> On Jul 9, 2015, at 9:27 AM, P Gebhardt <p.gebha...@ymail.com> wrote: > > > >> I remember encountering them mostly as replacements for the terrible 821 >> drives, which had the appearance of an 808, but substantially increased >> capacity. I don't think any 821s were ever installed at a customer's >> site, however--I saw the lot of them that we had falling to the CE >> sledgehammer. >> >> They were replaced by banks of 844s--lots of them. I think one site had >> well over 100 installed, all hooked together with a MAC on at least 2 >> Cyber 74s. >> >> >> --Chuck > >> > > > Wow, more than hundred of these CDC drives??? This must have been a massive > > installation! I didn't know so many disk drives could be combined with > > Cyber systems. Thanks for the insights! > I was already amazed by pictures provided by the University of Auckland: > > https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/historydisplays/FifthFloor/MagneticDataStorage/DataStorageImages/DiskPacks/CDCComputerRoom.jpg > > It doesn't say, though, where this picture was taken.
Wow. It isn’t clear how many systems are behind those drives. And I thought CERL (University of Illinois PLATO) was a big setup. When I was there (1975-1978) it had, I believe, about 20 844 drives. Those were all connected to a single 7054 (via extenders of course, which aren’t well documented in the manuals I have seen) and from there to a dual mainframe setup (Cyber 73 and CDC 6500). Both mainframes would do I/O, and on each there were two PPUs involved in the I/O to allow 1:1 interlace on 70-series channels. This setup seriously exercised the drive reservation logic. I ran into a controlware bug there, trying to use the Deadstart function (03uu). It runs a sequence of conventional operations internally in the 7054, but as supplied it did not correctly handle a drive interlock status and would get things wedged up. That wasn’t hard to fix; it gave me my one exposure to the controlware code, which is why I have a copy of it, though unfortunately not a copy of the manual. In theory, a 7054 with extenders can support 64 drives, since the unit number is a 6-bit value. And also, again in theory, you could hook up multiple 7054s if you need more drives than that. So well over a 100, accessible to a single system, is at least theoretically possible. Chuck, what (in this context) is a “MAC”? paul