20 Feb
2003
20 Feb
'03
6:41 a.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
I just randomly remembered the other day that when I
was at uni one of the
computing lecturers one day rolled out an enormous disk platter to demonstrate
how hard disk technology has changed over the years.
The platter was pretty huge - around 1m in diameter. Any ideas as to what
system it may have come from?
We had some Burroughs head-per-track drives that one of the lecturers
had hooked up to a Modular One computer. The Burroughs disks were
about that sisze, and stored (I think) 5Mbytes. The lecturer's OS on
the Modular One used the drives for virtual memory. Oh, this was at
Westfield College, University of London in the very late 1970s.
The system was called MOSAICS, for Modular One Segmented Architecture
Interactive Computer System. Note the inclusion of "interactive",
which was novel at the time.
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk