Exactly.
BTW, strapped in like that, Russell, you look like you'd have been in grave danger if that loading container had begun to slip.
It was obviously the double-treadle model of the IBM 305 RAMAC. The 1956 drive had 50 platters, each 24" in diameter, with a total capacity of 5 million 6-bit characters. It had an astounding average access time of under one second! Just imagine....
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Return to “Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security”
- Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:46 pm
- Forum: Technical Tips, Questions & Discussions (Computers & Internet)
- Topic: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
- Replies: 16
- Views: 12865
- Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:51 pm
- Forum: Technical Tips, Questions & Discussions (Computers & Internet)
- Topic: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
- Replies: 16
- Views: 12865
Re: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
Wait. What? Drives? You had something steam-driven or electrical spinning your hard drives?twomillenium wrote:The belt drives were so much quieter than the chain drives!
My first hard drive was an external Winchester 5 MB the size of a manhole cover and came with a treadle to run it...
- Fri Feb 10, 2017 1:14 pm
- Forum: Technical Tips, Questions & Discussions (Computers & Internet)
- Topic: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
- Replies: 16
- Views: 12865
Re: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
Since rotor already conveyed the information, I don't know if we, er, more mature techies can really stray off topic (and if we do maybe I'll just move it over to the "Off Topic" category).
I helped start up a (cutting-edge at the time) small business in early 1981 and, following a few months of detailed and adequate research, we decided on the purchase of an IBM 5120. This space-age marvel set us back about $15,000. Man; this wonder had everything but the kitchen sink built in...and it barely weighed 100 pounds! A nifty 9" built-in monochrome monitor (64 characters x 16 lines of text), 2 built-in 8" 1.2 MB floppy disk drives, a massive 64K of RAM and 64K of ROM, with both APL and BASIC resident in ROM; you flipped a switch on the front before powering the system on to select which you wanted to load. And it even had both a parallel and serial interface! But no such thing as a hard drive; sorry. I still have some boxes of those 8" floppies somewhere in the attic.
And to think that technology only cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today's dollars! (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)
I helped start up a (cutting-edge at the time) small business in early 1981 and, following a few months of detailed and adequate research, we decided on the purchase of an IBM 5120. This space-age marvel set us back about $15,000. Man; this wonder had everything but the kitchen sink built in...and it barely weighed 100 pounds! A nifty 9" built-in monochrome monitor (64 characters x 16 lines of text), 2 built-in 8" 1.2 MB floppy disk drives, a massive 64K of RAM and 64K of ROM, with both APL and BASIC resident in ROM; you flipped a switch on the front before powering the system on to select which you wanted to load. And it even had both a parallel and serial interface! But no such thing as a hard drive; sorry. I still have some boxes of those 8" floppies somewhere in the attic.
And to think that technology only cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today's dollars! (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)
- Fri Feb 10, 2017 11:40 am
- Forum: Technical Tips, Questions & Discussions (Computers & Internet)
- Topic: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
- Replies: 16
- Views: 12865
Re: Firefox, WinXP and Norton Security
Wow. Throwback Thursday on Friday. Nostalgia...sigh. Acoustic couplers to reach out and s - l - o - w - l - y touch the rest of the pre-internet world, and taking a plain ol' "portable" (meaning it was smaller than a bread box) cassette deck and plugging it into your whiz-bang TRS80 to load assembler or "C" into the computer's massive RAM.rotor wrote:All of this is still better than my RadioShack TRS80 computer loading programs from a tape drive. Ever try loading Microsoft assembly language from a tape drive?
Just a note that I'm currently limping along on an old Windows Vista laptop while my barely-one-year-old Windows 10 Pro workstation is back at Dell being looked at under warranty.
Firefox 51.0.1 (32-bit) does seem to function normally, but Google Chrome--as it would on your system--provides, every time it starts, the friendly notice: "This computer will no longer receive Google Chrome updates because Windows XP and Windows Vista are no longer supported." Yes-thank-you-very-much-for-the-constant-reminder-I-know-that.