On 01/19/2012 11:55 AM, upscope wrote:
Your dating your self. Vistamag was start of the art then. How about head per track disks and card readers.
At the risk of offending the OT police, I'll offer this: I do remember head-per-track disks, but I didn't work on them. I did work on Hewlett Packard disk transports that had one removable 14-inch platter and one fixed. The voice-coil driven heads on both platters required physical cleaning every month or so! I still have the little aluminum tool I made to make the task a bit easier. This was pre-Winchester technology, of course. I did use punch cards. Indeed, one of our old-fashioned scientists used cards for his FORTRAN code up until 1995 or so. I also was a heavy user of punched paper tape, and remember one sat-nav system that used a PDP-8S computer. This was a 12-bit system with a rows of indicators and a switch register to enter data. The computer didn't have non-volatile memory and the program (no operating system) had to be loaded each time it was turned on. First, a 64-word paper-tape bootstrap program had to be loaded by hand from the switch register. Then you could load the paper tape in the reader of an ASR-33 Teletype. It read the 7-inch diameter roll of tape at 110 baud and would take an hour or so to load. This was the original "Navy Transit" satellite system, that you could consult printed tables to predict when a satellite was due and if it was in the right ascension and elevation to process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_%28satellite%29 I'll be quiet now. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org