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The Daring Dufas[_8_]

On 7/15/2012 11:15 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jul 2012 03:28:01 +0000 (UTC), gregz
wrote:

My first PC was a first day ship IBM PC-1 that cost about 2 grand
(employee price) with two 128k diskette drives, a tape recorder "mass
storage" and a whopping 64K of RAM. (Epson dot printer and mono
monitor)

Several years later I did the $300 WDWX1 controller/ST238 upgrade to a
hard drive but that also required a new system board.
My old one suddenly just "went bad" and I had to replace it on the M/A
... funny how that works huh?
I had a problem earlier with one of those diskette drives and needed a
new one too. They only had the 360K. ;-)

I'm thinking a large disk in mid 70's was about 20 kb or perhaps mb. ?
In 1969 loading a program by paper tape into a $10k pdp 8/I first required
you to manually machine code the program on switches so computer would know
how to read the paper tape. Back when an oscilloscope was what you used to
fix computers.

In the mid 70s a big disk drive was a 3330 M11 and you got 200MB per
spindle on a removable pack. (ten 14" platters)

Two drives were about the size of a side by side refrigerator and the
standard array of 8 had a 60 amp 3 phase 208 power plug.

I worked on computers since they leaked oil on the floor and filled a
big room.

Do you remember the UNIVAC drum memory units? I think they were the size
of a 50gal drum. I do remember the university having a UNIVAC
classic science fiction computer with all the glass doors and blinking
lights. This was back in 1965-66 when I started playing with digital
computers and the UNIVAC was being replaced by a shiny new IBM 360/50
RAX system with terminals around campus. The terminals were big L shaped
desks with an IBM Selectric for I/O and part of the desk held all the
interface electronics. The I/O was the wide green and white fan-fold
paper and I don't remember an 80 column card reader as part of the
terminal. Of course, there was a ton of keypunch machines at the
computer center. Kids today have no idea what we called computers but
those huge machines got us to The Moon and back. ^_^

TDD