Old farts reminiscing about computers

[TEG]

Fooling drives into using media differently has gone on so many times in different formats... I used a bunch of S-VHS tapes notched so that a D-VHS VCR would use them as digital storage even though they wanted you to buy the more expensive "certified" tapes. Similar with Hi-8 videotapes in a digital tape backup system.

Oh that reminds me... Too many times a hard drive failed, and when IT went to restore from backup they found that the backup tape was bad.
Standard procedure seemed to be to leave the same tape in the backup drive and let it overwrite nightly. 2+ years later and the 730+ writes cycles had rendered that backup tape unreadable.
( Well it could read it, but with so many data errors that it was a waste of time to try to go back to business as usual. )
Losing years of "RCS/CVS history" doesn't make the developers very happy.
I have heard of that same scenario happen at different places I worked.

 

[wdolson]

A while back people were rigging flash drives so they reported to the OS they had more capacity than they actually did. When you tried to use it, if you are lucky it would just work as a smaller drive. At worst it would completely fail.

These rigged flash drives were common on EBay for a while.

 

[TEG]

Yeah, and they had official looking brand stamping on them. Particularly Kensington. It was attributed to some kind of Chinese counterfeiters.

This would be amusing:
Fake Chinese 500 GB external drive is one clever paperweight (literally)
If it were not so sad and dastardly.

That's right - it's a small PCB with a 128 MB flash chip, and two metal bolts to give the otherwise hollow drive some weight. The controller was made to report a 500 GB capacity and copy files in a loop when it reached past 128 MB.

 

[mongo]

Yeah, and they had official looking brand stamping on them. Particularly Kensington. It was attributed to some kind of Chinese counterfeiters.

This would be amusing:
Fake Chinese 500 GB external drive is one clever paperweight (literally)
If it were not so sad and dastardly.

Reminds me if the pre-OBD2 'tool' that shorted two pins on the connector so the car would flash error codes via check engine light. To make it seem worth the high price, the housing also contained a chunk of steel.

What does it say about me that my first thought is: where did they find a double ended USB Type A male cable to connect it with?

Random trivia, there is no such thing as a USB approved/ standards compliant extension cable (reason being there is no way to limit additional cables and the resultant length could violate the standard) . There may be legit 3.0/Type-C cables due to the ability to power ICs in the cable.

 

[HankLloydRight]

And I'm sure everyone remembers ripping music to "data" CDRs instead of "music" CDRs in order to avoid the RIAA's extortion fee. How stupid was that?

 

[landis]

Was that the same person that would use a CD tray as a cupholder?

So that reminds me of a story from the 90's.

This software engineer, had asked a documentation writer in a nearby cubicle why there was a raw floppy 'disc' tacked to the cubical wall. Turned out it was for a reminder that users may just well take the documentation literally.

The customer complaint that triggered the reminder was that it was very difficult to get the floppy out of the drive.

It turned out that when the documentation said to take the (5.25) floppy out of its sleeve, this enterprising individual used something like an 'exacto knife' to slice the edge of the protective cover, pulled the media out of the cover and successfully placed the very floppy media into the drive. The amazing bit is that it was the second time for this that caused the exasperation that triggered the 'trouble report'.

The 'fix' was to refine the documentation to improve the clarity of what a floppy 'cover/sleve' was. ;-)

edit:typo of clarity

 

[HankLloydRight]

Throwing around 8" floppy disks out of their "sleeve" was always fun.

 

[scaesare]

Throwing around 8" floppy disks out of their "sleeve" was always fun.

As were CD's. We had a corridor along our cubicle row with a wastebasket at the end... we used the widows on one side a our impromptu whiteboard while we launched CD's at the wastebasket during our tech discussions. After a while you got pretty good at correcting for the disc's tendency to invert in flight due to not having a lip around the edge...

 

[scaesare]

Yeah, Chen's blog has some great stuff in it.

