[thechat] oh yeah here it is "ADVENTURE"
Hassan Schroeder
hassan at webtuitive.com
Mon Sep 24 14:36:56 CDT 2007
Luther, Ron wrote:
> IIRC, the seams on the housing were even cheesier than on the 8". Lots
> of nice gaps to gather dust. Heck, smoke too! This was back when folks
> could smoke at their desks
Yeah, those were the days :-)
> Ah! Gotcha! The 12" drive I came across was on a machine I was using
> as a dumb terminal in the early 80s. I have no idea who the
> manufacturer was. (My guess would be Western Electric, but that's only
> because most of the dumb terminals at the phone company where I was
> working were made 'internally' at Western.)
Ah, if we're talking about "the phone company", all bets are off --
$DEITY only knows what kind of wierd proprietary stuff they've done
over the years (eons!).
> * There was a machine with dual 8" floppy drives. I *think* that one
> had an acoustic modem ... That awful black suction-cuppy thing you tried
> to get the telephone handset to stick into?
Oh, man. I used to maintain the telecom testing boxes for the IBM
field engineering office in San Francisco. And there were still
businesses using dial-up with acoustic modems then. Since there were
no modular phone jacks, the only alternative was to hook the modem
wires directly to the AT&T-supplied termination point on the wall.
I had to give the customer a screwdriver and tell him or her which
wire went where, because I wasn't allowed to touch AT&T equipment.
Some customers were just too freaked to mess with it.
All you youngsters probably have a hard time believing that :-)
> * And there was one machine with a 12" floppy drive. Don't remember
> much about it. I think it had a matte black 'pebbly' finish
That certainly says "old" -- but I can guarantee that I *never*
saw any IBM equipment with a floppy drive from that design era;
boxes were all very clean/euro-industrial by the early/mid 70s.
But look for the floppy stash -- we want confirmation!
--
Hassan Schroeder ----------------------------- hassan at webtuitive.com
Webtuitive Design === (+1) 408-938-0567 === http://webtuitive.com
dream. code.
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