The Univac FASTRAND *was* slow.
You could stand there watching through the window on the side of the
5,000-pound beast and actually see the enormous drum rotating as it
lumbered along at, what, 14 RPS I think.
Regards to the List -
Jack
At 08:57 AM 5/10/2018, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 05/10/2018 07:29 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
> I'm wondering what the reality of fast drum memories looked like,
and whether anyone came even close to these numbers. Also, am I
right in thinking they are at least in principle achievable? I
know I could run the stress numbers, but haven't done so.
All of the STAR-100 stations, including the paging station used drums.
Jim Thornton and folks at CDC ADL were working on a 100K RPM drum
spinning in vacuo for a paging store, but they couldn't get it to work
reliably. At any rate, STAR was the last system I saw fast drums on
and you can check the figures in the Bitsavers documentation under
cdc/cyber/cyber200. At any rate, a head-per-track drum could be much
faster than a disk.
There were big slow drums, also. Consider the Univac FASTRAND unit.
--Chuck
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