[cctalk] Re: Disk pack production tools

The 844 drives date from the early 70s.  I worked for CDC on a military project where these were brought in to replace the 821s that were bid (yes, I know there's no information on those--they're essentially a high-capacity unit build on an 808 chassis and unreliable as hell).  A typical installation might have used over 100 of the units on a 4-CPU Cyber cluster.  They worked well, unless one got a bad pack, which would clobber the heads on a drive; using the drive on a new pack would result in creating another head-clobbering pack.   I recall an overnight report issued by an operator where he succeeded in trashing several packs and multiple drives in his attempt to get something to work.  It was a blow-by-blow report somewhat akin to the Gerard Hoffnung bricklayer story.