Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 10:56 PM -0700 7/20/06, jim stephens wrote:
<snip>
That's interesting. That green sticker on the pack says
"Unclassified" doesn't it? That's very strange, I wonder what kind of
system it was in. The only systems I know of with packs like that
would have requirements for the packs to be destroyed. Is there any
clue as to what hardware it was for? It looks a *LOT* like the ones
we used on Honeywell DPS-8's.
I was surprised that it as not destroyed, given the Navy ID, but it is a
ones pack, with no data,
so maybe someone believed the label. Heaven knows with it being thru a
scrapper, andnow
my kitchen you'd be nuts to try to read it anyway.
And the 300mb would barely hold a word document anyway :-) probably
only fighter
inventories anyway. The navy or marines usually had their accounting
and ID stuff done
at centers away from bases and shipped in already printed, so the
computer of
this age probably would not have been for that sort of crap anyway.
The DPS-6's I had at ultimate had packs like this for 300mb drives, but
I won't swear
that is what this is for.
the inspector came with a listing of the IBM packs and models, probably
the CDC
drives that honeywell or dec used would be near that, or only double
density.
I don't know of anything over 300 they did before going on to
winchesters, and
killing off the removable (don't recall a 600 for instance).
Also it came with a cone like adapter for other packs, I didnt
photograph, or if I
did it was not mentioned in the photos.
If anyone is interested in having something done with a pack they don't
dare try
with their own, let me know. I had to manually remove the pack cover on
this
one, I think because I may be missing a pin release adapter to push up
far enough
to release the cover on this model drive.
I suspect that there may have been a system to prevent accidental
swapping of
packs on different spindles, but I never read or heard about it. I only
worked
on systems where there was one pack type around. I.E. T50 or T-300, or
CDC 50's or CDC 300's and none of those interchanged, or were remotely
interchangable.
This pack is marked "master alignment pack" on the outside, but not on
the pack inside, so it may be special, don't know. All the master alignment
packs I ever saw from IBM, or 3M were marked on the pack's badges,
not on hand written ones on the side.
Jim