8 ms·

A 1970s Cray-1 hard drive has been imaged

205 points by 1880 15y ago

apaprocki 15y ago
I can imagine how difficult this was to pull off. I came across some old Colorado tapes that had backups of BBS related stuff, files, etc. from 10 years ago. I figured I'd try to dump the data off of them using a Linux live CD only to find that Linux dropped floppy-interface tape drive support a long time ago. Next time around, I'll pull an ancient live CD version and get the data off before it goes the way of the Cray. Constantly migrate your data forward to avoid these hassles!
epo 15y ago
Gosh, some actual "hacking" in Hacker News. Just waiting for the comments asking "what does this have to do with startups" ...
- 16BitTons 15y ago
  Whenever HN is filled with items that aren't HN-esque enough for me, I like to go to "new", find some good articles, and upvote them.
- 4ad 15y ago
  I'd like to see more hacking news and less stuff about startups as well. Great article, it's incredible no more Cray-1 software has been preserved.
- eru 15y ago
  You know, it used to be called startup news?
mMark 15y ago
Norton Ghost?..
- zephjc 15y ago
  Seeing as the disk crashed, closer to something like divining the data by waving a magic magnetic wand over it.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  More like Seymour Ghost ;-)
ericHosick 15y ago
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760_9762_Oct73.pdf http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
- ordinary 15y ago
  Why pleasantly surprising?
  - ericHosick 15y ago
    Because it is usually things like we have 1000x faster such and such and 100x smaller since such and such a time. This brings home that there were amazing technological advances even in the 70's worth noting. Sure we have SSD's now and so on. But, ya. Just kinda cool to see.
- mjb 15y ago
  Latency has been scaling worse than almost any other factor for nearly the entire history of computing. The latency/throughput ratio for storage, networking, memory, cache and almost everything else has been rising continuously since the 70s and is likely to carry on rising. This is going to have big consequences for the way that we design systems in the future. Transferring a large amount of data is going to be cheap and fast. Seeking, handshaking, back-and-forth and any other latency sensitive operations are going to be slow and expensive. This has already played a big role in algorithm design in HPC, and is going to start being felt to a much larger degree in the wider field over the next decade. As the latency/throughput ratio gets bigger, the tradeoffs behind optimal system design will change. 30ms for a Cray 1 was only 2400 clock cycles. 8ms for a modern CPU is around 30 million. That's a big change.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    And buffer bloat is confusing the protocols in the process.
0x12 15y ago
That's pretty impressive. Not only did they image the disk, it was a disk that had had a head crash and one damaged head which they managed to restore to functioning well enough to capture the data. Now of course the big question: what is on that disk?
- danbee 15y ago
  I believe the head crash occurred on a different disk pack, one that they were using to test it.
  - Maci 15y ago
    From the Paper: Unfortunately, within 30 seconds of the heads being loaded a high-pitched whining noise began to be emitted from the drive, implying a potential head-to-disk contact was taking place. The drive was then powered down and the disk pack and heads were carefully examined. Thorough examination revealed that Head #4 on the drive (which reads the bottom surface of the lowest data platter) had 'crashed' into the disk surface and scraped away a concentric ring of oxide material, permanently damaging the platter. This is a good time to point out the advantages of not experimenting with your primary source material when performing digital archeology experiments! Src: http://www.archive.org/details/2011-cdc-disk-archaeology-fenton http://www.archive.org/details/2011-cdc-disk-archaeology-fen...
sgt 15y ago
Didn't I read about someone who built a replica of a Cray, but struggled to find actual software for it? This could be exactly what they needed. I think the story of the Cray replica (scaled model) was featured on HN.
- ra 15y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 Same guy!
michael_dorfman 15y ago
Oddly enough, I dreamt last night about the old 9-track, half-inch, reel-to-reel tapes we used to use, back in the day, and woke up wondering how much a reel actually held. Looks like it was 140MB at highest density. Now, excuse me a moment, while I try to get those pesky kids off of my lawn.
- sgt 15y ago
  I think that is the type of dreams HAL would have.
ilamont 15y ago
About four years ago I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, and asked him about the issue of old data formats. In Singularity or one of his earlier papers or books, he had lamented the inaccessibility of old data, which prompted me to ask about the role of standards. His response: We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes. And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access. So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest. So something like acrobat documents, which are basically trying to preserve a flat document, is actually a pretty good format, and is likely to last a pretty long time. But I am not confident that these standards will remain. I think the philosophical implication is that we have to really care about knowledge. If we care about knowledge it will be preserved. And this is true knowledge in general, because knowledge is not just information. Because each generation is preserving the knowledge it cares about and of course a lot of that knowledge is preserved from earlier times, but we have to sort of re-synthesize it and re-understand it, and appreciate it anew. Source: http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_continued_portable_computing_virtual_reality_immortality_and_strong_vs_narrow_ai http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_contin...
- ilamont 15y ago
  Related thought: The "Rosetta Project" (http://rosettaproject.org/ http://rosettaproject.org/) aims to build a publicly accessible library of human languages. Besides the website, part of the original concept was to seed the world with "Rosetta Discs", metal spheres with an approximately 2,000-year lifespan, etched with optically readable samples of thousands of written languages. Future humans who found the discs would be able to review and understand the dead languages on it as long as at least one of the languages on the disk was still known. The website (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) describes how it would work: The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’ On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification). The disk still seems to be a work in progress, but the Rosetta project is concentrating on many Internet and audio-based initiatives (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/us/29bcculture.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/us/29bcculture.html)
ColinDabritz 15y ago
This reminds me of the 'Digital Needle' project, which was a hacking project done by Ofer Springer back in 2002. The idea was to use a flatbed scanner to play a vinyl record. http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ It came surprisingly close. Perhaps with today's technology we could do better?
- DerekL 15y ago
  A company called ELP sells laser-based turntables. They start at $9900.
pud 15y ago
This reminds me of the world's geekiest joke. Q: Why do Cray supercomputers have a clear panel in the front (you can see it in the photos) A: So you can Seymour Cray.
WalterBright 15y ago
About a year ago, I needed to get some data off some old PDP-11 8" diskettes. Fortunately, an old friend had an LSI-11 in his closet with the disk drive. He hadn't run it in years, but it fired right up, and the disks read perfectly, and he sent me the images. Whew! (thank you, Cheshire Engineering!)
- WalterBright 15y ago
  My PDP-10 software, unfortunately, was gone for good. It was all on a magtape, and the drive that wrote it was way out of spec and the tapes were unreadable on any other drive. (sob)

205 points by 1880 15y ago

I can imagine how difficult this was to pull off. I came across some old Colorado tapes that had backups of BBS related stuff, files, etc. from 10 years ago. I figured I'd try to dump the data off of them using a Linux live CD only to find that Linux dropped floppy-interface tape drive support a long time ago. Next time around, I'll pull an ancient live CD version and get the data off before it goes the way of the Cray. Constantly migrate your data forward to avoid these hassles!

epo 15y ago

Gosh, some actual "hacking" in Hacker News. Just waiting for the comments asking "what does this have to do with startups" ...

16BitTons 15y ago
Whenever HN is filled with items that aren't HN-esque enough for me, I like to go to "new", find some good articles, and upvote them.
4ad 15y ago
I'd like to see more hacking news and less stuff about startups as well. Great article, it's incredible no more Cray-1 software has been preserved.
eru 15y ago
You know, it used to be called startup news?

mMark 15y ago

Norton Ghost?..

zephjc 15y ago
Seeing as the disk crashed, closer to something like divining the data by waving a magic magnetic wand over it.
rbanffy 15y ago
More like Seymour Ghost ;-)

ericHosick 15y ago

Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760_9762_Oct73.pdf http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.

ordinary 15y ago
Why pleasantly surprising?
- ericHosick 15y ago
  Because it is usually things like we have 1000x faster such and such and 100x smaller since such and such a time. This brings home that there were amazing technological advances even in the 70's worth noting. Sure we have SSD's now and so on. But, ya. Just kinda cool to see.
mjb 15y ago
Latency has been scaling worse than almost any other factor for nearly the entire history of computing. The latency/throughput ratio for storage, networking, memory, cache and almost everything else has been rising continuously since the 70s and is likely to carry on rising. This is going to have big consequences for the way that we design systems in the future. Transferring a large amount of data is going to be cheap and fast. Seeking, handshaking, back-and-forth and any other latency sensitive operations are going to be slow and expensive. This has already played a big role in algorithm design in HPC, and is going to start being felt to a much larger degree in the wider field over the next decade. As the latency/throughput ratio gets bigger, the tradeoffs behind optimal system design will change. 30ms for a Cray 1 was only 2400 clock cycles. 8ms for a modern CPU is around 30 million. That's a big change.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  And buffer bloat is confusing the protocols in the process.

