7 Apr
2018
7 Apr
'18
4:33 a.m.
Shortly after I arrived, the comp center announced a
brand-new feature -- permanent disc storage! (actually, I think it
was a drum...)
Irrelevant to the story (or Unix), but it was indeed a disc drive--much
more storage per unit volume than drums, which date to the 1940s, if
not before. Exact opposite of current technology: super heavy and
rigid combs banged in and out of the disk stack. The washing-machine
sized machine could be driven to walk across the floor. It would not
be nice to be caught in its path. (Fortunately ordinary work loads
did not have such an effect.) Vic Vyssotsky calculated that with only
10 times its 10MB capacity, we could have kept the entire printed
output since the advent of computers at the Labs on line.
Doug
7 Apr
7 Apr
7:01 a.m.
New subject: long lived programs
On 4/6/18, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
The washing-machine
sized machine could be driven to walk across the
floor.
I had exactly that happen to me when I was a student operator of my
college's System/360. We had a bank of three IBM 2311 disk drives
(each washing machine size; capacity 7 MB). They were bolted together
and at the opposite end of the raised floor computer room from the CPU
and operator's station. Facing the console, I had my back to the disk
drives. One evening I heard rattling noises behind me, turned my
chair around, and was shocked to find the disk drives right behind me.
IBM customer service had forgotten to lock the wheels on the drives,
and they had crept across the floor.
Vic Vyssotsky calculated that with only
10 times its 10MB capacity, we could have kept the entire printed
output since the advent of computers at the Labs on line.
Last year I bought two 4 TB drives for backing up my home computer.
As I walked to the check-out, it occurred to me that I was holding in
my hands over a thousand times the entire disk capacity of the world
at the time I started in the industry.
-Paul W.
7:09 a.m.
New subject: long lived programs
On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 09:01:44PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
Last year I bought two 4 TB drives for backing up my
home computer.
As I walked to the check-out, it occurred to me that I was holding in
my hands over a thousand times the entire disk capacity of the world
at the time I started in the industry.
Yeah, it's crazy. When I was doing my first sys admin job it was on a
Masscomp that had a 40MB disk for 20 people. We made it work.
I believe someone announced a 40TB SSD, nope, just looked, Seagate announced
a 60TB SSD in 2016. WTF, that's a huge drive for rotating, that's insane
for SSD.
We old farts live in interesting times.
--lm
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participants (3)
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Doug McIlroy -
Larry McVoy -
Paul Winalski