| Phil Payne 2006-09-24, 6:58 pm |
| > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/...3014/html/1.stm
That's a posed publicity shot - the RAMAC shipped in a kind of quilted
grey nylon blanket.
We thought they were quite neat, but they were sods to programme and
had almost no backup capability. I much preferred the 1401, but we
didn't get any discs with ours.
I didn't really get to grips with discs until we got our 360/30s and
360/50s in 1967. It was fun because you could see the real structure
of data on the disc (Count-Key-Data format) and write your own channel
programmes to make the things really sing.
The whole of Barclaycard at that time ran on a machine with the
processing power of a wristwatch and a storage capacity 1/32768th of my
MP3 player - and it cost several million quid. The mainfile was 42
reels of 10" tape, updated copy-to-copy in a 2 1/2 hour processing run.
Happy days? Nah - the kit was so unreliable that the run failed
because of hardware errors roughly once a week. Start over. They
don't remember that, do they? The print run, after a successful update,
took four hours on six printers doing 1,200 lines a minute. We used
about 1/6 tonne of paper each night.
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