0x12 15y ago

That's pretty impressive. Not only did they image the disk, it was a disk that had had a head crash and one damaged head which they managed to restore to functioning well enough to capture the data. Now of course the big question: what is on that disk?

danbee 15y ago
I believe the head crash occurred on a different disk pack, one that they were using to test it.
- Maci 15y ago
  From the Paper: Unfortunately, within 30 seconds of the heads being loaded a high-pitched whining noise began to be emitted from the drive, implying a potential head-to-disk contact was taking place. The drive was then powered down and the disk pack and heads were carefully examined. Thorough examination revealed that Head #4 on the drive (which reads the bottom surface of the lowest data platter) had 'crashed' into the disk surface and scraped away a concentric ring of oxide material, permanently damaging the platter. This is a good time to point out the advantages of not experimenting with your primary source material when performing digital archeology experiments! Src: http://www.archive.org/details/2011-cdc-disk-archaeology-fenton http://www.archive.org/details/2011-cdc-disk-archaeology-fen...

sgt 15y ago

Didn't I read about someone who built a replica of a Cray, but struggled to find actual software for it? This could be exactly what they needed. I think the story of the Cray replica (scaled model) was featured on HN.

ra 15y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 Same guy!

michael_dorfman 15y ago

Oddly enough, I dreamt last night about the old 9-track, half-inch, reel-to-reel tapes we used to use, back in the day, and woke up wondering how much a reel actually held. Looks like it was 140MB at highest density. Now, excuse me a moment, while I try to get those pesky kids off of my lawn.

sgt 15y ago
I think that is the type of dreams HAL would have.

ilamont 15y ago

About four years ago I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, and asked him about the issue of old data formats. In Singularity or one of his earlier papers or books, he had lamented the inaccessibility of old data, which prompted me to ask about the role of standards. His response: We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes. And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access. So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest. So something like acrobat documents, which are basically trying to preserve a flat document, is actually a pretty good format, and is likely to last a pretty long time. But I am not confident that these standards will remain. I think the philosophical implication is that we have to really care about knowledge. If we care about knowledge it will be preserved. And this is true knowledge in general, because knowledge is not just information. Because each generation is preserving the knowledge it cares about and of course a lot of that knowledge is preserved from earlier times, but we have to sort of re-synthesize it and re-understand it, and appreciate it anew. Source: http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_continued_portable_computing_virtual_reality_immortality_and_strong_vs_narrow_ai http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_contin...

ilamont 15y ago
Related thought: The "Rosetta Project" (http://rosettaproject.org/ http://rosettaproject.org/) aims to build a publicly accessible library of human languages. Besides the website, part of the original concept was to seed the world with "Rosetta Discs", metal spheres with an approximately 2,000-year lifespan, etched with optically readable samples of thousands of written languages. Future humans who found the discs would be able to review and understand the dead languages on it as long as at least one of the languages on the disk was still known. The website (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) describes how it would work: The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’ On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification). The disk still seems to be a work in progress, but the Rosetta project is concentrating on many Internet and audio-based initiatives (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/us/29bcculture.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/us/29bcculture.html)

ColinDabritz 15y ago

This reminds me of the 'Digital Needle' project, which was a hacking project done by Ofer Springer back in 2002. The idea was to use a flatbed scanner to play a vinyl record. http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ It came surprisingly close. Perhaps with today's technology we could do better?

DerekL 15y ago
A company called ELP sells laser-based turntables. They start at $9900.

pud 15y ago

This reminds me of the world's geekiest joke. Q: Why do Cray supercomputers have a clear panel in the front (you can see it in the photos) A: So you can Seymour Cray.

WalterBright 15y ago

About a year ago, I needed to get some data off some old PDP-11 8" diskettes. Fortunately, an old friend had an LSI-11 in his closet with the disk drive. He hadn't run it in years, but it fired right up, and the disks read perfectly, and he sent me the images. Whew! (thank you, Cheshire Engineering!)

WalterBright 15y ago
My PDP-10 software, unfortunately, was gone for good. It was all on a magtape, and the drive that wrote it was way out of spec and the tapes were unreadable on any other drive. (sob)