RE: iSeries Legends

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Shields, Ken
>
>       That's because, maybe with the exception of Joe, I can
> remember the old RAMAC drives, and the story seems very plausible.

Nope, you've got me there, Ken.  I've never seen a RAMAC, just a picture:

http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/98/1016news/disk.gif

My first drives were the removable disk packs on the S/3 (the 3340's?).  My
first time abusing hardware was hotplugging a tape drive from one running
Series/1 to another for "machine-to-machine" copies <grin>.  Only the
Series/1 was that stable.

I do remember the momentous day we installed our first microcomputer disk
drive.  Back then we were using the S100 bus, so a "microcomputer" wasn't
exactly microsized.  In fact, ours was stored in a 2-foot cube called a "Bud
Box", which had a drawer on top that slid out to allow the snap in/out of
the various S100 cards that made up a system.  Remember, back then you had
one card for the CPU and boot EPROM, another for the floppy drive, another
for the serial I/O, another for the screaming 110 baud modem, and multiple
8K or 16K memory boards.

One day our local mad professor (from the UofC) brought in our first hard
disk drive - a massive 8" Winchester platter.  Of course, this required
another entire card for the disk controller and then we had to go in and
hack CP/M to recognize the disk, because it held an absolutely unheard of
amount of memory - nearly five MEGABYTES.

Ah, memories <grin>.

Joe