[ale] TB in an external firewire drive

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Thu Sep 1 15:52:48 EDT 2005


On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 15:27 -0400, tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:

> First machine I owned was H89, 64kb ram, and 100kb hard sectored floppy 
> (well, actually originally tape, but that was painful even then). Two 
> years later, I had the opportunity to work (very part time) on a PDP-44, 
> which included 2.5MB disk drives- which were a full 12 inches across. I'm 
> not sure you want to consider those hard disks or not, the platters were 
> removable, and weighed a bunch. My first personal hard disk of the modern 
> form was 20MB, at just over $700.

NASA still has data from the "early days" on old, 12" disks. They can't
do anything with them since the drives have long since failed. There is
currently no one alive that even knows the data format on those disks.

When GSU was moving the physics department to the new building in 1996,
I found several old 12" drives. They weighed easily 20 lbs. In
retrospect, I wish I had shipped through my wife to her uncle who was
still with NASA at the time (He was one of the engineers that designed
the lunar rover. Way cool! Later, he was the director of shuttle safety
systems and devices after Challenger failed. He is now officially
retired but still working on the new space plane project.) but I didn't
know about the need. They hit the trash can along with the 6" drives and
6 full filing cabinets of punch cards that ran nuclear physics data
collection apps in the late 60's and early 70's. I don't miss the cards.
But I wish I could have gotten one of those cabinets. They were perfect
for small parts storage.

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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