[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>

    > Regarding the Winchester code name, I've argued about this with Clem
    > before.  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
    > disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia and
    > my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.

And you believe anything in Wikipedia? If so, I have a bridge to sell you! :-)

But, in this case, it's correct. According to "IBM's 360 and Early 370
Computers" (Pugh, Johnson and Palmer - a very good book, BTW), pg. 507, the
first Winchester was the 3340. The confusion comes from the fact that it had
two spindles, each of 30MB capacity, making it a so-called "30-30" system -
that being the name of Winchester's rifle.

     Noel

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 at  8:06:12 -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
>
>> Regarding the Winchester code name, I've argued about this with Clem
>> before.  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
>> disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia and
>> my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.
>
> And you believe anything in Wikipedia?

Yes, most things, especially if they match my preconceived notions.

To be fair, Wikipedia is relatively accurate.  And if you find
something wrong in it and don't fix it, you have only yourself to
blame.

> If so, I have a bridge to sell you! :-)

Hey, that's my line ("Porting UNIX Software", page 9).

> But, in this case, it's correct. According to "IBM's 360 and Early
> 370 Computers" (Pugh, Johnson and Palmer - a very good book, BTW),
> pg. 507, the first Winchester was the 3340. The confusion comes from
> the fact that it had two spindles, each of 30MB capacity, making it
> a so-called "30-30" system - that being the name of Winchester's
> rifle.

There are competing stories about why it was called "Winchester".
Another I have heard was that it was developed at IBM's facility in
Winchester Boulevard in Campbell CA.  But the Wikipedia article only
gives the 30/30 version, so I suppose it must be right :-)

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 at  8:06:12 -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
 |>> From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
 |>
 |>> Regarding the Winchester code name, I've argued about this with Clem
 |>> before.  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
 |>> disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia and
 |>> my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.
 |>
 |> And you believe anything in Wikipedia?
 |
 |Yes, most things, especially if they match my preconceived notions.
 |
 |To be fair, Wikipedia is relatively accurate.  And if you find
 |something wrong in it and don't fix it, you have only yourself to
 |blame.

It is not that easy.  For example there are people which "sit"
there for a long time.  Not all of them are good.  For example
i saw an absolutely inacceptible abstract on the jubilee of the
battle of the somme in german wikipedia, which would have been
correct only if russians lifes have not the same value than those
of others.  My own account is blacklisted because of the IP range
my reseller uses, and there are strange people here which do not
only soil nature, poison animals and drive races with their BMWs,
but they seem to soil Wikipedia, too.  (I never did so!)

Unfortunately the entire address range is blocked, i complained
but logging in with password is impossible.  (Seems to be the same
problem that Zoulas' blacklist daemon fixes so nicely by patching
daemons which know what a connection is about, with shell hooks
which then can manage the firewall.  Much, much better than having
a script iterating over textual server logs periodically.)
I could create a SSH tunnel to my server and connect from there,
though.  I have this option now.  So i could fix the german
wikipedia entries on the MBOX format etc., which seem to have been
written to prompt someone who cares and fixes the false.

On the other hand the german desk of the chemicals department have
even won a price.  (You know, german and chemicals is a love
story: nitrogen fertilizer, mustard gas, neonicotinoids ...  The
americans are not even to blame for monsanto anymore!)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2018, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:

> |To be fair, Wikipedia is relatively accurate.  And if you find 
> |something wrong in it and don't fix it, you have only yourself to 
> |blame.
>
> It is not that easy.  For example there are people which "sit"
> there for a long time.  Not all of them are good.  [...]

Wikipedia simply cannot be trusted (as if it ever could).

You will get some imbecile who thinks that they "own" that topic, and when 
you challenge said moron because you happen to have personal information 
i.e. you were *there* at the time then the coward will simply block you.

Wikipedia is only as accurate as the last idiot who updated it.

-- 
Dave Horsfall BSc DTM (VK2KFU) -- FuglySoft -- Gosford IT -- Unix/C/Perl (AbW)
People who fail to / understand security / surely will suffer. (tks: RichardM)

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
 |On Wed, 25 Apr 2018, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |
 |>|To be fair, Wikipedia is relatively accurate.  And if you find 
 |>|something wrong in it and don't fix it, you have only yourself to 
 |>|blame.
 |>
 |> It is not that easy.  For example there are people which "sit"
 |> there for a long time.  Not all of them are good.  [...]
 |
 |Wikipedia simply cannot be trusted (as if it ever could).
 |
 |You will get some imbecile who thinks that they "own" that topic, and when 
 |you challenge said moron because you happen to have personal information 
 |i.e. you were *there* at the time then the coward will simply block you.
 |
 |Wikipedia is only as accurate as the last idiot who updated it.

