[thechat] oh yeah here it is "ADVENTURE"

[Hassan Schroeder]

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.