Custer's "Inside Windows NT" is pretty interesting reading as well... she had access to Cutler, Perazzoli, Lucovsky, and a bunch of the ex-DEC boys that basically re-implemented VMS as NT. It's much more about the product than the people, though.

Pascal's "Showstopper" is more about the project itself. Has a bit of the "Soul of a New Machine" feel to it.

This side discussion reminded me to go get Chen's book...

 

[mrElbe]

IBM 2311 removable disks looked like a cake or cheese container.
When I was doing night shift as a hardware customer engineer at one account I found the night computer operators having a lively curling game on the smooth raised computer room floor. They were using live data disk packs.

 

[CuriousG]

And I'm sure everyone remembers ripping music to "data" CDRs instead of "music" CDRs in order to avoid the RIAA's extortion fee. How stupid was that?

There was good reason they called them MAFIAA.

 

[Joe F]

Firat tech job in '77 using a CAD system running on a Data General Eclipse system. It had almost washing machine sized disk drives with massive multi platter removable media. Held about 25 MB as best I can recall.

I remember it was like hitting the lottery when we upgraded to additional 300 MB drives. Ah, the good old days.

First personal computer (passed on the Trash 80) was an Apple II Plus. Some day I'll have to find the receipts for it and all the add-ons and media. No one today would believe it.

Added a Z80 card, a 132 column display card, additional floppy, Pascal, really big and loud dot matrix printer.

 

[TEG]

As were CD's. We had a corridor along our cubicle row with a wastebasket at the end... we used the widows on one side a our impromptu whiteboard while we launched CD's at the wastebasket during our tech discussions. After a while you got pretty good at correcting for the disc's tendency to invert in flight due to not having a lip around the edge...

Remember the endless spam of free AOL teaser CDs (and previously floppy disks)?

At least with the floppies people could make them rewritable and reuse them.

I recall some group dumped a truckload of old AOL CDs in front of their headquarters to make sure they knew the world was tired of their wasteful marketing campaign.

 

[GlmnAlyAirCar]

I adore my

Remember the endless spam of free AOL teaser CDs (and previously floppy disks)?
View attachment 276688

At least with the floppies people could make them rewritable and reuse them.

I recall some group dumped a truckload of old AOL CDs in front of their headquarters to make sure they knew the world was tired of their wasteful marketing campaign.

a.k.a. Christmas ornaments in grad school.

 

[ggr]

IBM 2311 removable disks looked like a cake or cheese container.
When I was doing night shift as a hardware customer engineer at one account I found the night computer operators having a lively curling game on the smooth raised computer room floor. They were using live data disk packs.

Ah, 2311s... remember them well. I, too, was 16:00-24:00 shift operator for an IBM 360 while I was undergraduate (1975, it was semi-retired). Two anecdotes:

1. One of the programmers wrote an on-disk sorting program, using a shell sort algorithm. (This is not a good way to do it BTW.) Shell sort uses a variable distance between the items being compared. Anyway, the first time we ran the program, the drive (think washing machine) first started vibrating, then rocking, then as the hydraulic(!) heads started to really move long distances, it walked itself across the raised floor. We killed the program before it crashed into anything.

2. (Not me...) One day a drive started making screeching noises. The inexperienced operator, before calling anyone, decided to try to figure out whether the problem was the drive or the pack. So he put a new pack in the drive; still made noise. Therefore problem must be the drive. So he put the old pack into another drive; still made noise. Therefore problem must be the pack. But that doesn't make sense, so he put the first spare pack into a third drive; still made noise. Now he's really confused, so finally he calls someone and says "the drive is making a screeching noise...". "Oh, that's a head crash... just power it off and don't do anything." The problem was that IBM Australia only had two spare sets of heads for the 2311 (which was somewhat obsolete by then) and he'd just crashed three drives and three packs.