Unfortunately all reference texts like Encyclopedia Britannica now
only exist in online versions; the Encyclopedia Britannica was one
of the first i think (according to [1] computer mouse is even as
old as 1963-64!), the "Fischer Weltalmanach" the last i know of;
mourning of loss in German at [2], titled "A Victim on the Altar
of Availability"; me too: when i was young it was of value to have
an entire cupboard of editorially edited general knowledge at
home.

  [1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Douglas-Engelbart
  [2] https://derstandard.at/2000077097204/Fischer-Weltalmanach-Ein-Opfer-auf-dem-Altar-der-Verfuegbarkeit

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-27 15:15, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> Wikipedia is only as accurate as the last idiot who updated it.

One should always question authority, nonetheless in many areas
wikipedia is excellent.  I get more out of slowly and carefully reading
a wikipedia maths article than I ever got out of sitting through a
university lecture.  I can say the same about botany articles.

I guess that's because idiots aren't drawn to these fields in large
numbers.

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Wesley Parish]

wikipedia and politics is a bad mixture. wikipedia and religion is a
bad mixture. wikipedia and ego is a bad mixture.

Imagine wikipedia articles edited and counteredited by the Newton
crowd and the Leibnitz crowd during that long dispute over who had had
priority, who had borrowed, who had stolen, who had ... (censored)
(censored) (censored) ....

Subjects where there is plentiful knowledge, even if it is obscure -
Calculus, Old English, the structure of the Unix file system, Lewis
Carroll's poem the Jabberwocky, the shape of the British constitution
and its offshoots, etc - they tend to reproduce the best known data.
On other matters, it can be decidedly iffy.

Wesley Parish

On 4/28/18, Ian Zimmerman <itz at very.loosely.org> wrote:
> On 2018-04-27 15:15, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>
>> Wikipedia is only as accurate as the last idiot who updated it.
>
> One should always question authority, nonetheless in many areas
> wikipedia is excellent.  I get more out of slowly and carefully reading
> a wikipedia maths article than I ever got out of sitting through a
> university lecture.  I can say the same about botany articles.
>
> I guess that's because idiots aren't drawn to these fields in large
> numbers.
>
> --
> Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
> if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
> To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
> which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.
>

[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Dan Cross]

That's a bit different. It's possible that some early Unix machines had
actual drum devices for storage or swap (did any of them?), but the
/dev/drum device is what Clem says it was.

It's funny, I just happened across this a couple of days ago when I went
looking for the `hier.7` man page from 4.4BSD-Lite2:

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=7&manpath=4.4BSD+Lite2&arch=default&format=html

It refers to this:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=drum&sektion=4&apropos=0&manpath=4.4BSD+Lite2

The claim is that it came from 3.0BSD. Why was it called drum? I imagine
that's historical license coupled with grad student imagination, but I'm
curious if it has origin in actual hardware used at UC Berkeley. Clem, that
was roughly your era, was it not?

        - Dan C.


On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 12:00 PM, David Collantes <david at collantes.us>
wrote:

> I found a Wikipedia[0] entry for it.
>
> [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
> <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory?wprov=sfti1>
>
> --
> David Collantes
> +1-407-484-7171
>
> On Apr 20, 2018, at 11:02, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
>
> I am sure I remember a machine which had this (which would have been
> running a BSD 4.2 port).  Is my memory right, and what was it for
> (something related to swap?)?
>
> It is stupidly hard to search for (or, alternatively, there are just no
> hits and the memory is false).
>
> --tim
>
>
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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Dan Cross wrote:
> Why was it called drum? I imagine that's historical license coupled
> with grad student imagination, but I'm curious if it has origin in
> actual hardware used at UC Berkeley. Clem, that was roughly your era,
> was it not?

Seems like the Project Genie 940 at UCB had a drum.  Maybe someone
wanted to carry the tradition forward.

[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Clem Cole]

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On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 1:01 PM, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:

> Dan Cross wrote:
> > Why was it called drum? I imagine that's historical license coupled
> > with grad student imagination, but I'm curious if it has origin in
> > actual hardware used at UC Berkeley. Clem, that was roughly your era,
> > was it not?
>
> Seems like the Project Genie 940 at UCB had a drum.  Maybe someone
> wanted to carry the tradition forward.


