives? and farewell.

I missed any clarification - discard if already answered...

I understood that the Winchester disc drive mechanism (radial arm
driven by a stepping motor for positioning) was developed at
Winchester College of Cambridge(?) University in the very early days
of HDD development.  The first mechs wore out and lost positional
reproducibility very quickly, and the design was shelved.  Then with
the development of the "space-age" materials that flowed from the
NASA programmes, ceramics and other very hard materials were
developed which overcame the wear problems for winchester mechanisms.

Now we have "hot-swap" throwaway 9Gb HDDs for a few $k.  Amazing the
rate of storage technology development.

On another matter, we will be sadly decommissioning our HP3000 after
20 years.  We started with an HP3000/II in 1977, and will be
pensioning off our HP3000/955 early in 1998.  Factors in higher
education here in OZ coupled with local marketing have driven us to
acquire dual DEC Alpha 4100s and DEC UNIX.  Go like the clappers, but
are not stable when compared with MPE.

I can only reiterate what others have said: it has been a pleasure to
lurk and occasionally contribute to discussion on this list.

List members are helpful, especially to newcomers to the HP 3000
world, polite, informative and very willing to help solve problems,
and have a good sense of humour.  Certainly the best list I have been
on.  (I know, I should get out more....)

Thanks to all

Jeff D


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