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The first one I worked on was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND[^] in 1967. Looked like two sections of sewage pipe one above the other, and hummed to itself all day (and night). The best thing about it was that you could hide behind it for hours.
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I worked around Fastrands for seven years or so. There was one just across the hall from my office, in the machine room. The horror!
I never heard of one crashing through a wall ... I did hear of a Fastrand, secured in its special wheeled moving rig, roll down a sloped corridor, zip through the reception area and then out the front door to the parking lot. I don't know if there were any hardware or wetware casualties from the incident.
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Yes, we all 'heard' about that story.
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I remember a similar incident when the San Jose Mercury News installed a new HP3000 system. Standard installation involved a 24-hour spinup on the hard drives. The computer room was not complete, so the back wall consisted of industrial plastic sheeting. 17 hours into the spinup, the technicians checked the status of the drives. Drives 0-4 showed no faults, drive 5 showed a minor fault that registered 11 hours into the test. During the physical part of the check, the technicians discovered that the minor fault was due to the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system used to deliver newspapers to the trucks, ending on its side and continuing the rigorous series of checks with only the minor fault.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Member 10707677 wrote: the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system ...
While magically still being connected to its power supply and data cables.
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Distance travelled to back wall, 3 feet. Distance from computer room to conveyor system, 4 feet. The drive hit the belt and toppled with 1-2 feet down the length of the conveyor. These were the old Perkins eight-platter 18-inch drives, designed for use onboard naval vessels. Cables were typically 60 feet long, with the excess coiled under the floor of the computer room. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it possible. The techs shut down the drive and gave it a thorough going-over. The only damage was a ding in the base cabinet. Luckily, the drive was designated a standby reserve, so the whole of the installation wasn't too badly affected by the extra testing of the drive. (This time, the techs remembered to lock the drive cabinet in place.)
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Still remember working on the DEC 10 system in 1987, perhaps one of the first ones to be installed in Bangalore, India at the Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). Faintly remember that the storage device there was a magnetic tape drive.
While writing programs (in FORTRAN then), it occasionally used to throw this message: "System shutting down in 5 minutes. Please save your files", followed by a countdown, till shutdown. Early versions of Windows used to do it best - throw up a BSOD 
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Message Closed
modified 25-Mar-15 17:48pm.
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Cornelius Henning wrote: calculate prime numbers
Yes - those were our favourite programs - with others being implementations of the Newton Raphson method, Regula Falsi method, Simpson's rule and Gaussian Quadrature for numerical integration.
One other interesting program we wrote was called "Odd Order Equisum Square", just another name for a magic square program.
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I worked on a PDP-11/34a with 2 RK06 7meg word diskdrives (and a tape drive).
I wrote a directory sort program that directly modified the directory pointers,
(Skipping the slow step of loading into an indirect array, and then applying the
changes). it was SO much faster. With one issue. Apparently I had a bug, and I
cross linked 5 files in an infinite loop (directory enteries were a Singly Linked List).
So, when I went to do the directory, the last 5 files kept repeating. But the segment
of code was being run by the OS, and would not break. The drive head was going back
and fourth over 2 points, and the drive slowly started ROCKING... More and More.
A Mad dash to the front of the CPU to HALT the system. Forced an Odd Address Trap,
to avoid the reboot, and then I had to remove my account, losing my files.. Because,
like an idiot, I was working on the live system, without a backup. Pretty soon, I
learned how to do backups.
High School... We were lucky to survive some of our mistakes!
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Wow! Early day OS-level programming! Must have been very exciting! Some of the things you did would have made history - perhaps the first time in the world that someone did them.
Being a Mechanical Engineer, I was not so lucky!
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Not sure if it would have made any history. But I still remember when someone told me that the operating system was just a program.
That changed my whole world. I dug in, and I learned to hack the OS (RSTS/E).
Learned how System function calls worked (literally implemented as a VMT in the OS),
which was our version of an Interrupt. It was SOOO Cool.
