Re: Dock 2 description ?

[ucklw08 <ucklw08@ucl.ac.uk>]

> Amazing, innit? I keep my original 10M 100ms Winchester as a doorstop for 
> fun. I don't want to think what we paid for that 10 years ago....

Gosh, my original DEC and IBM Winchster drives were the size of a washing
machine, chewed up power like an ultracentrifuge, and cost as much as one
very decent automobile.  Storage capacity varied from 750 KB to 1.5 MB --
some removable stack of platters (a stack of 8 to 11 fourteen inch disks)
cost small fortunes.  Of course, the operating system, compilers, etc all
fit in 65 KB memory.  Software arrived on punched cards and punched paper
-- only later did we get some 7 and 9 track vacuum column tape drives.

Memory didn't come on chips, it came on huge square frames of wire mesh
with little donuts at every intersection of the wires.  The motherboard
was wired by hand.  Indeed, engineering change orders would sometimes
specify that we were to lengthen individual wires for timing changes.