On Apr 12, 2:03*am, Morris Dovey wrote:
On 4/11/2010 11:02 PM, wrote:

On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:26:41 -0500, Morris *wrote:

You might get a kick out of learning that the floppy disk was originally
developed to load the microcode into the ill-fated object-based FS (for
Future System) machines.

Nah, floppies were used on the 370/158s to load microcode, well before FS.

Are you sure? The 158 was announced in August 2, 1972 about the time
Dept 71J in East Fishkill received a bare (no electronics) /Igar/ drive
from Boulder, and at that time the folks at Boulder were still having
difficulties producing diskettes (something about the jacket lining
abrading the oxide).

I'm not sure when they were introduced into the 370s, but yeah, they
were used for /158 microcode. I remember interviewing at CDC in early
'74. They had a /158 with its covers off, with a bunch of people
reverse-engineering the floppy drive. The /158 was their pride and
joy, which I thought odd. The whole place was "odd" and I told them
so before I left (didn't get an offer .

In 1972, D/71J was working on the UC0 and UC.5 controllers and firmware
drivers for not only /Igar/, but also for /Gulliver/ (the new sealed
hard drive from Hursley), /Lynx/ (a new band printer to succeed the
print-chain 1403), and an SDLC adapter - and all of these were being
developed (primarily) as building blocks for FS.

I worked on FS for a few months, before it was killed. I started in
P'ok in June of '74. IIRC it was killed that fall and the 308x
started using the hardware. FS was a *bad* idea and would have killed
any other company.

It was the guy across the hall from me who came up with the
motor+geneva+leadscrew drive to implement seeks (clack, clack, clack) on
/Igar/, which was later replaced with a (quiet) voice coil seek mechanism..

They all underwent final product test at the same time in Kingston
during, IIRC, 1974. We worked 12 hours on and twelve hours off with a
long commute, through that entire 6-week test process - it was an
exhausting experience (I remember waking up one morning on the way back
from Kingston - driving down the shoulder of US9 doing 65).

I did a lot of 12/12 projects in my time at IBM. In a department
meeting my boss announced that he had good news and bad news. The
good news was that starting immediately, we would be working half
days. The bad news was that there were 24 hours in a day. I'd
already been working 70-hour weeks, for months, so no change.

The evolved /Igar/ drive graduated as the 33FD. I still have some of the
diskettes.