Hard Disks

Hi, Last weekend I was lucky enough to find a pallet of Apple II stuff (2 complete systems, and lots of cool things), and amongst everything was a copy of a book called the "Apple II User's Guide" published back in '81 by Osbourne/McGraw-Hill. In this book under the chapter on Drives I found that it talks about three types of disks; Hard Disks, Winchester Disks, and Diskettes. It also has a picture for each, and it's the picture of the "Hard Disk System" that interests me. It appears to be a Rack Mounted enclosure for a Removable Disk pack. I can't see how many platters the pack has (the cover is white plastic), but I would guess between 2 and 4. It has four square push buttons (looks like the kind that light up), and two small lights. Basically it looks like a "Micro" version of the disk packs I used to use on Honeywell and UNISYS Mainframes. The photo was courtesy of "Cameo Electronics", and I can see their logo on part of the case. The text says the disks cost about $150 each and the drives between $3000-10000. All in all a very fascinating looking peice of hardware! I've never seen anything like them other than on mainframes, were these very common? Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)ix.netcom.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Mac Programmer | +----------------------------------+---------------------------+ | For Empire of the Petal Throne, and Traveller Role Playing | | see http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/ |