Old Hard Drive Technology Lives on

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Originally Posted by Tombie2

I'm pretty certain were STILL using that system at OneSteel :wasntme:

Some of our systems were originally used by Noah....

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In about 1973 the geophysical ship "Eugene McDermott 2" was launched. It was decommissioned about 1990. When it was being decommissioned the TI (980A?) navigation computer that ran the satellite navigation system was shut down. In that period it had never been shut down, never been repaired, and never rebooted. How many of you could say that about your desktop computer? (The computer was built to military specifications - one of the things I remember about it was the switch on the front panel labelled "Battle Short", which apparently bypassed the overtemperature and out of range voltage protection shutdown circuits)

John

Look... I've been around computers since 83 (when I was 13). Our Apple iie cost my Dad $3500 ...GASP. According to redbook a Corolla was 10k new. I guess you all know the specs. I felt very guilty about that for a while, but it did get me started on a career in IT and Dad did use it until about 97 for doing mailing lists!! I have it downstairs and it still works!

Anyway, I was out flying yesterday and pulled the iphone out to look at where the storms were to try and dodge them. It's kind of surreal to be looking at the weather radar streaming live to such a small device. In my opinion that is another paradigm shift for the IT industry...

Some of the stories about the computers on the Voyager satellites and the way they were reprogrammed to do things not dreamt of when they were launched are fascinating. They are a similar vintage to some of the computers people have mentioned in this thread.

Can anyone remember some of the details or can you point me to a site so that I can refresh my memory? All I have been able to find on the sites I've come up with are the model number of the CPU and the temperature range at which it was designed to operate.

Ok then.
How many of you remember the micro bee? It was an Australian made computer running CP/M (an alternative to MS-DOS). I thought it was so great, it was my first home computer AND it had a 3 1/4" (I think) floppy drive AND 64kB of RAM (upgraded from 32kB?). :D:D:D

At work (CSIRO) we use to have to go to our Division at Sydney University to use their mainframes. (We only had access to some IBMs ...8s & ...16s - I can't remember the prefix.) Whatever you do, don't drop the punch cards. :eek::eek::eek:

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Originally Posted by Bushwanderer

Ok then.
How many of you remember the micro bee? It was an Australian made computer running CP/M (an alternative to MS-DOS). I thought it was so great, it was my first home computer AND it had a 3 1/4" (I think) floppy drive AND 64kB of RAM (upgraded from 32kB?). :D:D:D

At work (CSIRO) we use to have to go to our Division at Sydney University to use their mainframes. (We only had access to some IBMs ...8s & ...16s - I can't remember the prefix.) Whatever you do, don't drop the punch cards. :eek::eek::eek:

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I remember the Microbee - but I think it probably had 5.25 floppy - originally at least. And cp/m (from Digital Research) was a predecessor of MS-DOS, which was so dominant when the IBM PC was first introduced that they refused to allow IBM to put their own brand on it. Hearing this Bill Gates bought a near clone of cp/m from a friend for small change and sold it to IBM with permission to call it PC-DOS but retained the right to sell it as MS-DOS. And the rest, as they say, is history.

My first computer was an Altos. This ran cp/m on 8kb memory and with two eight inch floppies.

John

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

I remember the Microbee - but I think it probably had 5.25 floppy - originally at least. And cp/m (from Digital Research) was a predecessor of MS-DOS, which was so dominant when the IBM PC was first introduced that they refused to allow IBM to put their own brand on it. Hearing this Bill Gates bought a near clone of cp/m from a friend for small change and sold it to IBM with permission to call it PC-DOS but retained the right to sell it as MS-DOS. And the rest, as they say, is history.

My first computer was an Altos. This ran cp/m on 8kb memory and with two eight inch floppies.

John

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The Microbee came out first with cassette storage, then 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. MS-DOS only became dominant after the IBM chose it for their PC. Digital Research tried to compete with an 8086 version of CP/M (CP/M-86) but MS-DOS won out.

Stephen.

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Originally Posted by StephenF10

The Microbee came out first with cassette storage, then 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. MS-DOS only became dominant after the IBM chose it for their PC. Digital Research tried to compete with an 8086 version of CP/M (CP/M-86) but MS-DOS won out.

Stephen.

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MS-DOS won out against cp/m-86 (which was a better OS) simply because it came as standard on IBM PCs (and every man and his dog who copied them), although cp/m was offered as an alternative (I think it didn't even cost extra - but you had to ask for it!)

John

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Originally Posted by Bushwanderer

Ok then.
How many of you remember the micro bee?... .... ....

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I not only remember the Microbee; I also remember the Microbee Star network.

It ran a network of 15 computers using just 2 x 360k floppies on the server, no hard drive.

On one of those two floppies there was room for a word processor, Wordstar or for dbase II or Visicalc or whjatever other program you needed to run. On the other you could store all the wordprocessor, database and spreadsheet files that could be written on those 15 workstations.