Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

rusty

Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

I told them to use Ardex Flex FL, but did they listen? Bloody B&Q value
adhesive and grout. You can blame NASA budget cuts.

Christian.

Rusty wrote:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

Licking your finger and applying along the seal is problematic though.

In article ,
"Rusty" writes:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't
go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was
one of the things they were specifically after).

It's easy to forget how far technology has moved on in the
25 years since it was launched (and even longer since the
design started), although some of the systems on it have been
modernised over the years.

--
Andrew Gabriel

On Wed, 3 Aug 2005 14:27:04 +0100, "Rusty"
wrote:

Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

How quickly can you get here?

P.S. parking is a bit difficult at the moment and the local B&Q has
just disappeared over the horizon.

--
Regards, Paul Herber, Sandrila Ltd. http://www.pherber.com/
SanDriLa - SDL/MSC/TTCN/UML2 application for Visio http://www.sandrila.co.uk/

Rusty wrote:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.

because it's a UK group and what would any Brit be able to tell some septic.

--
http://gymratz.co.uk - Best Gym Equipment & Bodybuilding Supplements UK.
http://trade-price-supplements.co.uk - TRADE PRICED SUPPLEMENTS for ALL!
http://fitness-equipment-uk.com - UK's No.1 Fitness Equipment Suppliers.
http://gymratz.co.uk/hot-seat.htm - Live web-cam! (sometimes)

In message , Rusty
wrote
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.



The correct stuff was sent up but the astronauts were out when Parcel
Farce called. They now have to collect it form the nearest central
depot, which on one of Saturn's moons.

--
Alan

Rusty wrote:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

They've got a hacksaw, so they've obviously been reading Drivel.

Owain

In message , Rusty
writes
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

Because they're septics

most of them would have trouble finding the UK, let alone UK.d-i-y

Even if they had, the tale of dIMM and his hacksaw wooul put them off
for life

Astro: "What's that hissing sound ?"

dIMM: "Oops, your nose cone seems to have sprung a leak"

--
geoff

"Rusty" wrote in message

Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

Because;

a) It would have generated 27 replies, all of which disagreed with each
other.

b) Another 32 replies would have just been humorous with no actual
suggestions.

c) Doctor Drivel/Evil would have made a point, and no matter how sensible it
was or wasn't, 43 people would have ripped the p*ss out of him.

d) Mary Fisher would have insisted they used organic filler made from
chicken droppings :-)

e) The thread would eventually have changed to something about sticking
ferrets to plasterboard.

Dave

"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
"Rusty" writes:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't
go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was
one of the things they were specifically after).

It's easy to forget how far technology has moved on in the
25 years since it was launched (and even longer since the
design started), although some of the systems on it have been
modernised over the years.

--

I bet the astronauts where glad when they fitted an inside loo

Arthur

In article , Andrew
Gabriel wrote:
When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going,

"... Tubelines had recently stockpiled Pentium 133 microchips, used in
the signal controls of the Jubilee line, and acquired a pile of 1970s
computers using the internet for spares for the Northern line."

http://www.cog.org.uk/pressdetail.asp?id=3

--
Tony Bryer SDA UK 'Software to build on' http://www.sda.co.uk
Free SEDBUK boiler database browser http://www.sda.co.uk/qsedbuk.htm
[Latest version QSEDBUK 1.10 released 4 April 2005]

Tony Bryer wrote:
In article , Andrew
Gabriel wrote:

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going,


"... Tubelines had recently stockpiled Pentium 133 microchips, used in
the signal controls of the Jubilee line, and acquired a pile of 1970s
computers using the internet for spares for the Northern line."

http://www.cog.org.uk/pressdetail.asp?id=3


I'm amazed that parts of the tube network are so advanced!

"David Lang" wrote:

c) Doctor Drivel/Evil would have made a point, and no matter how sensible

Does not compute, illegal stack overflow, pipe leakage in progress
--

In article ,
Tony Bryer writes:
In article , Andrew
Gabriel wrote:
When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going,

"... Tubelines had recently stockpiled Pentium 133 microchips, used in
the signal controls of the Jubilee line, and acquired a pile of 1970s
computers using the internet for spares for the Northern line."

