29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
8:10 a.m.
JP Hindin wrote:
Does this look right?
http://www.kiwigeek.com/hjp/comps/IBM_s34/OnTruck/P1010009.jpg
These disks are out of, as the link suggests, an S/34. I think they were
used in the S/36's as well, but I could be wrong.
I know they were also used in the Series/1 machines, as I have a stripped
one in the basement that the people before me had already dismantled.
Gotta love hard disks with electromagnetic drum brakes.
The CEs called them "Piccolo" drives... IIRC (and this goes back twenty
years), they were referred to as a 62PC drive, and were 64M in size. My
first S/34 had four of them, for a total of 256MB. I remember that one
needed to be replaced and there was this formatting procedure
thatrequired the serial number of the drive to be inputted into a
screen. This required the CE to take a flashlight and stick his head
inside the machine to obtain it. It was some gawd-awful long number.
The he had to reply to a pile of screens which all warned about the
dangers of formatting and data loss. There was a place to note that the
"customer has been informed" of this in one of the screens. I remember
thinking that the sequence for launching our nukes couldn't be this
convoluted.
Barry
