Control Data
Jan. 16th, 2006 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezSo, back in the old days when they still made things in Gloucester...
[See, that's an interesting thing. Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything. There were no factories. Those were kept far away in pictures on Midlands Today from mythical places like Smethwick, Cradely Heath and Wolverhampton. They had a special man whose job it was to go and speak to a fellow in overalls standing next to a brazier outside some gates and interpret his language of 'differentials' and 'free collective bargaining'. It was very odd to peer out of the Land-rover windows at the grubbier parts of Gloucester or Stroud and see the same sort of sawtooth factory roofing that was on the telly from far away. In one sense, AA Gill is correct: Stow on the Wold is a terrible and self-satisfied sort of place. In the other sense, his notion that the Cotswolds north of Chipping Norton is a wasteland is clearly the excitable and impenetrable jabbering of the long-term institutionalised sans medication.]
... There was a factory at the far end of what used to be the Gloster Aircraft site that made the sort of airport crash-tenders I'd seen in the Ladybird book of Commercial Vehicles. Big red oblong Gerry Anderson things. And in that factory there was an OEMed LSI-11 system (probably Midlectron, given the state of the build) that did... Things.
It was at the far end of the drawing office, which had been slung in the eaves of the ex-hangar where they built the tenders. As if the draughtsmen were descended from nesting swallows. They obviously weren't, because there was a narrow and steep staircase up to the office and I've never seen swallows smoke Players tabs.
I'd been called out there because I was performing in the Field Circus and the DEC box had expired. It was quickly obvious that the filters in the CDC Phoenix (40Mb fixed, 40Mb removable IIRC. [Which I don't, it transpires: 15Mb removable, 60Mb fixed. Hurrah for the collective memory of The Internet.] A preposterous amount of storage for what was only a medium-sized factory) hadn't been changed since the fall of Saigon. There was also the matter of the curious brown tinge covering the rest of the equipment (a normally white TVI-950 terminal and 132-column Anadex printer).
I asked the chap showing me the kit if it was a smoking office.
"Nope. They banned smoking in the office a couple of years back. Caused a bit of a stink."
"So is there a smoking room or anything like that?"
"Nah. You've to go outside and stand at the edge of the runway, but most of the lads can't be doing with that and come in here..."
A mob of blokes crammed into the end cupobard where they kept The Computer, all puffing away furiously on Woodbines and Navy Cut on a damp Tuesday morning can do quite a bit of damage to a disk-drive. But not as much as...
... CDC Hawks (5Mb fixed, 5Mb removable) are pretty much a three-bloke lift. Two on the heavy end next to the voice-coil, one on the lighter end by the blower motor. Phoenixes are a lot heavier. It was going to have to go back to the workshop where we'd a vaguely cleaner environment to pull it to bits and replace all the r/w heads. However, no-one could see how to get the thing down to ground level. Then someone suggested using one of the forklifts. There was a door in one side of the office that opened out into space. There had presumably been a verandah or gantry of some kind. What was left was a couple of sections of I-beam and a bloody long drop.
The stacker with the longest lift in the place hummed into position. At full extent, the forks were just on the level of the I-beam. The foreman edged out onto the beam and put one foot on one of the forks. It set to waving back and forth by about a yard. He came back in again, looking somewhat discomfited.
In the end, we edged the thing down the stairs, a shuffling mob of about eight chaps grunting and swearing and trying not to think about what would happen if anyone let go.
[See, that's an interesting thing. Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything. There were no factories. Those were kept far away in pictures on Midlands Today from mythical places like Smethwick, Cradely Heath and Wolverhampton. They had a special man whose job it was to go and speak to a fellow in overalls standing next to a brazier outside some gates and interpret his language of 'differentials' and 'free collective bargaining'. It was very odd to peer out of the Land-rover windows at the grubbier parts of Gloucester or Stroud and see the same sort of sawtooth factory roofing that was on the telly from far away. In one sense, AA Gill is correct: Stow on the Wold is a terrible and self-satisfied sort of place. In the other sense, his notion that the Cotswolds north of Chipping Norton is a wasteland is clearly the excitable and impenetrable jabbering of the long-term institutionalised sans medication.]
