Another oddly interesting interface related to SMD was IPI. Sun used it for a bit as their high end disks.
OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#12The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
I'd more bet that they are the critical infrastructure pillar everyone is scared to replace in a super important system, lol.
Maybe one of it saves the earth rotation control algorithm which the Earth Rotation Service requires for shooting their hidden ion cannons to keep it spinning.
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#13[flagged]
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#14This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?
The site is using an obsolete version of XHTML. So it's probably using out of date other things, too, and not targeting phones.
EDIT: I just checked. There are 77 HTML errors and warnings alone.
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#15This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?
It's missing
(Or more precisely, not sure why "make the site look like ass" was chosen as the default, and making it look good is opt-in!)
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#16This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?
It's missing Not sure why we need to add that but mobile sites look like ass without it. (Or more precisely, not sure why "make the site look like ass" was chosen as the default, and making it look good is opt-in!)
Because it's assumed that it's for desktop. The first iPhone demo had (if I recall correctly) the browser zoom into the NYT website. Which can work well.
I'd rather this than what I often see nowadays: sites with fixed width tables that overflow out of the mobile viewport with no way to view the info.
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#17The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
> the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel
Ouch.
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#18The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
Very True, and one thing people forget, we need to keep the ability to read these old devices.
I was a operator (now admin) on a few minis in the early 80s that had these drives. The drive pack on the ones we had were removable and we used 256MB packs.
We would backup data from one drive to another on third shift, at the same time to reel tapes. The reel tapes back then where used for long term backup off site, the drives for short term on site. But who knows how many of these packs are out there just sitting around waiting to be read :)
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#19The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
> the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel Ouch.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened:
Re: OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices
#20> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company). I wouldn't mind h…
I worked on replacing some PLCs a number of years ago that used drives like these and used the energy from the spin down when power was lost to write anything important to a short 8-track like infinite tape loop, gracefully-ish shutdown, and send messages to the monitoring gear.