/usr/home vs /home

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 06:39:00AM -0600, Robert Bonomi wrote:

> 
> > > 
> > > AHA.  probably an 'RL-05',  cousin to the better known "RK-05"
> 
> I had a memory fault -- the RLs were the RL-01 and RL-02.
> > > 
> > > 14" media, in a 'cartridge'.   I -think- it was an 'SMD' interface
> >
> > 14" could be true as it just fitted into a 19" rack.
> 
> Virtually all 'removable platter' or 'removable pack' storage of the day 
> was 14" media. :)
> 
> There were some "high-capacity" _non-removable-media_ drives that used 
> much larger media.  A friend had a coffee table made from a 45" disk
> platter.

Control Data Corp made the drives with the large platters - 45" sounds
about right.   It was the 808 Disk drive.   It was built on a huge heavy
cast aluminum frame (to counteract vibration)and the heads were 'loaded' 
and positioned hydraulicly.  There was a large and noisy pump unit right 
next to it.  It was quite fast at read/write.   Here one was set up to 
only use a couple of cylinders to reduce seek time and then used as a 
swap disk.

CDC was actually a major disk manufacturer in their day.

I also used that DEC setup with the removable disk cartridges
on a PDP-11 an later on a 8650.   The 8650 had lots of other
disk, but a cartridge was still used for the system controller
that did things like controlling the boot, etc.

////jerry