The midseventies SHARE survey 73

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:57:54 -0800, glen herrmannsfeldt

I was a SysProg at a company in Denver that was an "early adopter" (circa. 1971) of the Itel drives on a Sys-360 -- a Mod 50 in our case. IIRC, it took some source code changes in IOS (IECIOS). ((It 'twas "Open", "Proprietary" IBM OS-360 source code in those days on DLIB01.))

The 7330's worked "OK" -- for selected definitions of OK.

The most outstanding 'incident' that I can remember occurred as follows: The console operator called into the Sysprog Pen and complain that the system was slowing down. "Ya, right!", we said. I wandered into the computer room and walked up to the console and entered a "$DA". It took nearly a minute before it listed all the active jobs (6-7) and presented a new prompt! I looked at the operator and he said, "It was a little faster just before you came in." I looked at the blinken lights on the face of the Mod 50 and the WAIT light was burning fairly brightly. Huh! I turned around and looked absently out across the string of 7330's next to us and started scratching my head. It finally dawned on me that I could actually read the label on SYSRES as it was spinning!

Well, "spinning" was not the right word.

"Slowly rotating" was more accurate!

I open the front cover of that 7330 unit and saw the drive belt had flipped off the motor pulley.

That was the s l o w e s t head crash I ever saw.

Acutally, the disk pack did not seem to be damaged. But, we backed it up, and swapped out both the disk pack and the 7330 unit for Itel to replace all the heads.

Jonesy -- First System Reset-Start-Start in 1966 -- Marvin L Jones jonz W3DHJ linux 7,703' -- 2,345m config.com DM68mn SK