I hail as far back as Commodore 64 and some on board GPS stuff with the military....before satellites.

 

Ha HA, actually had a few of those 64's and 128's too

My buddy thought he was up there when he got that next one they built - dang can't remember it, the alpha or something odd !?!?


sorry for the thread hijack --> http://www.commodore.ca/

 

I seem to recall Commodore 128 or maybe it was the Tandy. Still used the big 5 1/4 floppies but it could read both sides.

 

What about a Tandy TRS80 MKII with 8" floppies, one in main cabinet 3 more in the drive cabinet..... Yeah,, I'm old!!!

 

yeah, recall the pet, and 128.... but they came out with a new naming convention ...

AMIGA !!! dang brain farts !- but I was close - it did start with an A !!

 

So, speaking of Commodore.......

Who else remembers the VIC-20, complete with "tape drive"?

When I got my SX-64, and upgraded it with a second drive, I thought THAT was the "cat's meow"!

Paid over $300 for my first hard drive, a whopping 30MB of storage! Woo-hoo!

"640K? Wow! Who would ever need more RAM than THAT??"

Pop

 

286, 386, 400's, Pentium 1, 2, 3.. I have a big gap in tech as I was overseas shooting at the bad guys then.

 

Took the survey a few days back...

I may have you all beat. I am still in the game and started in "data processing" in 1972 and built my first computer (8080) from a kit in around 1978..

 

I was working on RCA's 3488 RACE equipment in about 1966. Real mass storage for it's time.

Mechanically loud, but reasonably fast random access, about a third of a second.

I believe the California DMV used the system for about three decades.

Pop

 

Well, I'm not going back as far as possible cuz you already know I am 'experienced' not old
but anyone remember a CRAM system ?

Will let it soak for a day or two and come back...

It was used with a county/parish government program that we called GIGO because it weighed garbage trucks at the landfill and sent the data to the IT ctr...
Garbage In - Garbage Out !

 

Without a total Thread-Jack
Please take a few minutes to do the Ford Survey!!!

I didn't work on that equipment, but did work for a few years with a platform running on Sperry Univac's 418-III with a Data Cell and later on a Fastrand Drum storage device. When we got our first DASD Disk, it was s sight to behold. As I recall it held roughly 30MB and was 4' in diameter. You did not swap those discs as they were permanently mounted.

 

CRAM was very similar to the 3488, in that it used magnetic cards and edge coding for each one to determine which card to extract and read in a "deck". After extraction, the cards, like RCA's, ran down a track to a read/write spinning drum. The CRAM was earlier, used smaller cards, and had less storage capacity, but it, too, was effective mass storage for its time.

Never worked on one, as it was NCR, and I was RCA.

Pop

 

thread closed. Survey period is over.