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Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:17 am
by chulett
Funny...
years ago went to a demo of a new DG machine (all purple/blue and wire wrapped, if anyone recalls) and one of the disk drives tried to do the same thing. The salesman very nonchalantly stood in front of it to keep it from wandering off. Took me a minute to realise what was going on.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:22 am
by DSguru2B
I never got a chance to witness those machines
Heard about them from my univ. professors.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:32 am
by ArndW
DSGuru2B - Those beasts are dinosaurs compared to what is available today. It is similar to marveling at the old steam powered factory machines - there is a certain nostalgia associated with the old heavy iron, but you wouldn't want to revert to having to actually use them.
I know I still have an IBM Selectric somewhere in storage and one of my ex-colleagues in Germany has a whole barn filled with one or more working models of all PR1ME computers. I'm sure his electric bill is pretty high when he fires up an old P750! I think my washing machine has more computing capacity than that model does
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:40 am
by DSguru2B
Wow. It would have certainly been a kick for their users and some memory to share with us new kids on the block.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 1:27 pm
by ray.wurlod
I used to run a Prime 250 with 2MB memory. On eight nineteen-inch rack-mounted boards (0.25MB each).
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 1:56 pm
by DSguru2B
I never got to witness or use any of those so I have no idea what your talking about Ray.
I am at the disposal of my imagination.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:13 pm
by I_Server_Whale
DSguru2B wrote:I have no idea what your talking about Ray.
Me neither. Google didn't help me out either.
What is a Prime 250 with 2MB memory
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:37 pm
by chulett
Ah... those were the days!
The first machine I worked on as a professional used CDC 'Hawk' drives, from what I recalled. One fixed platter and one removable platter about the size of a pizza and in a 'cartridge' about two or three inches thick. The fixed platter stored our O/S and the removable platter had our code on it, one per application. Customer data was stored on 8 inch floppies. Total capacity of each hard drive platter?
5 megabytes. 
I don't recall how much RAM the machine had, but I'm sure it wasn't much.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:40 pm
by DSguru2B
Some memory huh craig. You guys sound like my college professors. Even they used to talk about those days with so much intensity.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:27 pm
by ray.wurlod
The early Prime machines' disk drives came in 80MB (five 14 inch platters), 300MB (nineteen 14 inch platters) and 600MB (sealed). You had to undertake weight training before you could change packs in the 300MB drives. And on the very rare occasions they crashed, the noise was spectacular!!
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:36 pm
by DSguru2B
I was thinking the same. Not only the IT folks had to be smart but physically fit as well.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:52 pm
by I_Server_Whale
ray.wurlod wrote:And on the very rare occasions they crashed, the noise was spectacular!!
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:26 pm
by chulett
Ray still has the scar from that time when... well, never mind. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Dealt with 200MB and 300MB packs, too. Heavy, noisy and God Forbid you dropped one.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:31 pm
by I_Server_Whale
chulett wrote:Heavy, noisy and
...expensive as well, I guess.
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:42 pm
by aartlett
<< Getting out of the wheel chair and waving the walker around >>
Okay you users of modern equipment. My first professional gig was on a GE 225. 4 banks of 4K Core RAM. Core ram for you newbies (say post '75 IT working life) was magnets wrapped in gold wire. Fast but big. They were non-volatile so you could turn the power off and on and start from where you were up to.
Disks ... didn't need no steenking disks ... tape drives only.
Next machine was a Honeywell H6000, that had 4M RAM and very heavy removable disks (I dropped one once ... my bad).