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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