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Back in the 80's and early 90's, my uncle's company had an IBM System/36, which was a predecessor to the AS/400. They used it for accounting. The thing was a mo

Back in the 80's and early 90's, my uncle's company had an IBM System/36, which was a predecessor to the AS/400. They used it for accounting. The thing was a monster, and it looked exactly like the top photo on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/36 It had 8 terminals attached, and a couple of huge line printers. We opened up the main system cabinet one day, and the hard drive (about 200 megs?) was over a foot wide. The system also used "disk cartridges" which were several 8 inch floppies in a box. Supposedly the system cost almost $200K (in 80's money.) In the mid 90's they replaced it with PCs.

jacquesm 5y ago
As drive packs come those were pretty compact already. Prior to that a 200 meg pack + drive would be the size of a top loading washing machine. Packs were removable, you'd screw them into place with a handle at the top and after closing the lid they'd spin up. Massive gear, a pack of 11 platters weighed a couple of kilos and would spin up to several K rpm, and woe to you if the pack was written on a drive with a different alignment, then you'd have to get the heads re-aligned. This was one of the reason why most machine to machine data transfer was done using tapes. Slower, but more reliable and much, much cheaper. Packs would usually stay within the same datacenter, and likely would be assigned to the same drive though theoretically there was no reason why they couldn't be moved to a different one that had been calibrated with the same calibration setup.
teh_klev 5y ago
Back in the 90's I worked as a field engineer and had a few of these on contract. They're really nice machines to work on and a common task was replacing these hard disks when they failed. The IBM field service manuals were pretty good and you could repair/replace pretty much anything on-site. They look like monsters but they're actually really friendly to field service techs.

jacquesm 5y ago

As drive packs come those were pretty compact already. Prior to that a 200 meg pack + drive would be the size of a top loading washing machine. Packs were removable, you'd screw them into place with a handle at the top and after closing the lid they'd spin up. Massive gear, a pack of 11 platters weighed a couple of kilos and would spin up to several K rpm, and woe to you if the pack was written on a drive with a different alignment, then you'd have to get the heads re-aligned. This was one of the reason why most machine to machine data transfer was done using tapes. Slower, but more reliable and much, much cheaper. Packs would usually stay within the same datacenter, and likely would be assigned to the same drive though theoretically there was no reason why they couldn't be moved to a different one that had been calibrated with the same calibration setup.

teh_klev 5y ago

Back in the 90's I worked as a field engineer and had a few of these on contract. They're really nice machines to work on and a common task was replacing these hard disks when they failed. The IBM field service manuals were pretty good and you could repair/replace pretty much anything on-site. They look like monsters but they're actually really friendly to field service techs.