Hmmm should i buy this

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Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:06 pm

Should i buy this hard drive? The advert says its amazing !!!!

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:31 pm

"Quantity discounts available." Even better! Very Happy

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:32 pm

I wouldn't bother.
You'll never need that kind of storage space. Cool

here · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:36 pm

ask him the MTBF rating

after all it's BIG so it might be risky!

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:43 pm

These are the ones with pockets on the base for a forklift, aren't they?

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:45 pm

i didnt get this from a lad, though if i get another hard drive lad im sending this Laughing

I found it while i was cleaning up my photobucket account and dusted it off.

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 10:09 pm

I'm still torn; I could get the 5MB for only $2898, but for only $500 more I can have twice the storage. However 5 should be enough so why waste the extra money.

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 10:16 pm

The ad shows it's age by the area for San Diego being 714, changed to 619 back in 1982!!

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 10:35 pm

If you would have told them back then that there would (30 years later) be a memory stick with 13107x the capacity, at 1/10th of the size and 1/20th of the price, they would have had you 5150'd. Laughing

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 11:08 pm

I remember upgrading the 4kb(yes-kb!) memory in my TRS-80 to a whopping 16kb.What would I ever need all that RAM for? Laughing

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 11:08 pm

Bart Fargo wrote:

The ad shows it's age by the area for San Diego being 714

Not to mention, it includes a telex number. How many people here remember telexes? All of the offices I worked in had telex machines, up to about 1984 or 1985 when we got our first fax. They were big, bulky, noisy monsters. Mine looked just like this one:

You typed your message on long, hard-to-press keys, which punched holes in a paper tape. (The clear plastic container on the lower left held the punched-out chads.) When your message was ready you dialed the receiving telex number (on a rotary dial) and ran the paper tape through. It cost by the minute and was expensive, so preparing the text in advance was important. Accurate typing was also important; you could backspace and delete errors by punching them out, then advancing the tape to retype. But when you ran the tape through, it would run through the overpunching in standby, and that took valuable time. It was usually better to simply start over and retype the whole thing without errors.

Ah, the memories.....

A co-worker forgot to shut off the machine after transmitting a telex to the UK late one afternoon. The next phone bill was several thousand dollars because the machine remained connected overnight. Fortunately for him, the accountant was able to persuade the phone company to delete the charge.

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 11:55 pm

/\/\/\ Ever send the phrase; "Your girl likes to hug and kiss, my girl likes to go like this (space)(space)(space)(space)(space)(space)(space)" on the telex? Laughing

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:04 am

Ahh, telex machines, those were the days.
My first job on leaving school in 1975 was as a telex op for a telex
forwarding agency. ours looked like this...

It was guaranteed that if you arrived at work on a rainy day with an
umbrella, someone would fill it with chad so once you walked outside and
put-up your umbrella you had a "snowstorm" of chad.

@Jose - I've never heard that phrase in relation to telex machines, does
it punch-out some sort of pretty pattern on the tape? I used to be able to
read the five-hole punch tape like i was reading a book, but its been a
long time and my memory is not so good.

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:15 am

/\/\/\ No, when the machine gets to the space (come to think of it, maybe it was the "return" instead of the space) the entire machine literally jumped up and down. Vigorously. Laughing

At least that's what happened on the antique that I used, at an oilfield company, back in the 80s. It looked just like the one Juan posted and shook like a washing machine filled with bricks.

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 3:43 am

Whenever my machine hit a deleted character on the tape it would jump and gyrate like a deranged drunk club dancer. Not spaces, but deletions. It just kept thumping away, stupidly, eating up time, until the new text finally came up. That's why I so very often would start over from scratch rather than to use a corrected tape. Telexing was a HUGE pain. But for the time, it was cutting edge. Instant, personal telegrams. I could send a message in my afternoon knowing that my boss in France would find it in his morning, and send a reply that would be awaiting me when I got to the office in my morning. What an invention!

