[Novalug] OT: Where we started - was:Pretzel

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Thu Jul 7 14:26:12 EDT 2011


> The item that puts the advancement into perspective for me is that I used to
> run one of the largest BBS systems on the eastern seaboard - two*hundred*  megs
> of storage on an overclocked 286 with 2mb of RAM.
I hate to shatter the dreams of anyone involved with early PCs, but 
whatever you did with them, those of us employed using Real Computers 
(and at the time, BSD UNIX on Vaxen or Workstations was the thing) 
always considered them to be Toys.

While you were running your BBS, I was at UUNET, and 40% of all the 
world's Usenet News passed thru us.

Still...that's a pretty big Toy....I'm just not impressed with PCs and 
Home Computing.

> My "free" cellphone has 32*gigs*  and the gods only know how much faster the
> processor in it is.
OK, along the comparison lines....in 1985 the Big Disks were 
Eagles...they were SMD (compatible with VAX Massbus)...1/2 a Gig for 
$20K...maybe $14K for .GOV and .EDU.

VAX 750 memory was $1 per *kilo*byte...making 1M cost $1000; you'd need 
to be a millionaire to buy 1G.

Back in 1972 the Univac 1108 I worked on had 2**18 36-bit words (Bill 
was wrong even then...640K was NOT enough...altho that was a 
"mainframe"). The 1108 was a One's Complement machine (all ones was 
Minus Zero), and used 6-bit "Fieldata" code...altho it would also do 9 
bit ASCII. No Tubes, but the memory was Real Core. We had an 1108 and an 
1106 in a room the size of a gymnasium. Most people ran Batch jobs from 
Punched cards, and we had an array of 200, 556, and 800 BPI 3/4 inch mag 
tape drives...the kind with the vacuum loops on both sides of the read head.

But what I wanted to mention is that in addition to the standard 
"washing machine" sized removable disks (probably 100M, but I don't 
recall), we had a Fixed Head Magnetic Drum. This thing was about as big 
as two good-sized metal desks stacked on top of each other, essentially 
a rotating cylinder with fixed heads down the whole length...so that a 
Track was a Cylinder. No Seek time.

There were rumors of these things flying off their bearings and the 
angular momentum crashing thru cinderblock walls, but they are probably 
apochryphal. They much have cost way over a million dollars...

Total Size? 80 Megs!

JIM
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