[Milsurplus] [MRCA] Lunar Photos

[Dennis Kidder]

DEC RM-03 and RM-05 were made by CDC - Control Data Corporation and were 
rebranded by DEC. CDC models were 9762 and 9766 respectively. 60 and 300 
MB. Used a LOT of the 9766 SMDs with clustered 11/70s. Hot stuff in 
1978. DEC rebranded a lot of other products but they escape me at the 
moment ...

Rather than using the DEC RH-70 Massbus interfaces and the DEC Disk 
controllers, we used System Industries 9400 controllers. SI had their 
own Massbus interface and the whole thing really ran circles around the 
DEC counterparts. I recall that the ONLY part of these systems from DEC 
were the CPUs ... everything else was third party.

The system ran a highly modified version of UNIX 6th Edition from Bell 
Labs. My roll was designing Unibus peripherals for these bad boys and 
system integration. We were one of the very first users of UNIX outside 
of Bell Labs.

I wanted to a story about NASA and data storage. More accurately, NASA 
and NOAA. Years ago, when I was working at Hughes Aircraft, Space and 
Comm, we were working a proposal effort (which we won) for NASA called 
EOSDIS -- Earth Observing System Data and Information System. This was a 
very large program of many spacecraft and we were proposing the 
"backend" ground segment to the program. One of the goals of the ground 
segment was to "recover" historical NASA and in this particular case, 
NOAA data from the previous decades of Earth sciences observations. Of 
course, the challenges involved many of the things discussed here ... 
obsolete, unused recording media and data formats with unobtainium 
hardware to read the stuff.

One team working the NOAA side of the effort traveled to University of 
Wisconsin, Madison, which happened to be a focal point for NOAA. There 
was a lot of archived data that needed to be recovered.

What the team found was a tape library, (I don't know the format but I 
am sure they were much older than the 9 track 1/2 inch gear I had been 
working with) in the basement of a campus building ...... with the 
bottom half of the tape racks under about three feet of water.

We won the contract, but I left that group and went off to do other 
great things at Hughes so I really don't know what ever happened to the 
"waterlogged" data, but I daresay they would have had quite a time 
recovering THAT data.

Great discussions -- brings back a lot of memories of times long gone 
... I do miss those blinking lights .... computers today are so 
impersonal ...

73,

-dennis W6DQ
Fullerton CA

On 4/25/2014 3:32 PM, J. Forster wrote:
> Well, DEC made it's own peripherals. DG bought peripherals from vendors in
> the business of making peripherals. They worked a lot better. Viz:
>
> Digitronics (PTR)
> Teletype    (PTP)
> Diablo      (RHD)
> AlphaDate   (FHD)
> BeeHive     (VDT)
> Centronics  (LPT)
> Calcomp     (PLT)
>
> The later DG peripherals generally sucked.
>
> YMMV,
>
> -John
>
> ===================
>
>
>> Hi
>>
>> Well, back in the late 60’s and early 70’s most of our time on the DEC
>> machines was spend rebuilding drives and copying media…..
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> On Apr 25, 2014, at 12:31 PM, Ray Fantini <RAFANTINI at salisbury.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Platforms come and go at alarming speed these days. Not uncommon to see
>>> pallets of tapes being sold at Wallops or Goddard for next to nothing.
>>> The last couple years there have been almost endless lots of D1 digital
>>> video cassettes, a huge expensive non compressed digital format for
>>> analog NTSC Here at the university we just pulled some one inch C format
>>> video tapes we had from the nineties and found that all the local TV
>>> stations no longer have that format and am now looking at trying to find
>>> a playback deck for that format. We still have a working 16 MM projector
>>> and am surprised by how many have come and wanted us to transfer from
>>> that to video. The problem is not that there is not the media out there
>>> but the equipment to transfer the old media to any current format is the
>>> issue.
>>> In the last five or ten years I have been working with old DEC computers
>>> at home, maybe more then with radios. The thing that occupies the most
>>> time is rebuilding drives and copying media with one of the largest
>>> ongoing projects being transferring old files to more modern platforms
>>> and getting modern systems to be able to push software to old systems.
>>> That's the big project around the shop these days.
>>>
>>> Ray F
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