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Talking Rotten
Message
From
26/01/2019 21:39:02
 
 
To
24/01/2019 15:16:34
John Ryan
Captain-Cooker Appreciation Society
Taumata Whakatangi ..., New Zealand
General information
Forum:
Politics
Category:
Economics
Title:
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01665625
Message ID:
01665742
Views:
51
>Yes, things will change. Sometimes it's a social renaissance and other times there's nostalgia for the good old days.

Or it's something else
While I was wrestling with IRG's (inter-record gaps between tape records) IBM came out with this thing called the 1405 RAMAC (Random Access Computer) which used disc platters instead of magnetic tape.
It looked like a juke box.
It had a stack of discs that looked like extra wide 33RPM records.
There was an arm that moved up and down among the discs ( 10 of them)
Seek time was OK unless the stuff you needed was on another disc, when the arm had to move the read/write head up or down to that disc and then move to the required track. It made sounds as the arm and head moved.
In that case, the seek time was measured in minutes and seconds.

My employer bought one of them and when things were dull for us "practical" tape programmers, we'd go and watch the arm and head move. One nutty programmer wrote some code that made the noises the arm and head made sound like Wagner's
Pilgrim Chorus.

Have you seen any tape drives lately?
Do you think that I miss them?

Things change. They are changing as we say they won't change.
Anyone who does not go overboard- deserves to.
Malcolm Forbes, Sr.
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