On 15/11/2024 00:18, Peter Humphrey wrote:
In the 70s and 80s the national grid control centre in this country used three
2MB disks, any one or two of which could be online at any time. I can't tell
you the platter size, but they were mounted in cabinets about 5' long, 3'6"
tall and 2' wide. Each. Our training included servicing the air circulation
system and its filters. I still remember the aluminium-alloy casings.
When I started in the early 80s, the company I worked for had those 19"
platters. We had one drive cabinet with one fixed and one removable
platter, 16MB each for a 32MB drive. And, iirc, an 80MB drive.
When we got one of those 300MB drives with "19 platters" disk packs, wow!
If anybody thinks those sizes don't quite make sense, I think the
platters actually stored 16MB/side, but one side per pack was used for
tracking data. So the 80BM drive had 3 physical platters (5 usable
sides), and the the 300MB had 10 physical platters (19 usable sides).
I got contracted out to an oil exploration company that had a Perkin
Elmer mainframe and a room of those 300 MB drives ...
And wrote a plotting program - in Fortran - that plotted rock
cross-sections. My programs always forced explicit declaration, but
stuck with the implicit conventions, so when I wanted variables "left"
and "right" I was wondering what to call them. I settled on SINIST and
DEXTER, and of course, when my boss at the client looked at my code he'd
studied latin ... those were the days ...
> Great things be could achieved with assembler and first-class people.
> More efficient than just throwing money at a problem until it gives
> in.
The problem with that is that it forces everyone else to just throw
money at it too ... We're using Oracle and BigQuery at work, and oh my
god do I hanker for Pick. 32 users hammering a 1GB database, with a
MIPS3000 processor in the database server (the same chip that powered
the Playstation 1). Even when the hard disk was going 19 to the dozen,
the users never complained that it was slow - they might have remarked,
because it was noticeable, but not at the "go make a cup of tea" level...
> Indeed, the best. Mind you, nostalgia isn't what it used to be...
Of course...
Cheers,
Wol
