On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:08:47 +0100, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 09:56:04 on Fri, 25 Jun
2010, Huge remarked:
In mid 70's I worked on ICL drives, including something they called a
"drum", which was a single-platter mounted vertically.

You sure it was a "platter"? Only, when I worked for ITT in around
1975/6 (on what became the Unimat 4080 telephone switch), the message
switches that we shared our computer room with definitely had drums that
were drum shaped.

Absolutely sure. It was in ICL's in-house computer room in Bracknell,
and I was one of those engineers allowed to wander around and look at
anything I wanted to. In the hope that one day, when it broke, I could
try to fix it. I say "day", more like "half an hour".

Connected via an SFC - a Sectored File Controller, I believe. I have
source code for driving it right here.....!

We used it as a 'fast' paging area, but it wasn't that marvellous, so I
think we gave up in the end, faster to use the ordinary disk as pages
often spilled from it to disk anyway. This was on a homebrew operating
system for the 2900.



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