​The 'someone' in all of this was Bill Joy (wnj).​  As I said, in those
days, all of us knew of older systems that used 'paging drums' - it was
pretty common term for the hunk-a-storage that the system dedicated to be
available to page itself.   it really is just like the fact that by the
time of the VAX, DEC was not shipping core memories at all (and few 11's
shipped with core either as the thanks to Moore's law, the price of
semiconductor memory had dropped), so calling the main system memory 'core'
was obsolete.   Thus, the UNIX term 'core dump' was really meaningless.
[In fact, Magic, the OS for the Tektronix Magnolia Machine has 'mos dump'
files - because I did that].

But the term 'core file' stuck, tools knew about, as did the programmers.
 The difference is that todays systems from Windows to UNIX flavors stopped
needed a dedicated swapping or paging space and instead was taught to just
use empty FS blocks.  So today's hacker has grown up without really knowing
what /dev/swap or /dev/drum was all about -- in fact that was exactly the
question that started this thread.

On the other hand, we still 'dump core' and use the core files for
debugging.  So, while the term 'drum' lost its meaning, 'core file' - might
be considered 'quaint' by todays hacker, it still has meaning.

Clem

ᐧ
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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 22 Apr 2018, at 18:37, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> But the term 'core file' stuck, tools knew about, as did the programmers.   The difference is that todays systems from Windows to UNIX flavors stopped needed a dedicated swapping or paging space and instead was taught to just use empty FS blocks.  So today's hacker has grown up without really knowing what /dev/swap or /dev/drum was all about -- in fact that was exactly the question that started this thread. 

Well, I had known but forgotten in fact.  There's also a distinction between whether a system swaps/pages onto a dedicated device and whether it exposes that device by some special name in /dev.  Solaris does (or did until fairly recently: I don't remember what the ZFSy systems do) generally use one or more special devices (not usually whole disks but they could be, and it could swap on files but not, I assume, write crash dumps to them) but I'm pretty sure they were not exposed as /dev/<somethng> other than the name they would already have in /dev/(r)dsk.
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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Ron Natalie]

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Ø  Well, I had known but forgotten in fact.  There's also a distinction
between whether a system swaps/pages onto a dedicated device and whether it
exposes that device by some special name in /dev.  

 

I’m pretty sure that swapping in V6 took place to a major/minor number
configured at kernel build time.   You could create a dev node for the swap
device, but it wasn’t used for the actual swapping.

 

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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 1:30 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> Ø  Well, I had known but forgotten in fact.  There's also a distinction
> between whether a system swaps/pages onto a dedicated device and whether it
> exposes that device by some special name in /dev.
>
>
>
> I’m pretty sure that swapping in V6 took place to a major/minor number
> configured at kernel build time.   You could create a dev node for the swap
> device, but it wasn’t used for the actual swapping.
>

​Exactly...   For instance an RK04 was less that 5K blocks (4620 or some
such - I've forgotten the actually amount).  The disk was mkfs'ed to the
first 4K and the left over was give to the swap system.   By the time of
4.X, the RP06 was 'partitioned' into 'rings' (some overlapping).  The 'a'
partition was root, the 'b' was swap and one fo the others was the rest.
Later the 'c' was a short form for copying the entire disk.

What /dev/drum did was allow to cobble up those hunks of reserved space and
view them as a single device.   I've forgotten what user space programs
used it, probably some of the tools like ps, vmstat *etc*.   You'd have to
look that the sources.​

>
>
>
ᐧ
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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Grant Taylor]

On 04/23/2018 11:51 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> By the time of 4.X, the RP06 was 'partitioned' into 'rings' (some 
> overlapping).  The 'a' partition was root, the 'b' was swap and one fo 
> the others was the rest.  Later the 'c' was a short form for copying 
> the entire disk.

I had always wondered where Solaris (SunOS) got it's use of the 
different slices, including the slice that was the entire disk from.

