Recycling

Not obsolete quite yet: there is still a market for floppy disks, including 5.25- and 8-inch disks, which really were floppy. Well, flexible.

Patch

Frank O'Brien explains, in exceptional detail, the hardware problem that vexed the Apollo 14 mission, and the dance of software fixes that kept the Moon landing on track. TIL about core rope memory.

Faster, cheaper, more durable

Magnetic tape is making a comeback, reports Babbage. It's an important level in the archival storage hierarchy at CERN.

When a tape snaps, it can be spliced back together. The loss is rarely more than a few hundred megabytes—a bagatelle in information-technology circles. When a terabyte hard disk fails, by contrast, the result is usually that all the data on it are lost. The consequence at CERN, specifically, is that a few hundred megabytes of its 100 petabyte tape repository are lost every year. Of the 50 petabytes of data held on hard disk, however, it loses a few hundred terabytes in the same period.

300 TB/yr lost to hard drive failures?!

Moving on

Shain Miley links to the video archive of presentations at this year's MySQL conference, including a presentation on migration from Oracle to MySQL by Joanne Garlow, tech lead/architect for the development team at my client site.

Like, random

Kyle VanHemert introduces the IBM RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage (and one of IBM’s last systems to use vacuum tubes). The 305 was announced on 13 September 1956, my one-month birthday.

The post embeds a really sweet 5-minute industrial from IBM promoting the system: check out the access panels that swing out and down to afford access to the copperage. The post conflates the 305 (the model number of the entire system) with the 350 (the model number of the 50-platter hard disk subsystem), but no matter.

(Link via The Code Project.)

All your database are belong to us

The current number of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing is loaded with tasty pieces: the theme is early DBMSs, and there are articles on the roots of Adabas, IDS, Total, IDMS, System 2000, IMS -- all those pre-relational acronyms that once filled the job listings for programmer/analysts. I once had limited familiarity with Adabas and IMS: in each case I was writing application code in COBOL and I used some glue-layer code (macros called Adamints, IIRC; and proprietary code written by AMS) to talk to the DB.

Plus, for dessert, Dan Murphy writes about the origins of TECO. Back in graduate school, the guy that turned over to me the project supporting the marketing research study tried to teach me TECO, but I bailed out and made do with SOS.

Data rot

David Pogue interviews Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum, on storage media old and new.

Fan belt?

The Australian Computer Museum Society has agreed to lend a 1960's-era IBM tape drive to the cause of recovering data on lunar dust that was collected on the Apollo XI, XII, and XIV missions, reports Nic MacBean. The 7-track IBM 729 Mark V drive is described as "in need of tender love and care."

(Link via Risks Digest.)

Still collating

Douglas W. Jones, on the CS faculty of the University of Iowa, maintains an online museum of punchcards (originally known as Hollerith cards) and related technology.

(Link via things magazine.)