[Simh] Sounds

[Kevin Handy]

I worked at a timesharing sevice that has a computer room with a PDP-11/34,
a ODO-11/70, both with tape drives and RP06. Also included in the mix was a
large air conditioner, and a humidifier. When backup to tape was being run,
the total noise level was incr4edible. The humidifier wasd necessary
because otherwise the static would build up so high you couldn;t touch
anything without causing sparks.

The 11/70 had a remote diagonisyic cpmsole, so no blinkenlights. It finally
had a problem where it would frequently crash, and field service couldn't
find the problem, so it was replaced with an 11/83 with a TSV05 taoe. The
sound level dropped by an amazing amount.

Nowodays, many people haven't even heard a dot-matrix printer grinding
away, let alone the huge mass of fans that seemed to make up most of an
11/70. Daisy weel printers are also extremely rare now. Line printers
(drum, chain, printronix) seem to be nonexistant any more, but were how
most of us thought about computers.

At college, I had classes that used a VAX 780 VMS, but ut had so many users
on it that it could take 15 minutes just to log in.  Great fun when you had
an assignment due the next day.


On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Bailey, Scott <scott.bailey at hpe.com> wrote:

> I was fortunate to have gotten "on the inside" quite early in my career,
> and
> reading this thread really has brought back a wave of nostalgia for the
> sights, sounds, and feel of old machine rooms.
>
> And that's scratching the surface (pardon the pun). I managed a lonely
> trio of
> Xerox 8010 servers that lasted into the late 1990s, and of course there was
> really no hardware or software support of any kind for those dinosaurs.
> They
> had huge (by today's standards) internal disks that were rotated by an
> external motor and drive belt. I recall vividly that following power
> outages
> (for whatever reason), one of the servers required you to remove the side
> panel and "jump start" the disk by rotating the spindle manually -- the
> belt
> was a little too worn/loose for the system to spin up the disk from a
> standing
> start!
>
> When I started at Xerox in 1985, there were 6085s all over the place and we
> used them for everything. Well, everything that didn't involve the VT100
> sitting next to mine. ;-)
>
> Actually (he says plaintively) a 8010 or 6085 emulator would be a great
> SimH
> fodder -- certainly they were important computing artifacts, and I regret
> in
> hindsight that the systems I supported -- with their accompanying
> materials --
> were long ago consigned to the dumpster. :-(
>
> (shakes head and returns to the real world)
>
> Scott
>
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