 

[TEG]

I was using a DEC PDP11/70 and users were reporting random data errors. Some messages would come out with wrong characters, and so a technician went to inspect the system.
They found a trail of ants leading into the one of the disk packs. The read/write heads were sometimes running into ants.
Someone admitted spilling a soda on top of the disk pack and some of it leaked inside leading to the ants being attracted.
SInce then hard disk platters all tended to be sealed in air tight enclosures with no chance of "bugs" getting in the system.

 

[tga]

Remember the endless spam of free AOL teaser CDs (and previously floppy disks)?

We stockpiled those and hid them inside a coworker's office - in books, under his monitor, in file folders, desk drawer, etc. We had dozens in there. Drove him nuts.

 

[wdolson]

And I'm sure everyone remembers ripping music to "data" CDRs instead of "music" CDRs in order to avoid the RIAA's extortion fee. How stupid was that?

It annoys me when dinosaur technology tries to legislate things to stay in business. I understand they want to stay in business and the artists need to make money, but trying to limit users from copying the content just slows them down a little if you're lucky.

The music business is in a lot of trouble now because instead of passing on the savings from new technology, they tried to extort customers into paying more. If they had dropped the cost of CDs as the manufacturing costs dropped, they probably would have kept most of their customers. Instead, the kept prices high so a lot of consumers looked elsewhere and now we have a generation of consumers unwilling to pay much of anything for music.

IBM 2311 removable disks looked like a cake or cheese container.
When I was doing night shift as a hardware customer engineer at one account I found the night computer operators having a lively curling game on the smooth raised computer room floor. They were using live data disk packs.

When I was at Boeing they had a number of those, though the mainframes were made by Harris. I never had anything to do with them though. I was focused on the hardware interface end and those disk packs were mostly obsolete when I started.

Remember the endless spam of free AOL teaser CDs (and previously floppy disks)?
View attachment 276688

At least with the floppies people could make them rewritable and reuse them.

I recall some group dumped a truckload of old AOL CDs in front of their headquarters to make sure they knew the world was tired of their wasteful marketing campaign.

When I used to get flooded with those CDs I'd keep them. I still have some as coasters at my desk. But I thought I had more than I would ever need until a few years after we moved here. Our bedroom has a deck off it and in the summer the sun comes up and shines right on the window. A robin started fighting with his reflection in the window at dawn. He would sit on the railing until the reflection copped an attitude and then attack the window.

I tried various means to get him to go away, but short of shooing him away every morning when I wanted to be sleeping, nothing worked until I remembered I had all those CDs in a box in the garage. I made a few mobiles with fish line and the CDs and the bird got the message and quit. Then I forgot to take them down when the winter winds started (we get intense windstorms in the winter) and they all blew off the deck. To this day I don't know where most of them went. I only found one of the strings on the ground.

 

[idealsol]

On single sided floppy disks we cut a notch on the opposite side to use them as double sided disks.
Also paid $ 500.00 for a Creative Labs single speed CD ROM drive.

I think I bought that same or similar CD ROM!
Couldn’t resist being able to actually burn a disk
We used a driver back then to get it to work, mscdex

I also remember buying a 300mb drive circa 1983. They thought I was crazy to need that much space, about $1500
PC drives back then we’re more typically 20-40 gb
We went on to start a clone computer company and did quite well until everything became a commodity

 

[tga]

Anyone remember Telebit trailblazer modems?

I used a Trailblazer to run a UUCP link between my Sun 3/50 and Yale at my first job. My workstation became the office's email server (7 people).

A few years later I had a company-supplied stand-alone X terminal at home, connected via a 14.4 Telebit (T3000?). Then RCN came in and offered ~1.5Mbit cable modem (woo-hoo!), so the modem went bye-bye.

I have a couple of friends who did DSP programming at Octocom. Telebit bought Octocom, then moved operations to Octocom's location in MA. Cisco eventually bought Telebit; I met them when we worked together at Cisco (in MA).