- That wasn't my experience. I recommend following up with them.
- Think they are swamped. I asked about 1 week ago and still nothing.
- Seconded. On the orange site you can un vote something. That might not be part of the public version of ARC that runs these kinds of sites. The only upvotes I regret are the misguided or spam posts that I upvote by accident. Alas, this feature may not be in the power of our benevolent host.
I try to give everything I see in “new” an upvote so so that it makes the front page. From there the decay function if it’s not interesting.
- If you work in computers and you don’t drink. Start.
- Kyrocera... there is a name I have not heard in a long while!
We had off and on luck with those. I worked for a CAD reseller / consultancy firm at the time. Did a lot of hardware, systems engineering type work and we were always looking for high performance deals.
The Seagate 10K drives were bread and butter, but it often made sense to try other drives for cost, size, and sometimes availability reasons.
- Right?
I was a smoker at the time. Yeah, knocked one back the instant the task was done.
- How to build a versino for the Coco is in this place: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-hardware/tree/master/...
I am amazed at how this has expanded to give new connectivity life to all these amazing 8bit machines
- Also please check out IRATA.ONLINE, which is a modern-day live PLATO system that you can connect to with vintage hardware.
- It’s like PATH but for regular files. Like PATH you need to be sensitive to the order as it stops once it finds the file it’s searching for
- Using DOS since '88. Never figured out what the hell APPEND was for until 2024.
- Jeeeezus. I broke out in a cold sweat reading this. Need a cigarette now. Nothing pushes my stress like failing drives ….
- The SCSI Seagate Cheetah was amazing!
Used the crap out of those, mostly in SGI workstations, which delivered nearly 100 percent of what the drive could do. Loved those disks, hated the noise!
They did run hot. We used to put them in these little SCSI boxes. Each box had a fan. As long as that fan operated, life was good.
One day, while in the server room, we heard the death whine! A Cheetah was dying a heat death in its box!
The peeps in there wanted to shut it down, and I said no way! Get the data off of it RIGHT NOW.
And get me dry ice stat!
A copy began as soon as we could mount secondary storage, and it began!
I insulated the drive with a towel and baggie I found, and was about to apply the ice when a cord got bumped!
Bssssssuuuurclunk!
Shit.
This drive needs to spin one more time or we are screwed. Turns out the company data on that drive was important, as in we don't have jobs and why did the backup not work, OH MY GOD, type important!
Got it, check!
I buried the drive in the dry ice, got secondary storage lined up and ready, applied power and nothing.
Shit, shit, oh shit!
Ok, give it 5.5 volts and try again! Nothing. Give it 6! Seven! It whined and moved a little.
Ok, back to 6, and I took the "do not remove" cover off and nudged the platters as the power was applied and it spun up!
Yes! Hell yes!
I slapped the cover back on, tightened just two screws and buried the screaming drive in the ice and time to copy?
FIVE LONG MINUTES
We got the data. That drive almost died twice, and I would pick it up gently, change orientation, until it got quieter, and then just freeze in place, holding it.
Right after I heard, "copy complete', I heard and felt a thunk as the thing tried to leap out of my hand!
It locked solid.
Whew!
Was an intense 5 minutes. And I got kudos for mooching a few more minutes out of what should have been a dead drive.
- Oh, the memories this brings back .. painful .. sad .. dreadful memories .. ;)
- dBASE is still a file format that is used, Microsoft Access files not so much.
- I have in my collection an Oric Atmos system, which was used for 40 years as the database and logging system for a motorbike club, member records, logs of fuel from the club tanks, leave/arrival times, and so on ..
It was finally retired and replaced with an Android app - but I have it preserved in my archives, disks and all (minus the data), for display some day .. with demo data, though, still an awesome little system, chugging away ..
- Thanks for posting - the whole archive is a nicely curated treasure trove.
- I know the donut shop using older equipment - but this is also a fun story for the site
- I was just being funny. I have no doubt these are real C64's doing gods work for a donut shop
- I wonder how they do things like tax filings etc. Doesn't that have to be in some standard data format? Probably a post-process done on a regular PC with the data somehow grabbed from the C64...?
- It looks like there’s 2 modern PSUs sitting between them so they’re probably OG.
- That’s a great example of “the Commodore keeping up with you”!
- This is something fun I will try to read during the holiday season. A related wealth of information on Plato: http://platohistory.org/
Hopefully the webmaster will get a LetsEncrypt cert soon as that may turn off a lot of visitors
- Folks interested in PLATO should read Brian Dear's definitive tome: The Friendly Orange Glow.
- Maybe its a retro case and its Raspberry Pi filling inside. Seriously, if it works and its not core to your business then stick with it. It's air-gapped so its not like there is a security concern with the old system.
- ok lol I once screwed a HDD because I mistyped some numbers at debug for lowlevel format :)
- Fun. I dont know what geography this was for, but some drives I didnt recall seeing that were famous (to me at least) not mentioned:
- Seagate ST-238 - the 30mb RLL version of the ST-225
- Seagate ST-251 - the 40mb MFM
- Seagate ST-4096 - full height 80mb
I also didn't see Rhodime or Kyrocera.
I remember the first time I opened a Compaq machine with a Conner peripherals IDE drive. I was baffled. What the hell is this ? Definitely wasn't going to initialize that with Debug: G=C800:5. The classic way to low level most MFM drivers in the era. There was no google to put in a part number to get details on.
- This is unrelated to retrocomputing or gaming.
- Since I can't see any connection to the retrocomputing/gaming goal of this site I have killed this submission.
- Is this connected with retrocomputing or gaming in some way?
- Analogue Pocket
- More