As far as I know, the Baker Street control room is still
full of GEC 4000 series minicomputers which do the train
tracking and real-time timetabling for a couple of the lines.
I used to visit them quite often when I worked for GEC Computers
to help them out with technical support. These machines were
probably all 1980's and early 1990's era. They had bought the
software from British Rail who were running it in their own
control room in Euston Tower in the 1970's, although British
Rail stopped using the GEC machines sometime in the 1990's.
Last time I was there was probably 1993 or 1994 (recovering
a filesystem from a corrupted disk, ISTR).

I'm not sure what the reference to the 1970's computers would
be. It could just be an inaccurate reference to GEC 4000 kit,
but I suspect it's something earlier. The computers which drove
the information boards locally were HP systems, which got their
info from the GEC 4000 minicomputers. I don't recall now what
sort of HP systems they were, but those might be the P133's
that are being referred to.

Tube lines are a rather harsh environment, and actually very
few minicomputers would work down there. We at GEC used to laugh
each time someone else bid DEC minis, installed the first one,
and found the computer crashed every time a train pulled out of
the station.

--
Andrew Gabriel

On 04 Aug 2005 16:24:36 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
Tony Bryer writes:
In article , Andrew
Gabriel wrote:
When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going,

"... Tubelines had recently stockpiled Pentium 133 microchips, used in
the signal controls of the Jubilee line, and acquired a pile of 1970s
computers using the internet for spares for the Northern line."

As far as I know, the Baker Street control room is still
full of GEC 4000 series minicomputers which do the train
tracking and real-time timetabling for a couple of the lines.
I used to visit them quite often when I worked for GEC Computers
to help them out with technical support. These machines were
probably all 1980's and early 1990's era. They had bought the
software from British Rail who were running it in their own
control room in Euston Tower in the 1970's, although British
Rail stopped using the GEC machines sometime in the 1990's.
Last time I was there was probably 1993 or 1994 (recovering
a filesystem from a corrupted disk, ISTR).


Considering the likely routing of the cabling and the general
unsavoury (or even savoury) environment of the Tube, I guess that
flushing of the cache would be needed too? ;-)

(Visions of the girl in Jurassic Park with all hell breaking loose
around saying "This is a Unix system - I know this" and immediately
delving 10 levels through the X Windows interface. Half the cinema
audience groans while the other half wonders why).

"Broad-bosomed, bold, becalmed, benign stands Bal-Ham, four-square on
the Northern Line"

etc.




--

..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

In article ,
Andy Hall writes:

Considering the likely routing of the cabling and the general
unsavoury (or even savoury) environment of the Tube, I guess that
flushing of the cache would be needed too? ;-)

There was no write cache in the OS (GEC's OS4000) to anything
like the extent there is in unix. Metadata updates were completely
interlocked, and data updates could cache one partially written
file block, but the application had full control and could disable
even that. The OS actually provided no way to shut itself down,
as it was always safe to just turn off the power (subject to the
customer's applications either being written to carefully to order
their own data writes or being shutdown first).

Those machines almost never crashed on the production systems
anyway. I don't recall for sure now, but London Underground
probably ran a pair as main and hot standby, and another pair as
cold main/standby/development/test.

They also used them as multi-user minicomputers for actually
doing their software development.

(Visions of the girl in Jurassic Park with all hell breaking loose
around saying "This is a Unix system - I know this" and immediately

At that time, no one used unix for process control applications.

--
Andrew Gabriel

On 04 Aug 2005 17:40:50 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
Andy Hall writes:

Considering the likely routing of the cabling and the general
unsavoury (or even savoury) environment of the Tube, I guess that
flushing of the cache would be needed too? ;-)

There was no write cache in the OS (GEC's OS4000) to anything
like the extent there is in unix. Metadata updates were completely
interlocked, and data updates could cache one partially written
file block, but the application had full control and could disable
even that. The OS actually provided no way to shut itself down,
as it was always safe to just turn off the power (subject to the
customer's applications either being written to carefully to order
their own data writes or being shutdown first).

Those machines almost never crashed on the production systems
anyway. I don't recall for sure now, but London Underground
probably ran a pair as main and hot standby, and another pair as
cold main/standby/development/test.

They also used them as multi-user minicomputers for actually
doing their software development.

