14 Aug
2023
14 Aug
'23
4:42 p.m.
On 8/14/23 06:07, Paul Koning wrote:
That drive was the fastest transferring disk, by a large margin, for quite a while.
Didn't Cray use multiple bits in parallel disk drives in the Cray-1?
I recall that the first time I heard the term "RAID", it was from one
of
my friends from Cray. I thought it was pretty innovative.
The 808 did have a non-production follow-on; the 821. A bunch of them
were used in a Special Systems bid--they were essentially
double-capacity (and perhaps double-speed, I don't recall) 808s. They
had a terrible problem with the controller firmware, IIRC. My boss,
Mike Miller was responsible for CDC being the sole qualifier on a
benchmark that netted something like $180M in the early 1970s. Mike's
contribution was noticing that one of the 821s had gone offline during
the final minutes of the benchmark and doing his best Usain Bolt
imitation and punching the "ON LINE" button on the offending drive. We
qualified by a margin of seconds.
The 821s stayed around for a couple of months, but eventually were
scrapped and replaced by lots of 844 drives. The customer liked the
substitution, since the 821 did not have removable media. To the best
of my knowledge, we had the only 821s in existence. They, as far as I
know, never got to regular production, so product catalogs of the time
(~~1970) probably do not mention them.
--Chuck