New Hard drive?

Is that an early black box flight recorder ?

No I don't think so.

Howard has already told us what it is in his post ...

 ... a 5MB hard drive is being lifted onto an aircraft.

ATB from George

It was meant to be a light hearted comment George !

I can read !!

Actually it's the prototype unitiserve back in the day when 5mb was the dogs b******s.

Qute !

Excellent photo. I started off in IT many years ago when 5mg disks were the size of a shoebox and 64k memory cards were the norm (and I don't consider myself that old !).

I wish I had taken pictures of all the kit I worked on.

... and that picture reminds me of this picture. Not IT related but looks similarly precarious.

To reminisc on old computer times, when I started at college and took computing, we had to produce punch cards to feed data into the system. Took me a week to write a programme onthese cards and the output was to read the outside air tEmp. So 1 week producing punch cards and when fed in, all I get back was a dot matrix print stating 19degrees.

How disappointing

Nice pic!

First computer we had in the telephone exchange ( crossbar) was used for fault analysis used "Phoenix"? drives 17" metal discs, they were clamped in side a plastic box, swapped over weekly and kept separate for security.

I was still in high school (16 yrs old) when I first wrote a program that had to be "loaded" on punch cards.  There was an old (even at the time) IBM something where you had to load the "compiler deck" in front of your program deck, as the IBM did not have storage or memory to save the compiler;you had to load it in each time!

Then shortly thereafter I started programing in HP Basic on a tty terminal that connected via an acoustic coupler and telephone handset to an HP Timeshare computer.  To save our programs, we 'printed' them out onto punch tape.

Gee I feel old

When I was an undergrad, we had to either punch or hand-mark a deck of cards. We then took them to the high priests of computing at the computer centre. They wore white lab-coats and worked from an elevated counter with an air of superiority seldom matched today. Without making eye contact we deferentially handed them the cards and retreated backwards on our hands and knees keeping our foreheads touching the floor. Only when we were out of the building was it acceptable to stand and walk.

A week-or-so later we would go to the pigeon-holes to retrieved our line-printed (on huge zig-zag paper, alternating bands of light green and white and with the index holes along the edges) output. Always disappointing to find out that your 1000-card program had crashed on the third card because you forgot a comma or space, and that you had to do it all over again.

those were the days eh Winky !