All this talk about RD53s & RD54s has prompted me to ask again:
By any chance, does anyone have a Maxtor 1140, 2140, 1190 or 2190
with a failed HDA who might be willing to part with the PCB?
TIA,
mike
Hi,
> FBOFW, modern "free" *nix ports tend to use gcc, and gcc is
>such a resource hog for anything smaller than a VAX. Even on
>a VAX it's colossaly slow.
Augh....any idea how it fares on, say, Sun or SGI machines?
> Not on a VAX, but small and spritely, is Minix....
I remember it well, it was the first *nix I had any "long-term" exposure to
back around '88 (I'd dabbled with Ultrix at university).
I see they're up to "Minix 3" now!
>....The Amsterdam Compiler Kit wasn't free, though! The thought of
>a Unix without a compiler....
LOL, I knew there was a reason I didn't do very with it at the time....
>....even though I despise C compared to high level languages like
>SNOBOL and FOCAL.
You'll get no argument from me there, I learnt "C" in 1983 and hate it with
a passion even to this day; I'm an assembly language programmer by trade
(hence I'm currently out of a job) but I learnt quite a number of high level
languages at school/university/because I wanted to and "C" was the only one
I disliked....the way I look at it, it's little more than a "high level
macro assembler" and really isn't suited to the majority of uses it's put to
nowadays (writing embedded apps and device drivers in "C", sheer madness!).
TTFN - Pete.
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Hi,
> Well, since you asked, I run NetBSD on everything. (If it won't run
>NetBSD, I mostly am not interested in keeping it....
>From all the suggestions here, I think that's probably going to be my route
"into" *nix.
As I said in an earlier message, initially at least, I don't want to be
messing around with different distributions.
Thanks.
TTFN - Pete.
Hi,
>....Why on earth should I waste a platform that will run an
>interesting non-Unix OS running Unix?
In my case at least, it's a case of curiosity (as in, could I run the same
version of *nix on an old PC, a VAX etc) and a lack of installation
media.... :-)
TTFN - Pete.
Another possibility is to just buy a professional clean bench. It has the
filters and blowers built in. I've seen them many times in Silicon Valley
for $50 to $100. I threw away several of them when we closed down the
Philips buildings in Sunnyvale. We couldn't even find a taker to haul them
away for nothing. That was only 3 years ago.
Last one I saw was at SV flea market. It was $50 and got no takers. That
was about 20 months ago.
Billy
Paxton Hoag wrote:
Personally I use a homebuilt Laminar Flow Hood with a 12 inch by 12
inch HEPA filter (came off a Fujitsu drive line) with a small
squirlcage blower that I can control the speed of. The goal is to
maintain about 1 pound of pressure above ambiant between the blower
and the intake of the filter. This generates the even flow through the
filter.
--
Paxton Hoag
Astoria, OR
USA
Billy wrote:
Ah - that brings back a lot of memories. I spent a lot of time in that
factory, even before it opened. Took part in the opening ceremonty,
including the Shinto blessing (the priest was flown over from Japan.) Was
sad to see it close. The Hillsboro factory was one of the last high volume
disk lines in the US. Only pilot lines left now.
Billy
> I suppose in an ideal world I'd assume that catastrophic failure of the media
> could happen very quickly - so priority is to get a snapshot of the disk onto
> modern storage before that happens.
The failure mode I've seen is oxide/binder coming off, clogging the head and
carving little concentric rings in the media :-(
Once the buildup starts, S/N ratio goes into the toilet, so the inner tracks
often have errors.
One of the techniques I've thought about to mitigate this is, as you say, just
snapshot all of the data without analysis, to avoid sitting on a track for a
minimal number of rotations, stagger-read tracks, or read them in inner to outer
track order.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious visual indication that the binder will strip
off a disc, oddly enough. You'd think there would be something like physical
discoloration when this was likely to happen.
Jules Richardson pondered:
... engage brain before posting :) I was thinking of lashing something up so
that the upper head wasn't in contact with the disk at all, reading the
bottom
surface, and only then reading the top. Thinking about it some more, the
loading of the head against the surface on both sides is almost certainly
critical, so this wouldn't work :(
Billy wrote:
The dual sided floppies offset the top head from the bottom to create a
tension path for the media. This kept the media snug against the heads -
critical because floppy media is based on contact with the head. Best way
to think of this an S shaped that is on its side. The lobs are the two
heads and the line drawing the S is the media. It is a very shallow bend
for the media. Any other method would create a pinch effect that could be
deadly of the coating.
When the heads are unloaded, the media would float between them. Loading
created the tension contour. A lot of work was done with air bearing type
of read/write but it was not reliable enough to go into production. The
media specs were too poor to give good snr with anything but contact
recording.
Contact recording was tried with hard drives a few times. These were the
famous "tail draggers". None of them ever achieved reliable enough
operation to survive long.
Billy