... There was a factory at the far end of what used to be the Gloster Aircraft site that made the sort of airport crash-tenders I'd seen in the Ladybird book of Commercial Vehicles. Big red oblong Gerry Anderson things. And in that factory there was an OEMed LSI-11 system (probably Midlectron, given the state of the build) that did... Things.
It was at the far end of the drawing office, which had been slung in the eaves of the ex-hangar where they built the tenders. As if the draughtsmen were descended from nesting swallows. They obviously weren't, because there was a narrow and steep staircase up to the office and I've never seen swallows smoke Players tabs.
I'd been called out there because I was performing in the Field Circus and the DEC box had expired. It was quickly obvious that the filters in the CDC Phoenix (40Mb fixed, 40Mb removable IIRC. [Which I don't, it transpires: 15Mb removable, 60Mb fixed. Hurrah for the collective memory of The Internet.] A preposterous amount of storage for what was only a medium-sized factory) hadn't been changed since the fall of Saigon. There was also the matter of the curious brown tinge covering the rest of the equipment (a normally white TVI-950 terminal and 132-column Anadex printer).
I asked the chap showing me the kit if it was a smoking office.
"Nope. They banned smoking in the office a couple of years back. Caused a bit of a stink."
"So is there a smoking room or anything like that?"
"Nah. You've to go outside and stand at the edge of the runway, but most of the lads can't be doing with that and come in here..."
A mob of blokes crammed into the end cupobard where they kept The Computer, all puffing away furiously on Woodbines and Navy Cut on a damp Tuesday morning can do quite a bit of damage to a disk-drive. But not as much as...
... CDC Hawks (5Mb fixed, 5Mb removable) are pretty much a three-bloke lift. Two on the heavy end next to the voice-coil, one on the lighter end by the blower motor. Phoenixes are a lot heavier. It was going to have to go back to the workshop where we'd a vaguely cleaner environment to pull it to bits and replace all the r/w heads. However, no-one could see how to get the thing down to ground level. Then someone suggested using one of the forklifts. There was a door in one side of the office that opened out into space. There had presumably been a verandah or gantry of some kind. What was left was a couple of sections of I-beam and a bloody long drop.
The stacker with the longest lift in the place hummed into position. At full extent, the forks were just on the level of the I-beam. The foreman edged out onto the beam and put one foot on one of the forks. It set to waving back and forth by about a yard. He came back in again, looking somewhat discomfited.
In the end, we edged the thing down the stairs, a shuffling mob of about eight chaps grunting and swearing and trying not to think about what would happen if anyone let go.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-01-16 08:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-18 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 02:43 am (UTC)I've got an engine crane, which I'm sure would shift it.
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Date: 2006-01-16 02:18 pm (UTC)And that's the biggest lie in that big book of lies.
Almost as big a lie as when they classify a task as "1 Spanner", but don't mention that you need to acheive a "4 Spanners and a fully equipped F1 race truck" task to get to that stage ...
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Date: 2006-01-16 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 02:49 am (UTC)One day the inevitable happened and the hard drive (probably the only one in the building) crashed. This was typical late-80s kit, 5¼" sized 506 or SCSI gadget with a paltry handful of megabytes on it. And when we disemboweled it in the traditional ritual, there was a folded paper air filter inside it. A filter that was so thick with tobacco that you could smell it.
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Date: 2006-01-16 02:26 pm (UTC)They didn't attempt to smoke it, did they?
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Date: 2006-01-16 07:15 am (UTC)From the same era as 64k being "high speed".
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Date: 2006-01-16 08:24 am (UTC)The ones I encountered were 15MB removeable and 4 x 15MB fixed. They crashed at least daily, too, though IIRC that was because the Norsk Data drivers for them were utter crap. Finally got swapped out for 75MB washing machines which, by contrast, were as reliable as very reliable things indeed.
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Date: 2006-01-16 10:05 am (UTC)(And begin to wonder once again about building cannons from redundant voice coils.)
