22 Jan
2009
22 Jan
'09
9:24 a.m.
On 22 Jan 2009 at 3:42, William Maddox wrote:
--- On Thu, 1/22/09, Josh Dersch <derschjo at
mail.msu.edu> wrote:
Could also be from one of the vertically-mounted Bryant disks. I
used to have one of those platters in my office; thought about making
a coffee table of it, but the hole in the middle was a problem.
IIRC, they didn't spin very fast--about 600 RPM. The heads were very
heavy.
There are photos and specs for Byrant units on the web.
Cheers,
Chuck
It's an ancient hard disk platter, about
31" in
diameter and maybe 1/8" thick. It's made by 3M and
has a label sporting a serial number and inspection
/waxing/etc dates from November of 1966. Any ideas what
kind of drive this would have belonged to? Any ideas on
capacity?
I've seen large platters like this on head-per-track disks
made by Burroughs. There's one on the Illiac IV at CHM.
I saw a similar drive at CMU that was allegedly the swapping
disk for a DEC KA-10. I vaguely remember being told that
the capacity was 512K words (36 bit on the KA-10). The
drive was designed for speed, not capacity.