Nerd relic: found this in the basement...

[grislyatoms]

last weekend at work poking around looking for some printer parts...











DEC RA60P disk pack - 200 or so MB

Last used date - August 1987...

Weighs 5-10 lbs. or so 

[Fly320s]

Irwin can burn it. 

[lee n. field]

<old fart reminiscence>
I remember helping to wrestle a hard disk for a Data General mini (which was old even then) into place, back in my first (ignoring the job that lasted 2 weeks) tech job, back in 1991.  Don't remember the capacity -- 80MB maybe.  Huge sucker -- took two of us to do the job.

Back in the daaaay.....
</old fart reminiscence>

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

i remember watching in 81 the new owner of a database firm load both sets of backup onto the washing machine after the head crash roached the primary and he didn't want to wait for his it guy to come in. killed all three copys   he never made that mistake again

[Larry Ashcraft]

My invoicing computer at the shop is a 1989 MacIntosh SE, with an ImageWriter attached.  The laser printer I had finally died, and I had to dig the old ImageWriter out.  Ribbons are still available online.

My floppy drive died years ago, so I have several years of invoices stored in the 30M hard drive, with an external hard drive for backup.

Hey, it still works, and the business climate today doesn't allow me to upgrade.  And the Mac has out-survived several PCs that I use in the back for engraving.

[Parker Dean]

I remember seeing these back in the Seventies. My father was computer operations manager for IU Bloomington and spent more time there than a kid would like.

At the time the machine room was on Seventeenth St and as you walked in and up an 18 inch or so tall ramp the printers were on the left and the disc drives were against the wall on the right. The tape drives were in two rows of ten on the left after you walked in maybe 30 feet. The CPU was on the far side of the room from the entrance. I remember an IBM 360 being in place but there were others, later. A lot of the time the operators had panels open, or ajar, due to heat issues. Punch card sorters were on the left wall behind the printers

Most of the times that I was there the machine was down for one reason or another, usually a thunderstorm, but sometimes they would be waiting on an IBM engineer to get there and fix it. One time the problem was multiple people out sick so my dad had to help out due to a big job that had to be done that weekend. I was maybe 12 and remember hanging tapes on the tape drives. Had to read the screen to see which one was needed, find it on the rack, remove the outer cover on the tape as you walked to the drive which would already be rewound and open. Stretch to reach the tape release and pull the tape off, slide the fresh tape onto the spindle making sure to leave a bit of tape hanging free. I wasn't tall enough to reach the control buttons on the top so I had to use the alternate method of briefly squeezing the bottom seal. The glass cover would glide up and you'd hear a brief hiss as the unit pulled a vacuum, and sucked the tape down into the channels, past the read head, and up to the take up reel. In movies you see these types of tape drives spinning but they hardly ever did this. Usually they'd twitch back and forth, often independently.

My dad did change one of the disc drives that time, way too heavy for a 12yo to pull out of the unit without doing something like kneeling on top of the unit and they wouldn't have liked that. It was pretty much just twist and lift, reverse to  insert fresh one.

[Manedwolf]

My invoicing computer at the shop is a 1989 MacIntosh SE, with an ImageWriter attached.  The laser printer I had finally died, and I had to dig the old ImageWriter out.  Ribbons are still available online.

My floppy drive died years ago, so I have several years of invoices stored in the 30M hard drive, with an external hard drive for backup.

Hey, it still works, and the business climate today doesn't allow me to upgrade.  And the Mac has out-survived several PCs that I use in the back for engraving.

If you want to match it with a laser again, get an old Laserwriter II. Staples still carries the toners. They are well over twenty years old, but they will not stop working. Ever. Huge Canon print engine inside that's the equivalent of an AK.

[mfree]

We were cleaning our computer center out at work the other day and ran across a drawer full of 9 track tape backups, circa 1984...

[Larry Ashcraft]

MW, a friend gave me a LaserWriter II, with less than 100 sheets through it.  I had a problem with the driver, and I can't remember what it was.  The LWII is still sitting there.

[ArfinGreebly]

I have a Heathkit H-89 (the Z-90 variant).

Boots either HDOS or CP/M.

Been a while since I used it.

Okidata printer out there, too, but I can't use it with the Heathkit, 'cuz the Heathkit only has serial ports.

So the Oki only works with my KayPros.

Speaking now of the image in the OP, has anyone else here ever heard the expression, "burn the disk packs?"

[never_retreat]

I'll have to ask my father about that disk. He was a tech service guy for DEC 25 years ago. I remember having all that crap laying around the house. Ah the joys of tying my younger brother to a tree with those big rolls of tape.
I vaguely remember him blowing the main breaker in the house trying to run one of those fridge sized computers at home.

[grislyatoms]

The glass cover would glide up and you'd hear a brief hiss as the unit pulled a vacuum, and sucked the tape down into the channels, past the read head, and up to the take up reel. In movies you see these types of tape drives spinning but they hardly ever did this. Usually they'd twitch back and forth, often independently.

We had a couple of 9 track drives at my last job we used right up until... mid '99 or so. Also had a high capacity 8 track unit, we used that up until the same time. We only used them for some old legacy crap that some of the Docs insisted on keeping.

The 9 tracks we had were DEC units. Junk. Maybe they were good at one time, but when I was there, they hardly ever worked properly. The vacuum could never get the tape in the right position, and if the leader wasn't trimmed perfectly, it wouldn't feed. I don't recall ever seeing them spin at high speed either, unless they were rewinding at the end of job/tape.

We were cleaning our computer center out at work the other day and ran across a drawer full of 9 track tape backups, circa 1984...

