Gary Kjos
garykjos at gmail.com
Wed Mar 21 10:37:44 CDT 2007
Close John. These were IBM 2314's 29Mb per drive.11 platters, 20 heads. We had four drives but all of our stuff was set up to use only 3 because one was often broken ;-) They had a plug thing in the front as I recall that you could change which was which by changing the plug from one to another. One drive was for the Operating system and our programs, the other two had the data files and workspaces for sorting etc. Wikipedia has a nice description of them here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_IBM_disk_storage#IBM_2314 We got to know our Field Engineers very well. They were there every week to do preventive maintenance and there were many weeks when they were there almost every day for something or another. I remember one time when we had been down for a while and there were about 4 FE's there working on the drives, our company president came in and was trying to pressure them to get it fixed faster and asked "so how long is it going to be down?" and the senior FE replied that "if we knew what was the matter it would already be fixed" The president went off in a huff and they had it fixed an hour or so later and we were off and running. Everybody in the room was happy to see the president storm off in a rage as we all thought him a blow-hard. Ah, the good old days. ;-) GK On 3/21/07, JWColby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote: > >In those days, disks on mainframes were removable from the drives > themselves which were about the size of a washing machine. The disk packs > were about the diameter of a LP record and the ones we used were about 8 > inches tall. > > Must have been one of the old IBM hard disk cabinets. It had drawers that > you could pull out and then unlock and remove the disk packs. Those were 80 > mb packs if memory serves me. Something like 8 platters, heads on each > side, hydraulically actuated heads. > > In 1972/73 I was trained by the USN to fix that disk drive system. > > John W. Colby > Colby Consulting > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com > [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gary Kjos > Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 10:37 AM > To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving > Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: But only Partly > > Ouch. We used to do Disaster Recovery Firedrills back in my early mainframe > days when I was a computer operator. We had an arrangement with another > local company that had a similar hardware configuration to ours that we were > backup sites for each other. In those days, disks on mainframes were > removable from the drives themselves which were about the size of a washing > machine. The disk packs were about the diameter of a LP record and the ones > we used were about 8 inches tall. > We would take our disks or maybe it was just backup tapes over to this other > company and they would let us use their system over night and we would > attempt to run our orders and print the picking documents. Since the > hardware configuration was slightly different we had different execution job > control that referenced the hardware they had there. I was mostly just along > to carry stuff in the early days but later on I was called on to run the > stuff too. When fixed hard drives and online terminals came along in about > 1980 that ceased to be an option anymore as we would have had to actually > overwrite their files on the disk or they would have needed enough empty > space for us to load our stuff on and as disk was failrly expensive in those > days that wasn't a viable option. So instead we concentrated on getting > better covereage from our hardware maintenance group. And we used our backup > tapes pretty often when stuff got corrupted and had daily, weekly and > monthly full backups for an entire year of generations, so we were really > quite secure and fully tested backup wise. Noplace I have worked since has > had anywhere near that level of backup. But hardware failed a lot more then > than it does now too, so we get lulled into a sense of security that drives > don't fail. But in this case it wasn't even a drive failure that caused it, > it was a human mistake. > > We had an occurance of the "can't read the backups" here a while back. > It was a very bad thing. There had been a change to the backup software > itself and maybe the hardware too. I don't remember exactly what the end > result was as far as data loss - don't think we lost anything - but we were > down for an entire day - no sales entered. > Order takers had to write orders down on paper to be entered later. I think > our website still took orders as it's seperate but there were no > confirmations etc. It wasn't a total loss as some of that business came to > us in the following days, but some of those orders went to other sellers > instead of us and perhaps some of those customers went away disgruntled too. > > GK > > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > -- Gary Kjos garykjos at gmail.com