(Visions of the girl in Jurassic Park with all hell breaking loose
around saying "This is a Unix system - I know this" and immediately

At that time, no one used unix for process control applications.


Except in Hollywood ;-)



--

..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

In article ,
Andy Hall writes:

At that time, no one used unix for process control applications.

Except in Hollywood ;-)

In the UK, the GEC 4000's got used in quite a lot of films.
The main reason was that we were in Elstree Way, Borehamwood,
right next to the film studios. Directors would often organise
shoots in our computer room, and staff would get yanked off
their projects for a day or two to write some software to do
things like make a row of 8 tape drives all turn their reels in
synchronisation, VDU's to scroll extra slowly, etc.

The last filming I know of which used GEC 4000 kit was an episode
of Red Dwarf IIRC, which had the front panel with rows of
keyswitches and lights off a very old (1972) computer, which
was supposed to look like a modern computer. Trouble was the
more modern computers didn't have any switches or lights on
them, so film directors weren't very interested in them;-)

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its
switches and lights, which is in a box somewhere.
I made a little animated GIF of it some time ago...
http://www.cucumber.demon.co.uk/gecc...es/gec4080.gif

I've actually got a working GEC 4162 (c.1982), but it may go
in the skip in the next year or so, as I've have no real use
for it for the last 10 years.

--
Andrew Gabriel

Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
Andy Hall writes:

At that time, no one used unix for process control applications.

Except in Hollywood ;-)


In the UK, the GEC 4000's got used in quite a lot of films.
The main reason was that we were in Elstree Way, Borehamwood,
right next to the film studios. Directors would often organise
shoots in our computer room, and staff would get yanked off
their projects for a day or two to write some software to do
things like make a row of 8 tape drives all turn their reels in
synchronisation, VDU's to scroll extra slowly, etc.

The last filming I know of which used GEC 4000 kit was an episode
of Red Dwarf IIRC, which had the front panel with rows of
keyswitches and lights off a very old (1972) computer, which
was supposed to look like a modern computer. Trouble was the
more modern computers didn't have any switches or lights on
them, so film directors weren't very interested in them;-)

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its
switches and lights, which is in a box somewhere.
I made a little animated GIF of it some time ago...
http://www.cucumber.demon.co.uk/gecc...es/gec4080.gif

I've actually got a working GEC 4162 (c.1982), but it may go
in the skip in the next year or so, as I've have no real use
for it for the last 10 years.


A number of ex-colleagues at ICL recall with some glee sitting behind
mag tape decks and flicking the test switch to make the spools wizz back
and forth for some long forgotten TV programme. LOL

Richard

--
Real email address is RJSavage at BIGFOOT dot COM

Andrew Gabriel wrote:

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its switches and
lights, which is in a box somewhere. I made a little animated GIF of it
some time ago...
http://www.cucumber.demon.co.uk/gecc...es/gec4080.gif

That can't possibly be real. As any filmgoer knows, real computer front
panels explode at the slightest provocation.


--
Ian White

(Andrew Gabriel) wrote in
:

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't
go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was
one of the things they were specifically after).


Damn! I threw away a box of 8" drives last year.

--
Rich P
Replace .invalid with .com to reply.

Pet @ www.gymratz.co.uk wrote:

Rusty wrote:

Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.


because it's a UK group and what would any Brit be able to tell some
septic.


Just about everything?

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

because it's a UK group and what would any Brit be able to tell some
septic.


Just about everything?

:¬)

--
http://gymratz.co.uk - Best Gym Equipment & Bodybuilding Supplements UK.
http://trade-price-supplements.co.uk - TRADE PRICED SUPPLEMENTS for ALL!
http://fitness-equipment-uk.com - UK's No.1 Fitness Equipment Suppliers.
http://gymratz.co.uk/hot-seat.htm - Live web-cam! (sometimes)

"Rusty" wrote in message
...
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

rusty

Look at:
http://www.starlitetechnologies.com/

In article ,
Ian White writes:
Andrew Gabriel wrote:

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its switches and
lights, which is in a box somewhere. I made a little animated GIF of it
some time ago...
http://www.cucumber.demon.co.uk/gecc...es/gec4080.gif

That can't possibly be real. As any filmgoer knows, real computer front
panels explode at the slightest provocation.

