Hardware vs Simh

On 4/13/2013 9:23 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Were there a time machine and i could go back to a datacenter (surely my destination), I'd head to the tape room first. I never did like setting things on fire as much as programming and playing. Example: in the first lab I worked in there was a MIcrodata 1621 with a Wangco half inch 9 track tape and a Dynex 5mb drive, pretty advanced for 1971. For quite a while all went well and most of my time and a couple of others was working on a disk OS. One weekend a guy was working on the system and disaster struck. The original 5mb Dynex had three large pieces. THe power supply had what seemed like one of every voltage you could have, but especially +24 and +5 and +12. All of this went into the second large box which is what we would call a 4u for factor now, a 19' wide box about 4' high and full depth with all the logic on a couple of boards. THe power fed into that. The 1600 connected to this box via a ribbon cable and from the box to the drive, which was the usual 19" by 8" hi by full depth 14" drive box. From that to each drive (in our case one) there was a 50 or 60 ping thin ribbon cable. the power supply was mounted on the read of the rack railing just low enough for the drive to clear (actually not and the logic below that.) One of the guys wass working on something and on about the nth slide in of the drive (it was top loading 2.5mb 2315) the logic cable + drive cable was pinched between the power supply and the bottom of the drive and the power supply lots of magic smoke in the room later and about 3000 bucks worth of damage we realized we had a disaster. the 24v was shorted to logic and +5 rail and zapped logic on the controller, and in the 1600 card cage on all boards. 200 Ic's and 6 months later it was running again. That is probably why I don't like playing with hardware. I didn't do it, but I just wanted to play programmer, and this was a 6 month down time that was no fun. AT one point Jay wEst owned this system, then a friend of mine, and eventually I got it, FWIW. Simulators and Al K are your friend (+ simh for a lot of other stuff) Jim