OT: In 15 years, hard drives will seem as quaint as reel-to-reel tape recorders

J

John

Rod Speed said:
Fools have been claiming that for decades now.
Hasnt happened and it wont this time either.


When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?
 
V

VWWall

John said:
When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?
Do you recall programming them by running a wire through them?
 
R

Rod Speed

Does nipping off severeal dozen diodes on a PDP8 bootcard count?

Wota wimp, those came later, some of us memorised the
boot loader and toggled it in thru the front panel switches.

And those diode boards aint magnetics anyway.
 
T

Toom Tabard

John said:
When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?

Could be !
I remember when my PDP11 with RT11 got upgraded from 32K to 64K, I
wondered what I'd do with all that extra space for my programs.

Toom
 
T

Toom Tabard

John said:
When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?

Could be !
I remember when my PDP11 with RT11 got upgraded from 32K to 64K, I
wondered what I'd do with all that extra space for my programs.

Toom
 
C

chrisv

Toom said:
I remember when my PDP11 with RT11 got upgraded from 32K to 64K, I
wondered what I'd do with all that extra space for my programs.

Toom

I'm guessing you just wrote everything twice! 8)
 
G

gfretwell

When I read the article I couldn't help thinking about core stores.

Am I showing my age?
Disk drives have the same advantage that core had. It was persistant
after a power failure. Back in the old 1401 or 360 days a well written
program could be restarted with the power on and "set IC button (or
PSW restart in the case of 360).
There is something reassuring about bits in oxide.
 
A

Al

chrisv said:
I'm guessing you just wrote everything twice! 8)

For a programming class, I wrote a program in PDP11 assembler to play
"The Game of Life." It ran in an emulation on a Dec-20. Did you ever see
the game of life printed out on a teletype? That was fun!

BTW, reel-to-reel recorders are being used for long lasting backup.
Nothing else does as well except maybe hieroglyphics ;-)

Al
 
A

Andrew Gabriel

Disk drives have the same advantage that core had. It was persistant
after a power failure. Back in the old 1401 or 360 days a well written
program could be restarted with the power on and "set IC button (or
PSW restart in the case of 360).
There is something reassuring about bits in oxide.

One of the first mini-computers I worked on was a GEC 4080
with core store. You could turn that off and back on again
with several people logged in, and it just carried on.
The only indication you got that this had happened was:

!!

output on the terminal, to warn you that any incompleted
line you were typing in on the terminal had been lost from
the terminal controller. No one was logged out, or had
their running commands interrupted.
 
G

gfretwell

BTW, reel-to-reel recorders are being used for long lasting backup.
Nothing else does as well except maybe hieroglyphics ;-)

There are some optical disk solutions that are supposed to last 100
years or longer. The problem is the machine that reads them won't.
Open reel tapes have a print through problem and after a couple
decades they will usually be useless. Again, the real problem might
be finding a machine that reads that tape. Not a lot of 7 track tape
drives around but I imagine you can still find 9 track units that
could read NRZI.
 
R

Rod Speed

BTW, reel-to-reel recorders are being used for long lasting backup.
Nothing else does as well except maybe hieroglyphics ;-)

Oh bullshit. Plenty of stuff written on paper etc has lasted a hell of a lot longer
than magnetic tapes ever will. In spades with being able to read it for centurys.
 
A

Al

There are some optical disk solutions that are supposed to last 100
years or longer. The problem is the machine that reads them won't.
Open reel tapes have a print through problem and after a couple
decades they will usually be useless. Again, the real problem might
be finding a machine that reads that tape. Not a lot of 7 track tape
drives around but I imagine you can still find 9 track units that
could read NRZI.

I have a reel-to-reel recorder. It's a Roberts from the 60's.
Transistorized yet! My tapes from that era sound just as good as they
did then. But, then again, my ears are that much older also. Print thru
is alleviated by winding the tapes loosely. At least it works for me.

Al
 

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