In my 12 years working there, I only recall one incident of
a machine bursting into flames spectacularly enough that it
stood any chance of making a film (but sadly it wasn't being
filmed at the time). More usually what happened is that a
burning smell would appear in the computer room, completely
diffused throughout by the aircon. People would walk around
looking for the source but normally never find it, and you
had to wait for someone to start moaning that a system had
stopped working before you actually identifed the cause. In
most cases it was actually some peripheral, normally a VDU,
or occasionally a disk drive (washing-machine sized, not
your little 3.5" drives of today).

--
Andrew Gabriel

"Andrew Gabriel" andrew@a17 wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
Ian White writes:
Andrew Gabriel wrote:

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its switches and
lights, which is in a box somewhere. I made a little animated GIF of it
some time ago...
http://www.cucumber.demon.co.uk/gecc...es/gec4080.gif

That can't possibly be real. As any filmgoer knows, real computer front
panels explode at the slightest provocation.

In my 12 years working there, I only recall one incident of
a machine bursting into flames spectacularly enough that it
stood any chance of making a film (but sadly it wasn't being
filmed at the time). More usually what happened is that a
burning smell would appear in the computer room, completely
diffused throughout by the aircon. People would walk around
looking for the source but normally never find it, and you
had to wait for someone to start moaning that a system had
stopped working before you actually identifed the cause. In
most cases it was actually some peripheral, normally a VDU,
or occasionally a disk drive (washing-machine sized, not
your little 3.5" drives of today).

...and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!

On 03 Aug 2005 14:20:02 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
"Rusty" writes:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't
go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was
one of the things they were specifically after).


Oooh! I had some brand new 8" drives, still in their boxes! Haven't a
clue what I did with 'em though..

sponix

"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!


They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

In article ,
"dennis@home" writes:

"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!

I have a disk pack from a CDC drive, with 10 14" platters
(plus a guard platter top and bottom). Depending on sector
size and the like, they are something like ~300Mb unformatted.
These are about 2 generations before Winchester drives.

I spent a year or so designing a filesystem garbage collection
utility for various disks back around 1985, and I liked to test
it on these because I could take the cover off the drive mech
and watch the heads for unexpected seeks (which slow the
procedure down, so you try to avoid them). My pack is actually
a "CE" pack (used for aligning the heads in the drive) which
a field service engineer had head-crashed (a damn expensive
mistake to make on a CE pack back then).

They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

I also have a single 14" platter from these.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

We still had these around for support purposes, but they were
long obsolete in new machines when I started in 1983. A source
of many nasty industrial injuries when people tried moving them
while the drum was still spinning and overlooked the gyroscopic
effect and the enormous length of time they took to spin down.
Some customers were using them into the late 1980's because
their realtime applications couldn't be transfered to run on
disks with seek times.

--
Andrew Gabriel

"dennis@home" wrote in message
news

"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!


They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

That's what I said. Whe they saw 250MB they went Wow!

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:35:00 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:


"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!


They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

The first UNIX system I used had two 2.4MB hard disks. Both
exchangeable!

On 5 Aug 2005 19:45:22 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:35:00 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:


"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!


They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

The first UNIX system I used had two 2.4MB hard disks. Both
exchangeable!


..... and you *definitely* wanted to avoid swapping....



--

..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

"Andrew Gabriel" andrew@a17 wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
"dennis@home" writes:

"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!

I have a disk pack from a CDC drive, with 10 14" platters
(plus a guard platter top and bottom). Depending on sector
size and the like, they are something like ~300Mb unformatted.
These are about 2 generations before Winchester drives.

I spent a year or so designing a filesystem garbage collection
utility for various disks back around 1985, and I liked to test
it on these because I could take the cover off the drive mech
and watch the heads for unexpected seeks (which slow the
procedure down, so you try to avoid them). My pack is actually
a "CE" pack (used for aligning the heads in the drive) which
a field service engineer had head-crashed (a damn expensive
mistake to make on a CE pack back then).

They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

I also have a single 14" platter from these.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

We still had these around for support purposes, but they were
long obsolete in new machines when I started in 1983. A source
of many nasty industrial injuries when people tried moving them
while the drum was still spinning and overlooked the gyroscopic
effect and the enormous length of time they took to spin down.
Some customers were using them into the late 1980's because
their realtime applications couldn't be transfered to run on
disks with seek times.