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Date: 2006-01-16 11:38 am (UTC)Might not be a cannon, but it makes a damn fine laser projector (pair of old SCSI 3.5" HDD's, hacksawed in half and mounted at right angles to each other; heads removed and replaced with scan mirrors blu-tacked to the remnants of the HDA, laser pointer mounted at TDC).
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Date: 2006-01-16 12:37 pm (UTC)(Mechanical television? Surely not...)
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Date: 2006-01-16 01:17 pm (UTC)Limits are about what you'd expect from HDD access times, i.e. about 250Hz on each axis. Good enough for a reasonable 6-digit clock display (makes great rhythmic sounds as it runs into the bargain).
The current laser doesn't have a modulation input though so there's no flyback blanking; the whole project was built using junkbox parts (note the use of PC brackets to support the horizontal HDD and laser diode).
Sometime I aim to get around to stuffing a bigger laser in there, ideally a bright green one with a modulation input. Really ought to get around to writing it up properly and posting full details on the web too.
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Date: 2006-01-16 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 01:49 pm (UTC)Yes.
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Date: 2010-09-26 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 10:45 am (UTC)We had a similar "big computer, big drop" problem when I was at the Royal Bank of Scotland's corporate loans division, which used to be housed in the posh looking building behind Neptune's Fountain in Cheltenham, the one which had a secure underground carpark clearly visible from the bus station which all the crusty-types swore blind was a compound for repo'ed cars that they someday, come the anarchist revoltution, would liberate; but in reality was just the managers' and nightshift engineers' carpark.
The server room in this particular building was, for some never-explained reason, on the top floor (with a fine view over the Cotswold hills). This was one of those old-fashioned server rooms that still had Halon gas automatic fire extinguishers, an oxygen suppressant that would asphixiate staff just as happily as it would put out fires, hence the less-than-reassuring presence of both a bloody great axe (which you were supposed to chop down the door with, presumably in one breath) and, downstairs, a revolving hazard lamp which would light whenever a human was present in the server room. Quite how we on the 1st floor were supposed to get to the 5th floor, in a fire, before the poor chap suffocated, was also never explained.
Anyway, the day came to get rid of some horribly huge piece of DEC kit that was so old, no-one could remember how it got in. Presumably, in the lift. Except the lift had gone through numerous upgrades, refits and redecorations since. Said DEC kit no longer fitted through the lift doors. Solution, remove doors; result, two days of red-faced staff pumping up and down six flights of stairs, but no movement of DEC kit because it still didn't fit in the lift. So three days later, DEC monstrosity still sitting there on the landing (now without its case, and looking like the Nude Electric Mainframe Revue), and staff nervously eyeing up the lift shaft ceiling and the price of hiring a crane.
Finally, a week later, some smart-alec mentions Stannah Stairlifts and the engineers realise that this is a job for a proper, proper robot (http://www.stairrobot.co.uk/products-sr1750.html). Quite an amazing piece of machinery, kind of like Johnny Five's mutant offspring, had he had taken to raping conveyor belts. We load the DEC monstrosity onto this little fellow's platform, and it happily trundles down six flights of stairs carrying one metric tonne of retro VAX wrongness. Job done.
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Date: 2006-01-16 11:46 am (UTC)(I want one of those robots.)
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Date: 2006-01-16 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 01:48 pm (UTC)Now I think about it, the wedding-cakeification of bits of Cheltenham is a relatively recent thing.
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Date: 2006-01-16 02:31 pm (UTC)We had halon suppression in the archives room at school. There were many legends (which completely ignored the fact that it had only been installed the previous year).
Maybe the server room was on the top floor because that's where they used to have the telephone exchanges? (Just a random guess from seeing old 'phone exchanges.)
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Date: 2006-01-18 09:24 pm (UTC)Naturally, the company we were installing the server for billed the halon installation company for a new server.
It's impressive just how much damage you can do to an IBM lump when you drop it from about 5 feet ;)
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Date: 2006-01-18 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-01-16 10:26 pm (UTC)