On 10/25/18 11:11 AM, Mike Wright wrote: > On 10/25/18 10:47 AM, Rick Stevens wrote: > <snip/> >> BTW, I used to work for Micropolis back in the 70's. I was employee >> 22 there. Yes, I'm an old fart. > > My first hard drive was a Micropolis 8" 20MB sounded like a jet engine > while it was ramping up to speed. Needed a separate Xebec?? controller > between the drive and mobo. If, big if, my memory serves me correctly, > set me back about 2 grand. Oh, my! One of the first "Project Alabama" drives we created. That was the internal name we used for the hard drive side of things. IBM used "Project Winchester", which is why that technology became known as "Winchester drives" (IBM had a lot more name recognition than we did). And your memory is pretty good. The actual list price was $1795. I remember building the clean room and helping design the "pancake" motor we developed for Alabama. The cool bit was using the back EMF off the motor to retract and park the heads on power down. One of the first uses of "regenerative braking" now so common to electric cars. Something a lot of people don't know about Micropolis...two of the founders (Stuart Mabon and Eric Dunstan) also founded Pertec (yes, the big 9-track tape drive people) and left there to start Micropolis. Interesting pair, those guys. Stu was Scottish, had a degree in nuclear physics and was very quiet and retiring. Eric was a Brit from Yorkshire, had degree in electronics (worked a lot with servo systems) and very loud and brash. Both really, REALLY smart chaps. In some ways, they resembled Jobs and the Woz (Steve Wozniak) at Apple. Two very different types of guys working together. > From one OF to another :D Geeze! You'd think we were dying off or something! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - "People tell me I look at the dark side. That's not true. I have - - the heart of a small boy......in a jar right here on my desk." - - -- Stephen King - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
