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Old 24th Mar 2018, 7:22 am   #141
electronicskip
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Palm PDA's. I have never seen one, but I was reminded of them at my evening class last night, where the BBC "Talk Italian" course textbook (evidently in need of an update) includes a dialogue where someone has lost their "palmare" that contained all their telephone numbers and appointments etc., and needs to report it to the police station. The drawing accompanying the dialogue shows what appears to be a Palm Pilot PDA, complete with its stylus. I was the only one who realised what it was that was being referred to.
Ive just given a Palmpilot away on here a few days ago , had it years but found it again in the loft, still worked too.
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Old 24th Mar 2018, 8:47 am   #142
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BT also sold a videophone circa 1990.
That would be the Relate 2000. I have some of these, and they theoretically still work, though I have never managed to obtain decent images from them. At least these talk to each other direct over a standard telephone line, so I can use them internally on my PBX - unlike the Amstrad offering, which needed to connect to a service from Amstrad (from which they no doubt raked in a decent sum each time they were used).

As said, though, these have all been rendered obsolete by the likes of Skype.
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Old 24th Mar 2018, 9:07 am   #143
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Another short-lived computer device was the SyQuest SparQ drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_SparQ_drive
1.0Gb on a removable disc might sound good but having basically a hard disc platter with heads you could see if you peaked inside was never a good idea. This thing was so dire and unreliable it brought the company down.
I've still got a couple of drives and some discs but they should probably be in a museum of failed technology.

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Old 25th Mar 2018, 1:59 am   #144
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Analogue Satellite boxes!
They were wiped out when Sky went digital. However when Sky vacated the boxes channels, the German's moved in! Taking over the free space left by them. Of course the stations were in German and they rarely used subtitles on English shows. Everything being dubbed into German. But you could watch several music channels, including MTV, which they don't have to pay for, before MTV stopped showing Music Video's. And of course many of the music video's were in English, even the ones made by the German acts! I watched it for several years, till the dish rusted and fell off during a cold spell!
I don't know if the Satellite is still transmitting. I guess not.

Took me ages to work out what Big Brother was! It hadn't started in the UK at that time.
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 6:49 am   #145
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Another short-lived computer device was the SyQuest SparQ drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_SparQ_drive
1.0Gb on a removable disc might sound good but having basically a hard disc platter with heads you could see if you peaked inside was never a good idea. This thing was so dire and unreliable it brought the company down.
I've still got a couple of drives and some discs but they should probably be in a museum of failed technology.

Andy
Removable-platter hard disk drives were of course common on minicomputers and mainframes in the 1970s and early 1980s. And they were not 'dire'. But :

1) The data density was a lot lower (perhaps 10MBytes on a 14" diameter platter), so the head flying height was greater. So small particles of dust were less of a problem. [For the pedants, OK the flying height was greater becuase it was the lowest they could use and keep it reliable, which limited the data density -- it was that way round]

2) You had to change the air filter every 6 months or every year (at least).

3) There was other maintenance you did every year too

Even then headcrashes were not unheard-of. Sometimes only the disk was damaged, the heads would clean up and could fly again. Often you needed to replace the heads too.

[And there is the well-known story of somebody who loads a damaged pack, crashes the heads on the first drive, finds he can't read it, tries it in the next drive, and so on. And then tries a good pack in the first drive (which the heads crash into.. Ends up wiping out a lot of heads and disks...]

I still have a number of such drives, spare heads, alignment disks, etc. But I don't run them all the time, and I certainly don't think they are 'archival'
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 8:20 am   #146
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Ronco products.

Almost all went to landfill years ago. So any remaining examples are rare and of interest for period displays in museums.

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Old 25th Mar 2018, 8:46 am   #147
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Ronco. Blast from the past.
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 9:09 am   #148
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Philips in car Record player .
Sinclair C5 .
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 9:32 am   #149
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Even then headcrashes were not unheard-of. Sometimes only the disk was damaged, the heads would clean up and could fly again. Often you needed to replace the heads too.

[And there is the well-known story of somebody who loads a damaged pack, crashes the heads on the first drive, finds he can't read it, tries it in the next drive, and so on. And then tries a good pack in the first drive (which the heads crash into.. Ends up wiping out a lot of heads and disks...]

