Roy Morton
10 years ago
Just found these specifications for the computers being used in the survey department at South Crofty mine in 1984; cutting edge stuff in its day.

'The new field data is reduced using a Commodore 8000 series computer. This 8 bit machine supports 96K of internal memory interfaced to a Winchester Hard Disk unit of 5Mb and a dual drive floppy disk unit of 1Mb capacity. A dot matrix printer completes the unit'

I wonder how much that little set up cost?
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Wormster
10 years ago
OOh with that Winchester disk, I would reckon the pricetag would have run to several 'fasands of your English pounds!
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NewStuff
10 years ago
Argh! I hate the term "Winchester"...

Anything with fixed heads and platters is a "Winchester" disk. That 1TB of spinning rust in your PC? "Winchester". The First IBM Unit's with 30MB Platters? "Winchester", and where the name originated (Winchester 30/30 rifles) Sorry, pet peeve of mine.

MFM or RLL most likely. Noisy bloody things whichever way. That would have been a decent setup for that era. I still have a Seagate 5MB that powers up. Huge thing, Sounds like a bloody warp drive! Painful if you drop it on your toes, as I did with it's sister unit... 😞
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Willy Eckerslyke
10 years ago
"NewStuff" wrote:

... where the name originated (Winchester 30/30 rifles) Sorry, pet peeve of mine.


Don't you mean .30-30?
:guns:
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grahami
10 years ago
The first computer we had at my (teaching) school was a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) with built in green screen, calculator type keyboard and tape cassette for storage. Since it came with no instructions, we had to clear the memory by switching it off and on again until we found a book on "BASIC" - ah those were the days! I ended up as the de factor computer teacher (NOT IT) :offtopic:

Grahami
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Mr.C
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10 years ago
"grahami" wrote:

The first computer we had at my (teaching) school was a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) with built in green screen, calculator type keyboard and tape cassette for storage. Since it came with no instructions, we had to clear the memory by switching it off and on again until we found a book on "BASIC" - ah those were the days! I ended up as the de factor computer teacher (NOT IT) :offtopic:

Grahami


I remember them well, with a massive 8kB of RAM!!
And IIRC they were around £650 in 1979?
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PeteJ
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10 years ago
"NewStuff" wrote:

Argh! I hate the term "Winchester"...

Anything with fixed heads and platters is a "Winchester" disk. That 1TB of spinning rust in your PC? "Winchester". The First IBM Unit's with 30MB Platters? "Winchester", and where the name originated (Winchester 30/30 rifles) Sorry, pet peeve of mine.

MFM or RLL most likely. Noisy bloody things whichever way. That would have been a decent setup for that era. I still have a Seagate 5MB that powers up. Huge thing, Sounds like a bloody warp drive! Painful if you drop it on your toes, as I did with it's sister unit... :-[



Always thought it was IBM Worsley Park, Winchester, Southampton?
Pete Jackson
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Mr.C
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10 years ago
"PeteJ" wrote:



Always thought it was IBM Worsley Park, Winchester, Southampton?


Matches my memory also.
The first "Winchester Technology" drive I came across was the Honeywell Bull D140 in 1981. It was a (IIRC) 10M removable cartridge, with a 10M fixed Winchester below it. (or was it 20 +20 Meg?)
The ones I played with were in PDP11's & emulated 4 (or maybe 8?) DEC RK05's.
They weighed over 70LBS & cost several thousand quid each!
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