Re: Rewriting SSA. Is This A Chance For GNU/Linux?

On 4/3/25 8:16 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Thu, 3 Apr 2025 16:38:57 -0400, c186282 wrote:
 

    The 360/370 boxes WERE really popular, so I'm gonna GUESS there's a
    least one or two still chugging away. Maint cost would be insane
    these days ... but you can kinda bury that in the budget while new
    hardware stands out more and in more places.

 I'm not sure there are any little old ladies left to knit magnetic core.

   Outsource to Vietnam   :-)

The tape drives were fragile when new but they and the disk drives the
size of a washing machine may have been replaced over the years. My mother
had a plastic thing to keep layer cakes fresh that I was always reminded
of by the 2311's removable media.

   They DID kinda look like that !
   But, like in the old movies, I *do* remember the
   banks of tape units, the reels spinning back and
   forth. Hideous lookup/xfer rates but, for a time,
   they WERE "leading edge".
   And look REALLY cool in sci-fi movies !
   Write yer step by step by step batch jobs ...

https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/groups/ibm-1311-2311.pdf
 7.5 MB!!! What can you ever use that much storage for?  I bought a microSD
last week for another RPi project. It's getting hard to find them less
than 64 GB.

   Actually it's getting hard to find under 128gb lately - IF
   you can get 'em they may actually be MORE expensive than
   the larger units.
   The tariffs may freeze things for awhile ...
   My first 'PC' hard drive was 10 MB ! What INCREDIBLE
   capacity and speed !!! Full-height Rodime - you could
   kill someone if you hit 'em in the head with the
   heavy thing .......
   Today's money ... about $6000us.
   MFM ... or just 'FM' - can't remember.