I still have a number of such drives, spare heads, alignment disks, etc. But I don't run them all the time, and I certainly don't think they are 'archival'
I spent a few years working on such drives, mainly CDC and Ampex, and on many occasions walked into a "disaster zone" such as you have mentioned.I t could be an expensive business when some machines had up to 18 heads, not to mention computer down time and possibly data loss. We used to carry out regular discs maintenance for companies on a contract basis, cleaning the heads and checking the drives. We also carried out disc pack maintenance where the surfaces of the platters were inspected with a mirror and microscope arrangement that slid into the disc pack. The surfaces were cleaned and a report produced for each disc pack. The condition of each pack was monitored in this way over subsequent visits and deteriorating packs taken out of service before problems occurred
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 10:25 am   #150
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CDC and Ampex disc drives, the largest removable drive I worked in would have been the CDC 300MB drives, 10 platters 20 heads including 1 servo head.
We recommend the customer used the pack inspection service that Martin writes about. With proper maintenance head crashes were not that frequent but they did occur.

I was fixing these types of drive in the late 1990’s last one I saw would have been 1998. By then it was mainly Seagate SCSI Winchester style drives, no repair on site only replacement.

CDC disc drive subsidiary was name changed to Imprimis Technology, Inc. and this was later bought by Seagate Tecnology.
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 11:26 am   #151
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Hi Frank, I used to do a lot of the CDC 300MB drives, I should have said up to 20 heads. There were smaller 80MB removable drives I used to work on, as well as some with fixed and removable platters. CDC Hawk rings a bell. I finished that job in 1991 I think. Its amazing that a large air conditioned room of these drives, each the size of a washing machine can now fit on a USB stick or SATA drive!
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 11:53 am   #152
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Hi Martin,
This may bring back a few memories then, it’s a 12Mb download, for any one else this shows how good service manuals can be, there were three to a set, installation and maintenance, logic diagrams and theory of operation, parts list, I think I have them in some sort of order.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/dis...ance_Aug82.pdf

This was the 80MB version.
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 12:26 pm   #153
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Amazing Frank, I've not seen one of these for years, and indeed it does bring back memories! The build quality of mainframe/mini computer and their peripherals was superd, with documentation to match. Mind you when you look back at the prices it's not suprising. When I started working on modular mainframe systems in 1975 the entry level system was £88,000!
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 2:07 pm   #154
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1) The data density was a lot lower (perhaps 10MBytes on a 14" diameter platter)...
The drive I cut my teeth on was the HP 7906H. This had 10MBytes fixed and a 10MBytes removable cartridge. HP did get densities quite a bit higher with the 7933 and 7935 'washing machine' models of 404MByte capacity on 7 platters. These were the last hard discs HP made prior to moving to Winchester technology.

I do recall one of my customers who failed to screw down the feet on an earlier model (7920, 50 MBytes). The voice coils etc. were sufficiently massive that the drive walked across the floor and pulled its own mains plug out, by which time it was blocking the door.

That caused a fair amount of hilarity, I can tell you.
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Old 25th Mar 2018, 6:28 pm   #155
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The voice coils etc. were sufficiently massive that the drive walked across the floor and pulled its own mains plug out, by which time it was blocking the door.
With suitable sequences of disk accesses it was possible to control which way the drive went. I knew someone who in a fit of boredom wrote a program which enabled him to walk the drive around the computer room. One young lady got quite worried when the drive kept following her around.
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Old 26th Mar 2018, 11:33 pm   #156
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The owner never took this one found in a rummaging box at the flea market out of its retail box.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 10:48 am   #157
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I used the little 25+25Mbyte CDC 'Lark' drives extensively in the 1980s: a pair of them were standard fitment on GEC 4000-series minicomputers used as X.25 packet-switches back then.

An interesting design: the drive contained a conventional 25Mb harddrive and a removable 25Mb platter-in-a-blue-plastic-cartridge. The idea being that you could do a bitwise track/sector copy of the hard-drive to the removable, or vice-versa. The drive-electronics supported this natively so you could image the disk without needing any operating-system-specific backup software on the computer itself.

Never had any problems with them! Picture of a Lark cartridge here: http://www.mbiusa.com/mbi_000043.htm
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 1:52 pm   #158
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Speaking of drives, almost 20 years ago I picked up what I thought was a CD-ROM drive from a skip. On closer inspection later I discovered it took a sort of cd jewelcase sized caddy. Presumably this was some kind of magneto-optical drive? They can't have been particularly mainstream - never seen anything similar, before or since!

Also useless : old modems and ISDN boxes, surely?
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 2:46 pm   #159
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Speaking of drives, almost 20 years ago I picked up what I thought was a CD-ROM drive from a skip. On closer inspection later I discovered it took a sort of cd jewelcase sized caddy. Presumably this was some kind of magneto-optical drive? They can't have been particularly mainstream - never seen anything similar, before or since!
Early CD drives used caddys but they were too inconvenient and were soon replaced by the modern "cup holders". There were also Capacitance Electronic Disks in the late 70s which used caddys.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 3:46 pm   #160
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We had a PC with one of those caddy CD drives at work in the mid 1990's. I was offered it when we upgraded after the millenium, but declined. It is the only one I have seen.
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