Oral History Panel on 8 Inch Floppy Disk Drives (2005) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Oral History Panel on 8 Inch Floppy Disk Drives (2005) [pdf]

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18 pointsgrunthos7 comments

Takes me back to the whirrr-clunk of retries on DEC RX02's. Got into trouble for writing an RT11 driver for a Rodime 5Mb hard disk drive (no idea how many platters it had, it was full height); seems so insanely large at the time that I split it into 8 separate area (being used to 256Kb per 8" floppy and rarely filling that, having 8 drives with over twice the capacity each was amazing).

Not quite related, but my oldest brother tells a story of an internship repairing 8" hard drives for CP/M machines... and having verified he'd fixed his first, picked it up, and went to stick it on the shelf. It hadn't fully spun down, so as he twisted his body the whole huge spinning mass gyroscopically precessed it out of his hands and it crashed to the ground in a million pieces.

I worked at a place that had 14" HDD's - huge 19" rack mount things, took ages to spin down. Never carried one personally, older personnel advised not trying to turn a corner while carrying one unless fully spun down.

Tangentially related, this showed up in my news feed today:

It's RAID. With Floppy Drives.

https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/

This is a great way to show how RAID works in "slow motion" ;-)

I've done similar for demonstrating how UDP and TCP works using IP-over-AX.25 and 1200bps modems. If you configure one end to be at a slightly different pitch it'll still sync but it'll give that end a different "voice" so you can hear which side is talking.

It takes a couple of minutes to do an ssh handshake, so with verbosity turned up a bit you can work your way through everything and see how the magic happens!

These CHM oral histories are so great – I love the ones about the 6800 and 68000, because Motorola didn’t seem to keep historical records in the same way as Intel and others did, so this is the only way some of these stories have ever been told.

These disks were robust. I saw people successfully boot a Vax from an 8" floppy which looked to have been partially folded.

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