PDP-11's Deccasete

We used PDP 11/04's with a cassette drive to collect microbiology data. There is nothing more frustrating than coming in in the morning and finding the cassette tape drive trying to write to the cassette and rocking back and forth on the same spot until the oxide is worn off. We didn't have enough memory to store all of the data in the PDP-11 and there were no disk drives in the system. The entire program was loaded into a PROM and booted the machine. It was one large program that monitored the incubator, moved the test kit carousel, removed the cards, read the optical transmittance, and did the data analysis. The console was a VT-52 with the hard copy option. Even earlier incarnations had PDP 11/05's with core memory. I seem to remember that we were excited when the RX01's came out, we purchased DSD versions and wrote the data to 8" floppies. We wrote data to the correct sector and when we were done the data was in a RSX usable file. What memories. Mike michaelmcfadden(a)sprintmail.com