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USN hard drives. The midseventies SHARE survey


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Weird. My fire control systems (MK88-2 and MK98-0) had a pair of IBM drives in them, and when the disk went below the speed where the air bearing could be maintained, the heads unloaded and were pulled out of the pack.

The midseventies SHARE survey 76
and might run on the 85, 75, some possibility in 65 (i.e. the 65 tended to have one or two channels that you could attach 2301 drum ... which read-wrote...

Elsethread there's a discussion of life cycles... The USN kept this damn drive in service from the mid 60's to early 90's. At the peak, between Strategic Missile Fire Control and NTDS, they had something north of a thousand drives in service. (It had the advantage from the Navy's point of view that the beast could be stripped down to parade rest and rebuilt at sea.)

The midseventies SHARE survey 75
os-360 had another kind of failure mode .. the 1052-7 used as operator consoles on most 360 machines ... and if the 1052-7 ran out of paper, an intervention required would...

During the draw down in the late 80's, we (the MK98-0 community) got a metric buttload of spares as NTDS and MK88 equipped ships and boats were taken out of service. Two years later, in their infinite wisdom, they scrapped all the remaining installations (and all those spares) for more modern PC type hard drives... But did they chose the drive that was already slated for the0's successor? No. For 12 installations, they chose a completely *different* drive, knowing full well that 98-0 would be replaced with 98-1 within a decade.

Someday I've got to dig into my notes and see if I can find the IBM model number for that sucker and swap horror stories here. (The controller was a custom job by Generous Electric.) It has to be the most Rube Goldberg contraption in the universe.

D. -- Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings. Oct 5th, 2004 JDL


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The midseventies SHARE survey 75

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The midseventies SHARE survey 73