We found a bunch here a couple years ago, dates were mid-eighties. Sent them to Iron Mountain to be destroyed.

Ah the joys of tying my younger brother to a tree with those big rolls of tape.
I vaguely remember him blowing the main breaker in the house trying to run one of those fridge sized computers at home.

[Manedwolf]

MW, a friend gave me a LaserWriter II, with less than 100 sheets through it.  I had a problem with the driver, and I can't remember what it was.  The LWII is still sitting there.

That's alright, the next civilization will be able to find it and use it.

[Hutch]

Infants, all of you.  Did anybody (else) have to make printer carriage control tapes with a puncher and rubber cement?  Hmmmm???

Or IPL a computer (boot up, for you rookies) from a card deck?  Why, back in MY day....  where was I?

[Manedwolf]

My first computer in about third grade was an already-somewhat-obsolete Atari 800XL bought at the last-days wreckage of a chain store.

I recently found it in a closet and powered it up. It still works. O_o

[Tallpine]

as you walked in and up an 18 inch or so tall ramp

There's a reason for that ramp   Somewhere in the building they have this huge air conditioning system that blows ice cold air under a "false floor" (like a dropped ceiling only in reverse).  There are holes in the floor panels under the computer units so the cold air can come up through them, and the tops of the units are just grates.  The air is pretty warm by the time it gets to the top.  One time the a/c quit and the room went up to ~130 degrees in about 2 minutes before everything self shut down.

The connecting cables run under the false floor, too.  We had this handle thingie with two suction cups to lift the floor panels (about 2' x 2' IIRC).  You get quite a blast of glacial air from an open panel.  The circulation effect would set off the smoke alarms unless you disabled the system first.  Something like 60 seconds after the smoke alarm goes off, the CO2 gets released 

IPL a computer

Yep, done that.

That was my first "computer career" before the companies merged and I got laid off (or I could have moved to Houston  :rolleyes: ).  Then I said the heck with it all and went off to be a logger, eventually.  Now I'm back to writing software, and doing traceability/coverage analysis.  Funny how things go around ... 

So I could say I have 36 years experience in the computer industry, if you don't count a 25 year break in the middle 

I'm still mourning that I never became a working cowboy - is there still time

[grislyatoms]

There's a reason for that ramp   Somewhere in the building they have this huge air conditioning system that blows ice cold air under a "false floor" (like a dropped ceiling only in reverse).  There are holes in the floor panels under the computer units so the cold air can come up through them, and the tops of the units are just grates.

Good place to keep your beer cold. So I've heard, I wouldn't have ever thought of doing that.

[Manedwolf]

Good place to keep your beer cold. So I've heard, I wouldn't have ever thought of doing that.

Creative ways to keep beer cold is a long-held tradition. Apparently on forward Pacific bases without any refrigeration in WWII, people used to stash a few bottles of beer in the wings of fighters going up high on patrols, they'd come back down nice and cold.

[grislyatoms]

Hah, that's great, I wonder if my great uncle ever did that? Though he flew a B-24, not a fighter.

[BrokenPaw]

My first computer in about third grade was an already-somewhat-obsolete Atari 800XL bought at the last-days wreckage of a chain store.

Hmm.  For some reason, I had pictured you as older than that.  You're far too jaded for one so young.   

My first home computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX-81, with 1K of internal memory (my parents went all out and bought the 16K external memory module, too).  Earlier than that, I was playing with the Honeywell minis that were at my dad's office (they used disk packs like those in the OP).  By the time high school rolled around, I had my very own 286 (10MHz of scorchingly-fast power), and the computers that they had there (at least, the ones that they let us underclassmen use) were like a step back into the stone age:  An HP 3000 mini and a Honeywell DPS 6/92 lurking in the dinosaur pen. 

My high school was also the first HS in the country to have a supercomputer: an ETA 10P vector supercomputer that could crank out 375 MIPS, and had 2.4G of disk.  Which was impressive at the time.  But none but the Anointed ever touched the ETA or the attached Cyber 910 graphics workstations; I learned C on the Honeywell DPS6, while a friend of mine learned to hack the print service so that it would inject one of several haikus into any given print job at random.

-C

[ctdonath]

Still have my Sinclair ZX-80 (that's the pre-Timex version). Started learning hardware & software engineering by building an audio interface from scratch (with dad's help) and making it play "Yankee Doodle Dandy" by timing frequency pulses via empty loops.

[oldfart]

In back of where I'm sitting right now and under my reloading bench is a pair of TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computers.  They both still work though I no longer have the modem or printer cables for them. 

I took one of them into a local 'Best Buy' to show to the Geeks there.  They were amazed.  Most of them didn't even know what I had or what they were capable of.  I remember a shot of a hallway full of reporters in Iceland when Reagan met with Gorby there.  One of the reporters was busily typing away on his Model 100.  They were very popular with newspaper types since they all have a built-in modem.

Originally, they sold for about $300 but now you can find them on Ebay for as little as $40.

[Jim147]

I remember the days of my Tandy 1000.
Leaning to write code and saving to a cassette tape.
No hard drive and those incredible block graphics.  :rolleyes:

[Boomhauer]

Hah, that's great, I wonder if my great uncle ever did that? Though he flew a B-24, not a fighter.

More than likely. A bunch of crews back then loaded up on alcoholic beverages whenever/wherever they could, too.

[RocketMan]

My old TRS-80 Model I sits on the storage rack behind where I am now. Complete with monitor, expansion interface, two 180K floppy drives, cassette recorder, and the special carrying cases that were available as an option way back when.
It all still worked the last time I tested everything, but that was ten or so years ago.

There really are a bunch of nerds on this site.
Or maybe nerd relics...