I recall using a DEC 10, the size wardrobes, with 150KB hard drive. It
managed 200 users, and quite well too. It needed a permanent systems admin
man on it to keep it up to scratch.

I have seen small tower servers using Novell running 1000 users plus, all
using windows and no one permanently managing it.

In message , s--p--o--n--i--x
writes
On 03 Aug 2005 14:20:02 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
"Rusty" writes:
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was
running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples'
old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't
go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was
one of the things they were specifically after).


Oooh! I had some brand new 8" drives, still in their boxes! Haven't a
clue what I did with 'em though..

Hey, I've got a couple in the loft

--
geoff

In message ws.net,
Doctor Drivel writes

"Rusty" wrote in message
...
Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting.
The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

rusty

Look at:
http://www.starlitetechnologies.com/

I see the site's "under construction"

They're prolly making it up as they go along

Now, who was after some fire bricks the other week ?

--
geoff

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 19:59:21 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

The first UNIX system I used had two 2.4MB hard disks. Both
exchangeable!

.... and you *definitely* wanted to avoid swapping....

Couldn't help it, really. Memory was even more expensive...

But the swap area was a fixed size, created by making the file system
(just one) smaller than the physical size of the disk.

The idea of 'partitions' for different file systems came later, and was
in fact a botch answer to a design flaw.

On 5 Aug 2005 20:55:24 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 19:59:21 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

The first UNIX system I used had two 2.4MB hard disks. Both
exchangeable!

.... and you *definitely* wanted to avoid swapping....

Couldn't help it, really. Memory was even more expensive...

But the swap area was a fixed size, created by making the file system
(just one) smaller than the physical size of the disk.

IIRC, on some kernels you had to compile in the swap area size as well
and the two had to line up to avoid a nasty panic and a corruption



The idea of 'partitions' for different file systems came later, and was
in fact a botch answer to a design flaw.



I didn't know that. I guess I started using/administering Unix
systems with some of the first microprocessor based ones in the early
80s. These were mainly v7, System3 and 5 later. All had separate
partitions as I remember. What was the design flaw? I guess it
predated this period.....


--

..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:02:09 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

But the swap area was a fixed size, created by making the file system
(just one) smaller than the physical size of the disk.

IIRC, on some kernels you had to compile in the swap area size as well
and the two had to line up to avoid a nasty panic and a corruption

Yes...not sure about v6 (which was where I started in 1976). I'll take a
look at the source sometime...I have it here!

The idea of 'partitions' for different file systems came later, and was
in fact a botch answer to a design flaw.

I didn't know that. I guess I started using/administering Unix
systems with some of the first microprocessor based ones in the early
80s. These were mainly v7, System3 and 5 later. All had separate
partitions as I remember. What was the design flaw? I guess it
predated this period.....

Yes...basically, all disk addresses (sector based) were 16 bits, inside
and outside the kernel. So the maximum disk size was 32MB (0.5K
sectors). OK until the RP02 disks we had (20MB) were upgraded to RP03
(40MB). This meant that the raw device couldn't 'reach' the whole disk.

The solution was to split the disk into partitions ('virtual disks' in a
sense), each of which didn't exceed the limit. Then the only thing that
needed to do 16bit arithmetic was the disk device driver.

There was a lot of post-justification, saying that it was a good idea to
split the disk up anyway (and that's true). But the original impetus was
the 16 bit limitation.

The one system call that had to change was 'seek' since it used an int
and not a long. In order not to break anything, it was supplemented
(rather than replaced) by a 32 bit version, and that's why it's called
'lseek' to this day...

In message , Bob Eager
writes
On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:35:00 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:


"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
eenews.net...

..and held 250 Meg on a Winchester drive and everyone went, wow!


They held 5M on the fixed disk and 5M on the removable cartridge.

Before that we used drums that held about 5M and needed a screwdriver to
unstick the heads if you left them stopped for too long.

250M on a disk is far too modern.

The first UNIX system I used had two 2.4MB hard disks. Both
exchangeable!

Note for other uk.d-i-yers

If you don't have a bus pass, you probably won't have the faintest idea
what they're on about


--
geoff