On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:24:07 -0400, jeff wrote:

Many years ago when I worked with NASA I got a tour of a facility in
Greenbelt. It was a disk farm with hundreds of washing machine sized
drives, each about 200 Megabytes, for a total of about half a Terabyte.
It contained all of the telemetry from every scientific satellite for
about six months. Now that much storage can fit in your pocket!

I worked with almost every generation of IBM "washing machine" sized
disk from the late 60s onward, starting with something called the
2311. They were 3.625 meg per cabinet and cost upwards of $30,000
back when that could buy a decent house or really nice boat.

Wayne.B wrote in
:

I worked with almost every generation of IBM "washing machine" sized
disk from the late 60s onward, starting with something called the
2311. They were 3.625 meg per cabinet and cost upwards of $30,000
back when that could buy a decent house or really nice boat.



Yeah, on that same IBM museum website there's big, tall disk platter
cabinets with glass fronts so you can watch the platters spinning (and I
suppose occasionally crashing)...(c;

It's a great tour through IBMland from the beginnings. They saved all
the pictures. There's even the IBM-PC blazing along at 4.77 Mhz of
breathtaking speed! Whoda evah thunk it?

Spozed to go sailin' with friends on a lazy Saturday around Charleston
Harbor next weekend. I'm stripping some great sailing music off:
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.easy-listening
tonight. It's that dreamy smooth kind of music to smooth your fingertips
over an exposed length of sensitive skin. Hope the women are wearin'
their thongs...(c; Thongs and Dana Dragomir's pan flute...hmmm... A
l'il smooth piano music for later after dinner. Slow dancin' stuff.

Larry
--
Sunshine and 4 knots should be about right. We'll make a pot of Bloody
Mary in the coffee pot.