10 May
2016
10 May
'16
6:03 a.m.
On May 10, 2016, at 1:12 AM, jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:
IIRc there was a Silent 700 that had cassettes? Or
was it the KSR version of the 800 dot matrix TI printers?
I actually got to use one of these or one similar for a while:
http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/TI_Silent_700_Model_733
Back in high school, while working at University of Texas Center for Space Research. We
had a line from the NASA laser-ranging network which ran into the TI which recorded
anything incoming onto its cassette. I?d come in in the morning, switch the TI connection
to an RS-232 into the PDP-11, and play back the tape onto the ?gargantuan? hard drive,
then change to a new tape and archive (put into a box) the old one. The PDP-11 would
later send a week or more worth of observations to the campus CYBER to determine the orbit
of whatever satellite was being tracked (usually LAGEOS, also Starlette and BE-2 (sic?).)
The setup got replaced eventually by a CP/M system with 2 8? floppies (Balcones Computer
Corporation, according to the box. I have never seen another one of those?.). Accustomed
as I was to the 5.25? floppies on my TRS-80, I walked into the lab the day after the new
CP/M box was installed - and my jaw fell open. The 8? drives just kept running! No
spin-down when not being accessed! Luckily someone was there to explain that that was
actually by design, I didn?t need to shut down the box to keep from wearing out the
disks.
Fun times.