Recounting th e"good olde days"???

[Deskin, Bob]

While I forget the numbers, we had something like that on our first HP3000 Series III. I think they were 50 meg drives. We got it in 1978 and it was actually a Series II that had been changed on the assembly line. You could see where they had added the third I to the original two.

My other favourite story of my HP3000 days when I was the system manager as well as programmer and systems analyst (we were a small shop in an otherwise very large company that had a central IBM mainframe in another city) was about the disk drive. We were in Aylmer, Quebec, just across the river from Ottawa. Now Quebec has a huge amount of hydro electric power but, at least in those days, the reliability wasn't the best. We were doing a compress (I forget the exact term) and the power went out, only to come back on a couple of minutes later, go off, and then on again. Needless to say, that messed up the compress. So I reloaded from our backup, taken just before the compress, and nothing happened. Now, the HP3000 was renowned for its reliability. We were always stunned when it crashed. We called in the system engineer who eventually found the problem. The power outages mangled things. It seemed that the defective track table for the system drive was on a defective track. So out came the disk pack to be replaced.

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: powerh-l-admin@lists.sowder.com
[mailto:powerh-l-admin@lists.sowder.com]On Behalf Of Fyfield, Derek
Sent: April 27, 2005 6:44 AM
To: 'powerh-l@lists.sowder.com'
Subject: RE: Recounting th e"good olde days"???


To further the washing machine imagery, earlier examples of these HP 7905
drives had a squares of Perspex in the lids so you could see if the platters
were moving.  The drives looked a treat, all lined up just like a
laundromat.

Regards,
 
Derek Fyfield
Bahrain HO 
SMS Development & Report Writing 
  
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