In the mid-90s our CS department got a lab full of Indys, which undergrads weren't allowed to use until their 3rd year because those were the serious kit. We could only imagine how cool it would be to have Indigo2s to play with.
In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.
In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.
IDE was just coming in (in the UK) in 1990. The acronym got updated to "AT Attachment" because "Integrated Drive Electronics" was generic, and it wasn't as if the older drives had no electronics on them. Much later when SATA showed up, the name evolved again as ATA became known as Parallel ATA to distinguish the two.
Before that, when you installed a hard disk you had to go into the BIOS to specify the geometry of the drive. 46 types were already defined, to match individual drives on the market. "Type 47" allowed -- required -- manually specifying the drive geometry in terms of cylinders, heads and sectors. So for a short while some traditional MFM or RLL drives would be informally classed as Type 47 because their geometry and capacity differed from earlier drives.
Matte PETG is available. No affiliation, but: https://californiafilament.com/collections/new . Great when you want the properties of PETG but not the shiny plastic look, e.g. printing things for car interiors. Like GP I'd also love to see this filament in PETG.
Yep. Sold in the UK as the Tomy ROBO-1. Had great fun playing with it, never knew people had hooked them up to computers. Echoing others' comments, the drive was noisy even when stationary. And it didn't seem to have any sensors to let it know when it had reached the limit of any particular motion. Instead the plastic gears would start to skip loudly with a usefully intuitive "if you keep doing that I'll break" sound.
About a decade and a half ago I worked on a large data migration project at a FAANG. Multi-exabyte scale, many clusters across many countries. Once everyone was moved the old storage platform wasn't completely empty, because the number of migrations was large and users were (naturally) more focused on ensuring their data was in place and available on the target platform rather than ensuring every last thing was deleted on the legacy platform. We weren't initially concerned about it because it would all get deleted when we turned down the old setup.
As we were gearing up to declare victory and start turning down the several dozen legacy storage clusters someone mused that given some users were subject to litigation holds -- not allowed to delete any data -- that at least some of the leftover data on the old system might be subject to litigation hold, and we'd need to figure that out before we could delete it or incur legal risk. IIRC the leftover 'junk' data amounted to a few dozen petabytes spread across multiple clusters around the world, in different jurisdictions. We spent several months talking with the lawyers figuring that out. It was an interesting dance, because on the one hand we were quite confident that there was unlikely to be anything in the leftovers which was both meaningful and not migrated to the new platform, while on the other hand explaining that it wasn't practical to just "go and look" through a few dozen PB of data. I recall we ended up somewhere in between, coming up with ways to distinguish categories of data like caches and working data from various pipelines. It added over six months to the project, but was quite an interesting problem to work through that hadn't occurred to any of us earlier on, as we were thinking entirely in technical terms about infrastructure migration.
That does sound very interesting. Any insights on what would you do differently if you had to do it again? Any way to accelerate things now that you know the pain or do you think it's quite unavoidable and "legal Time"?
Doing it in parallel, which of course is only an option if you know about it. And templating that into a general approach and having legal folks sign off on that.
I didn't know the TI-99/4A was 16-bit until many years later when the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were taking over from the Spectrum, C-64 and Amstrad (in the UK). Aside from the refueling tunnels getting a bit tricky later on in Parsec, I have fond memories of Alpiner and Pirate's Adventure. That latter one being the bundled game with the Adventure cartridge, requiring you to insert the cartridge (containing parser etc., I think) and then load the particular adventure story from tape.
The Annie Jacobsen book didn't have quite the same visceral impact of despair for me as watching Threads. But it was still disturbing for two reasons: the cascade which leads to war is remarkably believable with its grab bag of technical limitations, forced decisions with flawed data and dramatic consequences, and that it was written "now". It's not something which can be tidied away into a past era which we'd like to thing we emerged from never to return.
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