2 Mar
2005
2 Mar
'05
6 p.m.
Don Hills wrote
The original diskette design was for a microcode load
device for an
IBM mainframe. I recall there was an IBM Journal of R&D article about
it, I'll see if I can find it
I happen to have the 25th Anniversary issue of the IBM Journal of Research
and Development, Sept 1981.
There is an article on page 701.
The IBM Diskette and Diskette Drive
by J. T. Engh
The diskette and diskette drive have had a major influence on data
processing. They provide a low-cost, compact, high-performance solution to
the need for a reusable magnetic medium and have largely replaced the
punched card in many applications. Early applications were simple
program-load functions. Today these have expanded to a wide range of medium
exchange, information storage, and data processing applications. This paper
examines the history of the development of these products within IBM. The
discussion includes some of the alternatives considered and some of the
problems encountered during these developments.
You can find it on the IBM Research site
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/255/ibmrd2505ZE.pdf
My business card was in the book with an email address of
uw-beaver!entropy!dataio!holley
Michael Holley
2 Mar
2 Mar
7:59 p.m.
"Michael Holley" wrote:
Don Hills wrote
>The original diskette design was for a microcode load device for an
>IBM mainframe. I recall there was an IBM Journal of R&D article about
>it, I'll see if I can find it
I have been meaning to say all along this discussion - I thought they
were designed to local microcode into 370's. That's the first time I
saw one. It was stuffed inside a 370 and it had microcode on it.
(I saw the service tech fooling with it and he showed me how it worked.
But then I just *had* to find out what microcode was. Little did I know
it would be like following Alice down the rabit hole :-)
Can't remember what vintage that machine was. I think it ran DOS/VS and
CICS. I do remember it had a giant refrigerator box of 3rd party memory
which must have been all of 4mb. A 370/138 maybe? That machine ran
24/7 and was generally busy.
heh. I remember I wrote a hack to submit little card jobs from the CICS
terminals. It would freak out the operators because these jobs would
appear in the print queue from space. I was quietly told to cease and
decist by my boss :-)
fortunately I discovered a dec-20 shortly after that.
-brad
7234
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