Just you and IBM. -- Will

If you are thinking about that early GRC stuff, that was silk! -- Will

On 08/02/2015 07:08 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: It wasn't uncommon to see the same thing in 30s-50s radios, with the schematic pasted inside the cabinet. For me, a zip-lock freezer bag works just fine. --Chuck

On Sun, Aug 02, 2015 at 11:55:10AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: Not really inside but I got an IBM 3270PC (it's just a 5150 with some extras to make it a terminal emulator). But it was "upgraded" with a new motherboard and a 486 CPU. In an open 5.25" inch slot was the manual for the motherboard, it fit rather snuggly and easily accesible from the front. /P

As an employee with some involvement, there was a batch of original iPads that were engraved with Steve Jobs signature. Scott Forstall joked "I don't want to see these show up on eBay!" Anyway, being none too careful, I let my then 3 year old play with it, and she was walking around with rapt attention to whatever cartwheeling clown was on it, when she dropped it on some bricks. The iPad's back was dented (not near the signature), and while it still worked, wouldn't take a charge. Failure Analysis said they didn't want to take it since it was one the "special' ones... So I opened it up (easier then then now; just wedge the screen out and break some metal retaining clips) and found that the dent, while small, was sharp and deep and pressed on the charging circuit. I wanted to insulate it, so I put a picture of my daughter there and sealed it up. Still works to this day and is great for netflix. But when it does eventually wind up with some collector down the line, I hope they'll be surprised and a little confused. Its always nice to make someones life a little more surreal. Cheers, --sma

Where is the inscription? Inside the case? On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 12:50 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

On 08/02/2015 01:55 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I suppose that bad sector maps for ST506/412 hard drives don't count? :-)

On Mon, 3 Aug 2015, ben wrote: In the early days, particularly when actual ST506 and ST412 were common drives, there were VERY VERY few that had no bad tracks. In the days of ST506/412 drives every responsible manufacturer included a list of bad tracks. In the early days, there were plenty. That was one of several reasons why reputable hard drive manufacturers rounded the capacity down, rather than peddling them with the size stated to half a dozen "significant" digits. Would you rather have a "10 Meg" drive that formatted out to 10.1Mebibytes, or one that formatted to 10.1Mebibytes that was sold as being "10.653696 Meg" ("WOW! This drive is so good that it gave me MORE capacity than it was rated for!") For a brief while, Spinrite defaulted to retoring to service any BAD TRACKS that passed Spinrite's tests! That was based on the assumption that a simple read/write test is surely far more trustworthy than the special hardware and software that the manufacturer used to decide to tell you not to trust that track. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 08/03/2015 11:33 AM, ben wrote: Perhaps you don't remember but old ST506-style drives had no automatic bad sector remapping, so even new ones had "bad sector" maps affixed by the manufacturer. Most often these were in the form of "byte offset --Chuck

The bad blocks were "written on the drive" in the sense that they were written or printed on a paper label stuck to the top of the drive, not stored digitally on the drive platter(s). I may be mistaken, but I have a memory rattling around in my head of the bad block list even being printed on greenbar paper at final test, which was then cut with scissors and Scotch taped to the top of the drive. So, they were very literally "written on the drive" in layman's terms. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/

On 2015-08-03 6:09 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: written or printed on a paper label stuck to the top of the drive, not stored digitally on the drive platter(s). I may be mistaken, but I have a memory rattling around in my head of the bad block list even being printed on greenbar paper at final test, which was then cut with scissors and Scotch taped to the top of the drive. So, they were very literally "written on the drive" in layman's terms. Some of my drives have paper printouts of bad blocks that are folded and fit into a plastic sleeve that's attached to the drive. Don't have access to brands/models right now, sorry. These would be the larger, full height, 80s vintage drives; possibly early SCSI and possibly accompanying Sun 3 gear. --Toby