Who I? Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to the sunny place on the internet we like to call “Who, Me?” in which Reg Readers talk about failed technical tasks.
I’m sorry if this happy, happy attitude puts you off. Your correspondent is experimenting with being a “Monday person” and it feels strange.
Anyway, our story this week comes from a reader we’ll rename as “Howard” who many years ago (many, many years ago) worked with an operating system kernel called MagicSix, which was developed during his time in the labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was used was a student. Howard had used the operating system to make an Interdata 7/32 system use virtual memory “in ways its designers never intended”—that was his skill.
After Howard graduated and continued his education, the MIT lab upgraded to an Interdata 8/32, which, as you will no doubt recall, was an improvement over its predecessor by properly supporting virtual memory. Howard was hired as a consultant to get MagicSix running on the new machine.
This involved installing the operating system on a floppy package on the 7/32, removing the floppy package from that machine and installing it on the 8/32, and checking to see if it would run. Repeat this as many times as necessary until it works.
Now you might be wondering about the term “Disk Pack”. We here at Who, Me? they definitely were. Well, this was 1978, so hard drives were nothing like they are today. In Howard’s description, the hard drives of the time looked a bit like top-loading washing machines, and the hard drives themselves were stacks of platters “that looked like eight metal LPs,” he wrote – a simile that may be no less confusing to younger readers.
Luckily, he also provided a link to a picture of a not dissimilar system [PDF] time so you can get an idea.
Transporting a disk pack from one machine to another required stopping the drive, screwing in the carrier (which simultaneously unscrewed the disks from the drive), and then lifting the carrier out. For obvious reasons, there was a latch on the drive’s lid that prevented it from being opened while the hard drives were in motion.
The plate stacks were typically labeled on the top plate. The units Howard used were marked with the MagicSix logo – he also helpfully provided a picture of them.
Now the commissioning took place on August 32nd. actually not as smoothly as Howard had hoped. Many hours of moving disk packs back and forth from one machine to another followed, with many failed attempts resulting in the disks being moved back to the first machine. It was very frustrating.
At around 3 a.m., after another failed boot, Howard opened the drive on 8/32 and noticed—just for a moment—“Hey, I thought there was a label on that disk. Well, one more. “Secret.” Then he put the cover of the carrier in…
Next: a hellish buzz and plastic shards flying everywhere as the teeth of the cover met the teeth of the disk pack and physics did the rest. It turned out that the drive’s lock was faulty and Howard couldn’t see the label because it was still spinning at 3600 RPM.
Luckily, Howard wasn’t the only reveler at MIT, and someone was there to show him where to find a vacuum cleaner to remove the plastic particles from the driveway.
By the way, he has the operating system on August 32nd. finally got it working. And he told us, “I wish I could say I’ve learned my lesson about not working half asleep, but that would take another decade or two.” Well, yeah.
Has your tired self ever made a mistake that your alert self would never have made? Tell us by emailing Who, Me? and maybe we’ll share your story on a future Monday.