Re: [Simh] SIMH and physical hardware (Zachary Kline)

[Al Kossow]

On 2/10/16 9:52 AM, Bob Supnik wrote:

The Computer
History Museum in Menlo Park


Mountain View



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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Bailey, Scott]

I was fortunate to have gotten "on the inside" quite early in my career, and
reading this thread really has brought back a wave of nostalgia for the
sights, sounds, and feel of old machine rooms.

And that's scratching the surface (pardon the pun). I managed a lonely trio of
Xerox 8010 servers that lasted into the late 1990s, and of course there was
really no hardware or software support of any kind for those dinosaurs. They
had huge (by today's standards) internal disks that were rotated by an
external motor and drive belt. I recall vividly that following power outages
(for whatever reason), one of the servers required you to remove the side
panel and "jump start" the disk by rotating the spindle manually -- the belt
was a little too worn/loose for the system to spin up the disk from a standing
start!

When I started at Xerox in 1985, there were 6085s all over the place and we
used them for everything. Well, everything that didn't involve the VT100
sitting next to mine. ;-)

Actually (he says plaintively) a 8010 or 6085 emulator would be a great SimH
fodder -- certainly they were important computing artifacts, and I regret in
hindsight that the systems I supported -- with their accompanying materials --
were long ago consigned to the dumpster. :-(

(shakes head and returns to the real world)

Scott


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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Henk Gooijen]

-Oorspronkelijk bericht- 
From: Pontus Pihlgren

Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 8:09 AM
To: Johnny Billquist
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Sounds

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 11:26:44PM +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:

Google for walking disks... It's a known phenomena, or at least it used to
be...

By the way - just to make another silly comment... The RK07 is a small 
disk

(it's basically just an overgrown RL02). Come back when you've played with
an RP06 for a while... Then we can talk of walking...


I encourage anyone in this hobby to read the stories arround Fastrand.
Not sure how much is true or exaggerations, but it's a fun read.

Or the spinning up of an RM03. Sounds like it is going into warp 
overdrive,

and will open a hole into another dimension as it is spinning up...


Let's do the time warp again :-)

-

Ahhh, Fastrand rings a bell ... that's Sperry isn't it?
I will google for that and for "walking disks" this evening.
Must be interesting.   I used to work on Sperry 1100/63.

Yeah, I have three RM03 drives. I cleaned the first one, but after
powering up, the lid remains locked. I have not (yet) investigated it.

- Henk

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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 12:23 PM Kevin Handy wrote:

> Nowodays, many people haven't even heard a dot-matrix printer grinding away, 
> let alone the huge mass of fans that seemed to make up most of an 11/70.
> Daisy weel printers are also extremely rare now. Line printers (drum, chain, 
> printronix) seem to be nonexistant any more, but were how most of us thought 
> about computers.

I always thought those band printers were the noisiest contraptions.  Always 
housed in their own sound-proofed box, they let out an awful noise when the lid 
was opened !
 

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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Kevin Handy]

I worked at a timesharing sevice that has a computer room with a PDP-11/34,
a ODO-11/70, both with tape drives and RP06. Also included in the mix was a
large air conditioner, and a humidifier. When backup to tape was being run,
the total noise level was incr4edible. The humidifier wasd necessary
because otherwise the static would build up so high you couldn;t touch
anything without causing sparks.

The 11/70 had a remote diagonisyic cpmsole, so no blinkenlights. It finally
had a problem where it would frequently crash, and field service couldn't
find the problem, so it was replaced with an 11/83 with a TSV05 taoe. The
sound level dropped by an amazing amount.

Nowodays, many people haven't even heard a dot-matrix printer grinding
away, let alone the huge mass of fans that seemed to make up most of an
11/70. Daisy weel printers are also extremely rare now. Line printers
(drum, chain, printronix) seem to be nonexistant any more, but were how
most of us thought about computers.

At college, I had classes that used a VAX 780 VMS, but ut had so many users
on it that it could take 15 minutes just to log in.  Great fun when you had
an assignment due the next day.


On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Bailey, Scott  wrote:

> I was fortunate to have gotten "on the inside" quite early in my career,
> and
> reading this thread really has brought back a wave of nostalgia for the
> sights, sounds, and feel of old machine rooms.
>
> And that's scratching the surface (pardon the pun). I managed a lonely
> trio of
> Xerox 8010 servers that lasted into the late 1990s, and of course there was
> really no hardware or software support of any kind for those dinosaurs.
> They
> had huge (by today's standards) internal disks that were rotated by an
> external motor and drive belt. I recall vividly that following power
> outages
> (for whatever reason), one of the servers required you to remove the side
> panel and "jump start" the disk by rotating the spindle manually -- the
> belt
> was a little too worn/loose for the system to spin up the disk from a
> standing
> start!
>
> When I started at Xerox in 1985, there were 6085s all over the place and we
> used them for everything. Well, everything that didn't involve the VT100
> sitting next to mine. ;-)
>
> Actually (he says plaintively) a 8010 or 6085 emulator would be a great
> SimH
> fodder -- certainly they were important computing artifacts, and I regret
> in
> hindsight that the systems I supported -- with their accompanying
> materials --
> were long ago consigned to the dumpster. :-(
>
> (shakes head and returns to the real world)
>
> Scott
>
> ___
> Simh mailing list
> Simh@trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
>
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