Now I'm guessing Solaris got it from SunOS which got it from 4.x BSD.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 4:47 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> wrote:

> On 04/23/2018 11:51 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>> By the time of 4.X, the RP06 was 'partitioned' into 'rings' (some
>> overlapping).  The 'a' partition was root, the 'b' was swap and one fo the
>> others was the rest.  Later the 'c' was a short form for copying the entire
>> disk.
>>
>
> I had always wondered where Solaris (SunOS) got it's use of the different
> slices, including the slice that was the entire disk from.
>
> Now I'm guessing Solaris got it from SunOS which got it from 4.x BSD

​It was not BSD - it was research.  It may have been in 6th, but it was
definitely in 7th.  Cut/pasted from the V7 PDP-11 rp(4) man page:

*NAME*

rp − RP-11/RP03 moving-head disk

*DESCRIPTION*

The files rp0 ... rp7 refer to sections of RP disk drive 0. The files rp8
... rp15 refer to drive 1 etc. This

allows a large disk to be broken up into more manageable pieces.

The origin and size of the pseudo-disks on each drive are as follows:

disk start length

0 0 81000

1 0 5000

2 5000 2000

3 7000 74000

4-7 unassigned

Thus rp0 covers the whole drive, while rp1, rp2, rp3 can serve usefully as
a root, swap, and mounted user

file system respectively.

The rp files access the disk via the system’s normal buffering mechanism
and may be read and written

without regard to physical disk records. There is also a ‘raw’ interface
which provides for direct transmission

between the disk and the user’s read or write buffer. A single read or
write call results in exactly one

I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more efficient when
many words are transmitted. The

names of the raw RP files begin with rrp and end with a number which
selects the same disk section as the

corresponding rp file.

In raw I/O the buffer must begin on a word boundary.​

ᐧ
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[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Dan Mick]

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On 04/23/2018 02:06 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 4:47 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS
> <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 04/23/2018 11:51 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> 
>         By the time of 4.X, the RP06 was 'partitioned' into 'rings'
>         (some overlapping).  The 'a' partition was root, the 'b' was
>         swap and one fo the others was the rest.  Later the 'c' was a
>         short form for copying the entire disk.
> 
> 
>     I had always wondered where Solaris (SunOS) got it's use of the
>     different slices, including the slice that was the entire disk from.
> 
>     Now I'm guessing Solaris got it from SunOS which got it from 4.x BSD
> 
> ​It was not BSD - it was research.  It may have been in 6th, but it was
> definitely in 7th.  Cut/pasted from the V7 PDP-11 rp(4) man page:
> 
>     *NAME*
> 
>         rp − RP-11/RP03 moving-head disk
> 
>     *DESCRIPTION*
> 
>         The files rp0 ... rp7 refer to sections of RP disk drive 0. The
>         files rp8 ... rp15 refer to drive 1 etc. This
> 
>         allows a large disk to be broken up into more manageable pieces.
> 
>         The origin and size of the pseudo-disks on each drive are as
>         follows:
> 
>             disk start length
> 
>             0 0 81000
> 
>             1 0 5000
> 
>             2 5000 2000
> 
>             3 7000 74000
> 
>             4-7 unassigned
> 
>         Thus rp0 covers the whole drive, while rp1, rp2, rp3 can serve
>         usefully as a root, swap, and mounted user
> 
>         file system respectively.
> 
>         The rp files access the disk via the system’s normal buffering
>         mechanism and may be read and written
> 
>         without regard to physical disk records. There is also a ‘raw’
>         interface which provides for direct transmission
> 
>         between the disk and the user’s read or write buffer. A single
>         read or write call results in exactly one
> 
>         I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more
>         efficient when many words are transmitted. The
> 
>         names of the raw RP files begin with rrp and end with a number
>         which selects the same disk section as the
> 
>         corresponding rp file.
> 
>         In raw I/O the buffer must begin on a word boundary.​
> 
> ᐧ

But...that has numbers, not letters, and the third partition is not the
whole drive, the first one is....?

