Who am I? Hello and hello, dear readers, and welcome to the sunny place on the interwebs we like to call Who, Me? in which Reg readers share their stories of technical challenges gone wrong.
Sorry if this bright, cheery attitude puts you off. Your correspondent is experimenting with being a “Monday Man” and it feels amazing.
Anyway, our story this week comes from a reader we’ll call “Howard” who worked years (many, many years ago) with an OS kernel called MagicSix that found use in the MIT labs. was a student. Howard tricked an Interdata 7/32 system into using virtual memory “in a way the designers never intended” with the OS – such was his skill.
After Howard graduated and continued his studies, the MIT lab switched to the Interdata 8/32, which, as you no doubt remember, was improved over its predecessor by properly supporting virtual memory. Howard was hired as a consultant for MagicSix to work on the new machine.
This involved installing the OS on the diskpack on 7/32, removing the diskpack from that machine and installing it on 8/32, and seeing if it would work. Repeat as many times as necessary until it works.
Now you may be wondering about the term “disk bundle”. We here at Who, Me? of course there were. Well, that was 1978, so hard drives weren’t what they are today. According to Howard’s description, disk drives of the era looked like top-loading washing machines, and the disks themselves were stacks of records “that looked like eight metal records,” he wrote, a comparison that might be no less disconcerting to younger readers.
Fortunately, he also provided a link to an image of a dissimilar system [PDF] time so you can understand.
Moving a pack of discs from one machine to another involved stopping the drive, screwing in the media (which simultaneously unscrews the discs from the drive), and then removing the media. There was a lock on the drive cover which, for obvious reasons, prevented it from being opened when the drives were moving.
The disc stacks were usually marked on the top plate. The units Howard used were marked with the MagicSix logo, a picture of which he also helpfully provided.
Now, as it happened, the process of getting up and running on 8/32 didn’t go as smoothly as Howard had hoped. After hours of shuffling packages of disks from one machine to another, there were many failed attempts that meant returning the disks to the first machine. It was very unpleasant.
Around three in the morning, after another boot failure, Howard opened the drive to 8/32, noting – just for a moment – “Hey, I thought this disc had a label on it. a secret.” He then inserted the carrying case cover…
Next: a hell of a buzz and plastic shards flying everywhere as the teeth of the cover collided with the teeth of the disc pack, and physics did the rest. It turns out that the lock on the drive was faulty and the reason Howard couldn’t see the label was because it was still spinning at 3600rpm.
Luckily, Howard wasn’t the only night owl at MIT, and someone was there to show him where to find a vacuum cleaner to clean the disc of plastic.
By the way, he eventually got the OS working on 8/32. And he told us, “I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson not to work while half asleep, but it’s going to take another decade or two.” Oh, good.
Ever made a mistake that your careful self would never have made? Tell us about it with an email to Who, Me? and we can share your story this coming Monday.