I still remember things like:
A = sys(chr(6)+chr(A)+chr(B) ...)
So, this string was passed to SYS. It was pushed onto the stack, and CONSUMED in bytes.
The 6, for example, meant a privileged call. And the A was a value to indicate what call.
Like Killing a job. Then B would be the Job Number to kill. Or A could be LOGINS, and B would
be 0 for disable login and 1 for enable login).
I literally found the code in the OS that processed this stuff. But source was not available.
I had to decode the Octal byte stream from the system memory (I think 4047 was the jump command).
But realizing the Operating System was just a program... Wow, that opened all the doors.
I was rewrote the boot sector to change the message from "non-system disk" to "Good Going Valade!"
to tease a fellow student who always tried booting the wrong disk. He was SHOCKED to see his name,
and a little more than upset at me. (I was a little too cocky)
==
Hardware... Well, I pretty much fried everything I worked on. So I decided I was made for
software. LOL...
==
Do you have a day in Mechanical Engineering where you said "aha"... And realized that it was all about X (neutralizing various forces, compaction vs. expansion, material design)?
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: Do you have a day in Mechanical Engineering where you said "aha"
Not one, but several:
1. While pursuing my Doctoral Degree in Mechanical, we needed a uniform collimated sheet of laser light to illuminate a 3D photoelastic model. My Professor suggested a motor driven contrivance for that, and when put to practice, the 'sheet' of light turned out to be like an ameoba, simply because we could not meet the manufacturing tolerances needed. This set me thinking into looking at static, rather than dynamic / motor-driven ways. While going through all 'junk' in the lab, came across a solid glass cylinder, and a perspex cylindrical lens. Using these two, could produce what was needed - perfectly collimated, and uniform too. The Professor was very happy.
2. Again, during those days, needed to solve a system of two integral equations. The first implementation (in Fortran) caused floating point overflow. Faintly remember that the upper limit of a float turned out to be of the order of 10308 and a variable hit that limit. Showed it to my Prof, and we discussed. Turns out that there was another variable, which went to 10-308. Formulated a way by which these two came in pairs, so that their product was computationally tractable. This was also an 'aha' moment.
3. Another 'aha' moment was when I deviced a stepper-motor driven traverse mechanism, which gave 'wow' moments to my Prof; all using 'junk' in the lab.
All of the above was twenty years ago. In professional life, there have been some 'aha' moments. But after becoming a senior person, I let my team members get their own 'aha' moments, so that they also get personal satisfaction.
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They're installing it as a Flight Data Recorder on that plane
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Respect for International Business Machine (IBM)
Gaurav Arora
http://gaurav-arora.com
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Weren't those called "microprocessors" or something back then? 
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That is crazy man!
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I've heard about "walking" harddrives, as those things' heads (when in sync) would make them move across the floor... tlak about "system is running"
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Whilst working at BT in the 80's we took delivery of what we were told was the first 20Mb drive, it was the size of a desk pedestal and took 4 of us to lift it. we took delivery of another a month or so later as we filled it pretty quickly.
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Reminds me of my first hard drive for the IBM-PC, the Corvus. A huge, loud, expensive device - over $5,000 for 10 MB.
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I started working with them in the mid 1970s. They were about the size of a modern day dishwasher. Had platters - like vinyl records stacked about 5 high. I think they stored 400 MB. They were so big and expensive that peripherals were shared amongst several computers and I worked on a peripheral switch - how to switch hard drives, tape drives, paper tape, etc between computers.
I remember getting an IBM PC with a hard drive for the first time. Probably mid 1980s. 10 MB instead of floppy disks. We thought we had it made.
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Was that the Flight Data Recorder or the Voice Recorder? 
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According to Zeph up near the top of the thread, it is the Flight Recorder 
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Sometime around 1990 I went with a class to tour an IBM facility in San Jose, CA. One of the rooms we visited was full of the 25 MB version of this drive. The customer apparently did not want to upgrade the system ...
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