SwiftOnSecurityHistory in pics: Testing prototype Roomba's in 1982. It would take two decades until they could be made small enough to clean under a couch.
Glyph@SwiftOnSecurity looks like they were testing it to validate its interaction with washing machines in this picture for some reason?
Final Round Player 😷🇪🇺🍸@glyph @SwiftOnSecurity TFW when you wake from a mid-80s tech nightmare. You went to change the disk pack in the top loading hard drive for the S370 IBM. And it was full of water. The overnight banking reconciliation run would have to wait.
BobbingAlong
Alan Houser ☻␆@squareflair @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity
From the back of my mind. Deep in my dreams.
@squareflair @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity That was the dream world nightmare. The Real World nightmare IRL was the operator who couldn't work out why a disk pack wouldn't mount. So he took it out and tried it in the next drive. And then the next one. And now he had one pack trashed with a head crash and three drives with trashed disk heads.
ISTR they were 5Mb drives, but might have been 10Mb.
The year after that I had more disk space in my IBM PC XT than the mainframe had in one of those drives.
Christopher Hunter
Mark@squareflair @jbond @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity A number of years ago I happened to be moving a data center my company acquired. I was amazed to find water lines coming up through the raised flooring. Turns out there was a line of IBM mainframes that were water cooled. As in literal water pipes going directly into the box. I don’t know if that might be the case here, but it’s one possibility.
gnarlygeek@MarkAB @squareflair @jbond @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity Some Cray and Control Data mainframes of the era also had water cooling. It was a little unnerving as a programmer to get a tour in the datacenter and see the interior of a CDC 6600 with the water circulating and multiple oscilloscopes connected while the system was running. We're now coming full circle in cooling large systems. FYI, tape and disk drives, and PDU's usually took up more spaces than the processors.
@gnarlygeek @squareflair @jbond @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity I worked with DEC VAX and Burroughs/Unisys, all air cooled as far as I know. And that was back in the 80’s and early 90’s. I was the CFO of a small DP company and wore a lot of hats since I did the buying/selling/leasing of the equipment and facilities. We grew a lot and by the time server farms became a thing they wouldn’t let me play with their toys any more.
Jeff Morris ZA@MarkAB @gnarlygeek @squareflair @jbond @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity I wrote software for B6700, B6900 and ClearPath monsters.
@jeffZA @gnarlygeek @squareflair @jbond @glyph @SwiftOnSecurity I think the last Unisys system I had any involvement with was a ClearPath install about 20 years ago. Once the company started building mega data centers and consolidating I went back to being a pure finance guy. You don’t get much of a feel for the hardware when all you see is the Fixed Asset Request.