[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 5:14 PM, Dan Mick <danmick at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 04/23/2018 02:06 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 4:47 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS
> > <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>> wrote:
> >
> >     On 04/23/2018 11:51 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> >
> >         By the time of 4.X, the RP06 was 'partitioned' into 'rings'
> >         (some overlapping).  The 'a' partition was root, the 'b' was
> >         swap and one fo the others was the rest.  Later the 'c' was a
> >         short form for copying the entire disk.
> >
> >
> >     I had always wondered where Solaris (SunOS) got it's use of the
> >     different slices, including the slice that was the entire disk from.
> >
> >     Now I'm guessing Solaris got it from SunOS which got it from 4.x BSD
> >
> > ​It was not BSD - it was research.  It may have been in 6th, but it was
> > definitely in 7th.  Cut/pasted from the V7 PDP-11 rp(4) man page:
> >
> >     *NAME*
> >
> >         rp − RP-11/RP03 moving-head disk
> >
> >     *DESCRIPTION*
> >
> >         The files rp0 ... rp7 refer to sections of RP disk drive 0. The
> >         files rp8 ... rp15 refer to drive 1 etc. This
> >
> >         allows a large disk to be broken up into more manageable pieces.
> >
> >         The origin and size of the pseudo-disks on each drive are as
> >         follows:
> >
> >             disk start length
> >
> >             0 0 81000
> >
> >             1 0 5000
> >
> >             2 5000 2000
> >
> >             3 7000 74000
> >
> >             4-7 unassigned
> >
> >         Thus rp0 covers the whole drive, while rp1, rp2, rp3 can serve
> >         usefully as a root, swap, and mounted user
> >
> >         file system respectively.
> >
> >         The rp files access the disk via the system’s normal buffering
> >         mechanism and may be read and written
> >
> >         without regard to physical disk records. There is also a ‘raw’
> >         interface which provides for direct transmission
> >
> >         between the disk and the user’s read or write buffer. A single
> >         read or write call results in exactly one
> >
> >         I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more
> >         efficient when many words are transmitted. The
> >
> >         names of the raw RP files begin with rrp and end with a number
> >         which selects the same disk section as the
> >
> >         corresponding rp file.
> >
> >         In raw I/O the buffer must begin on a word boundary.​
> >
> > ᐧ
>
> But...that has numbers, not letters, and the third partition is not the
> whole drive, the first one is....?
>

Yup -- disk were pretty expensive in those days ($20-30K for a <100M drive)
so often people did not have more than one.  So they started with rp1, rp2
etc..
As disks dropped a little cheaper and having more than one RP06 became
possible (RP06 aka IBM 3330 - project Winchester --  was a huge 200M drive
- we had 3 on the Teklabs machine and that was considered very, very
generous), then letters became the convention used in /dev/.  i.e.
/dev/{,r}rp0{a,b,c,d..} for each of the minor numbers.

To be honest, I really don't remember - but I know we used letters for the
different partitions on the 11/70 before BSD showed up.

The reason for the partition originally was (and it must have been 6th
edition when I first saw it), DEC finally made a disk large enough that
number of blocks overflowed a 16 bit integer.   So splitting the disk into
smaller partitions allowed the original seek(2) to work without overflow.
V7 introduced lseek(2) when the offset was a long.

Clem

​

ᐧ
ᐧ
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[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 17:27:29 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> As disks dropped a little cheaper and having more than one RP06
> became possible (RP06 aka IBM 3330 - project Winchester

You're confusing the 3330 with the 3340: the latter was the
Winchester, the first disk with an HDA.  The 3330 was the old-style
disk pack in a cheese bell.  A variant (apparently not from IBM; CDC
maybe?) of the same disk pack stored 300 MB, and we used a lot of them
at Tandem in the 1970s and early 1980s.  I suppose they were pretty
widespread.

Greg
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[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Paul Winalski]

On 4/23/18, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> You're confusing the 3330 with the 3340: the latter was the
> Winchester, the first disk with an HDA.  The 3330 was the old-style
> disk pack in a cheese bell.  A variant (apparently not from IBM; CDC
> maybe?) of the same disk pack stored 300 MB, and we used a lot of them
> at Tandem in the 1970s and early 1980s.  I suppose they were pretty
> widespread.

The 3330 was, as you say, a conventional (for the day) disk drive
where the heads remain with the drive and you removed the platters
with a plastic cover very much like a cheese bell.  The 3340 was the
first IBM drive where the heads were sealed with the media.  The disk
packs looked somewhat like the front end of the Starship Enterprise,
with something like a roll-top desk cover at the back.  You put the
pack in the drive, the drive opened the roll-top desk and plugged into
the back of the head assembly, and you were in business.  After a few
years IBM discovered that nobody was removing their disks anymore, and
so the 3340's follow-ons were not removable.  But they still used the
sealed-media technology still in use in hard drives today.

Regarding the Winchester code name, I've argued about this with Clem
before.  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia
and my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1905 bytes --]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 7:43 AM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
> disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia
> and my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.