But my office was a converted apartment, and on nights when I went to big dinners (I was in the wine business then) I often slept in the bedroom of the office rather than go home and risk arrest. I can't tell you how many times that damn telex woke me up -- a sudden KA-CHUNK! as it turned on, then the chatter of a telegraph hammering out a message on the roll of paper at 2AM. Ugh.

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 4:03 am

As you can see from the pic. i posted above our telex machines were quite solidly built and
therefore were fairly stable on the desks and didn't jump about but when you had a room of
25 machines all going at the same time they made quite a din.
As said, i worked for a telex forwarding agency, we used to take the overflow, mainly from banks, that their
own staff couldn't transmit/connect with during their normal office hours and send them out during the night.

@Juan - You really should have invested in a "tape splicing kit", just tear the tape at the start of an
error and stick it back together where you wanted to continue from, bit like film editing in the olden days.

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 5:36 am

Now you tell me! Laughing

30 years too late, but better late than never.

I can't even imagine a room full of telex machines. It must have been unbearable. Did you wear earplugs??

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 5:47 am

No earplugs, i would think health and safety wouldn't allow it these days.
We did have to have the radio on full blast too be able to hear it above the
noise of the telex machines. Smile

here · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 6:10 am

^^^^^
ah, memories

OK, can we start on punched cards now?
I fondly remember holding a large, properly ordered stack (for our massive financial model) out of the window - without any rubber bands round it - was a colleague's life work and he described in great detail (whilst trying not to beg) what he would do to my reproductive equipment if I let go. The world would have 4 less kids by now if I had!

PS love the sig

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 6:39 am

My first job was coding on Burroughs mainframes. There were a couple of dumb terminals (huge brown metal monsters with green screens that gave you static electric shocks) but the preferred way of coding was to fill in a "coding sheet"; basically a grid of squares 80 columns by 40 rows, in which you hand-wrote your code.

You would then take your coding sheets to the ladies (and they all were) in the "Punch Room" and they typed your code into the punching machines and these produced punched cards. So two or three days later you would pick up your cards, take them up to the ninth floor and these would be read into the mainframe and your code compiled.

You got your cards back and a printout of your compiler errors and then you had to type out corrections to your code on a hand punch machine, a smaller, manual version of the one the ladies in the punch room used that worked off an arcane combination of five or six keys.

I moved over to PC's and coding in C after a couple of years of that torture Smile

here · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 6:46 am

sunshine wrote:

You would then take your coding sheets to the ladies (and they all were) in the "Punch Room" and they typed your code into the punching machines

my god I've just gone pale & started shaking
I remember too well those 'ladies' a wild bunch of man eating young (they probably were, didn't seem so to us) "experienced" women. Frightened the life out of us young lads I tell you . . .

Quote:

I moved over to PC's and coding in C after a couple of years of that torture Smile

now we are talking, can we start talking about Xenix now? Laughing

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 11:28 am

you are all very old people, I can hardly remember not having a computer with internet connection Cool

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:59 pm

Strolling down memory lane, does anyone remember the IBM mag card system?

Or the stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine ?

Or the spirit duplicator also referred to as a Ditto machine? We loved the tests the teachers printed those with as we would sit and smell the purple ditto fluid on the freshly printed tests.

Jim The last 2 were way before photocopy machines and the first was way before computers, but they made our office life much easier.

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 4:03 pm

I worked with an IBM mag card system in the late 70s; what a wonder! I could type things and they would be recorded for automatic retyping or even correcting. Wow. But it was way too expensive for me to consider when I set up my own office for a new job. I had to stretch to get a new Selectric.

And the intoxicating smell of a fresh mimeograph.... My first experience with mind-altering drugs. Laughing

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 5:10 pm

Lol all this convo from a harddrive image awesome, but i remeber our teachers at school using a ditto machine though in england it was called a banding machine, but the smell of fresh chemicals was very nice as a student Laughing