At 11:20 AM 7/20/2007 -0700, Pete Eggers wrote:
>Anyone seen the precursor to disks?  Magnetic drum storage.  The control
>hardware was much simpler because there was exactly the same number of bits,
>traveling at the same speed, no matter where the data was on the drum.

Yep....also fixed-head discs.  Sounded like jet engine as they were 
pressurized
as they spun-up.

>Speaking of paper tape, anyone ever have to bootstrap a machine by entering
>data/address pairs through toggle switches on the front panel to load the
>operating system's boot program off paper tape?

Ah yes....having to toggle-in the instructions to built a boot-strap loader so
the PDP-8 could then read the program off the paper-tape reader.


>And then those new fangled floppy disks.  At 8 inches square, they certainly
>were floppy!  Anyone use those data entry desks with built in 8" floppy
>drives?

Yeah....and the IBM-5100 series PC also used them.  Still have some of those
floppy discs.

I also still have some core memory planes that were taken out of a memory
core block from the last decommissioned IBM-1800 that Exxon had in Corpus 
Christi
around 1985 or so.

I can remember in the 70''s we really took a step forward when we could 
read that tray of cards in (or paper tape) and finally store it on a 
DEC-Tape on the PDP-10.  Now we could simply had the  operator a small deck 
(5-10 cards) and the DEC-Tape to mount... :-)

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