​Interesting ...   My source was (is) my friend and former colleague from
Stellar, Russ Robelen, ​who was the HW lead for the 360/50 and the IBM ACS
systems.   Russ said the original IBM project Winchester  first begat the
platter (as Noel pointed out was so named because of the 30-30 capacity of
the original disk) - which showed up in the 3330 disks as well as the
sealed head stuff that Paul and Greg are talking about.  What I never asked
him, was where Memorex fit it.  It was a somehow a joint project with them,
and they got at least some of the technology -- in fact DEC's OEM for the
RP05/RP06 was Memorex [the big box of logic on the side of the DEC version
was the Massbus to IBM I/O logic converter].    It is also true that real
lasting piece of project Winchester was the embedded (sealed head) stuff
that came from the 3340.

I should ask Russ what he remembers, on this.  I'm guessing that maybe
there was two parts of the project.   The sealed head stuff that Paul and
Greg are discussing and probably was IBM only, as I do not remember that
Memorex ever produced a similar product to the 3340 .   But maybe platter
stuff may have been joint.

But I have asked Russ a couple of times, and he very much states that name
'Project Winchester' came from the platter technology which was first
introduced in the IBM 3330.

I'll have to dig up the book Noel suggests and see what they see (and ask
Russ what he thinks of it).
ᐧ
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[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 at  9:13:41 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 7:43 AM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>  Clem claims that the code name refers to various advances in
>> disk technology first released in the 3330's disk packs.  Wikipedia
>> and my own memory agree with you that Winchester referred to the 3340.
>
> ???Interesting ...   My source was (is) my friend and former colleague from
> Stellar, Russ Robelen, ???who was the HW lead for the 360/50 and the IBM ACS
> systems.   Russ said the original IBM project Winchester  first begat the
> platter (as Noel pointed out was so named because of the 30-30 capacity of
> the original disk) - which showed up in the 3330 disks as well as the
> sealed head stuff that Paul and Greg are talking about.

Hmm.  The earliest 3330s had 100 MB per disk, considerably more than
the 3340.  I had thought that the 3340 had fewer surfaces.  And the
3330s definitely only had one disk per unit, though they brought out
an 8-drive cabinet with a whopping 2.4 GB (by the time I used them).

> What I never asked him, was where Memorex fit it.  It was a somehow
> a joint project with them, and they got at least some of the
> technology -- in fact DEC's OEM for the RP05/RP06 was Memorex [the
> big box of logic on the side of the DEC version was the Massbus to
> IBM I/O logic converter].  It is also true that real lasting piece
> of project Winchester was the embedded (sealed head) stuff that came
> from the 3340.

Yesterday I suggested that CDC might have used the same disk packs as
the 3330, but I'm now very sure that the ones we used came from Ampex.

> I should ask Russ what he remembers, on this.

It would also be interesting to hear if he can shed any light on the
Winchester Boulevard vs. 30/30 controversy.

Greg
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[TUHS] 3330s, 3340s, Winchesters... (was: /dev/drum)

[Paul Winalski]

On 4/24/18, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> Hmm.  The earliest 3330s had 100 MB per disk, considerably more than
> the 3340.  I had thought that the 3340 had fewer surfaces.  And the
> 3330s definitely only had one disk per unit, though they brought out
> an 8-drive cabinet with a whopping 2.4 GB (by the time I used them).

The 3340 indeed had fewer platters per unit than the 3330, and because
of that a lower disk capacity.  Both the 3330 and 3340 were CKD
format, not fixed-block, so the capacity depended on the record size.
Highest storage capacity was achieved with one record with a
zero-length key field covering the full track (called full-track
blocking).

According to the IBM Archives web page
(https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3330.html),
the 3330 was code-named Merlin.  It could have from 2 to 16 spindles
per controller.  Originally each disk pack had a maximum capacity of
100 MB.  The 3330 model 11 used IBM 3336 disk packs that had double
the original capacity (up to 200 MB).

This IBM Archives web page
(https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3340.html)
says that the 3340 was code-named Winchester.  This page reports, but
does not verify, the "30-30" Winchester rifle story.  The IBM 3348
Data Module, the disk pack equivalent for the 3340, was a sealed
module that contained the head assembly.  This reduced the hazards of
head misalignment and surface contamination.  Unlike later
sealed-module disks, the 3348s were removable media.  Modules with
maximum capacities of 35 MB or 70 MB were available.  There was also a
70 MB module with up to 0.5 MB accessible from fixed heads.

-Paul W.