using command prompt to change to another drive

[cjolley]

Originally posted by xortam
Hell ... I've still got copies of CPM and such on 8" floppies. ... and don't even get me started talking about the CRAM deck I have. ... or how about the Star Trek game on paper tape from a Cyber machine. I've got so much useless junk lying around here ...

Do you have a working 8" floppy drive?
If not, why do you keep them?

And, what is a CRAM deck?
chuck

[GNEP]

You're just showing off about your age Xortam

[VJ]

Originally posted by xortam
Hell ... I've still got copies of CPM and such on 8" floppies. ... and don't even get me started talking about the CRAM deck I have. ... or how about the Star Trek game on paper tape from a Cyber machine. I've got so much useless junk lying around here ...

Hey, I have got CP/M+ lying around on 3" disks (192 KB)...


Jörg

[xortam]

Originally posted by cjolley
Do you have a working 8" floppy drive?
If not, why do you keep them? ...

I did use the phrase "useless junk" didn't I? I've still got trinkets around here from electronics conventions held in the 60's (WESCON).

... And, what is a CRAM deck?

I thought I told you not to get me talking about this. CRAM stands for Card Random Access Machine (the below linked NCR UK site claims 'M' stands for Memory, which is wrong according to what I was told back then). The engineers originally wanted to call it Card Random Access Processor, but it didn't pass marketing. CRAM was an NCR storage device (apparently the first mass storage device as I just learned). Here's a link to a site which shows you the machine and this site describes CRAM a bit. The CRAM shown in the UNO photo doesn't appear near as big as the unit we had. There doesn't seem to be much info Googled on CRAM.

Originally posted by GNEP
You're just showing off about your age Xortam

I'd gladly shave off some years given the chance. But yeah, I've been around computers for quite awhile.

Originally posted by VJ
Hey, I have got CP/M+ lying around on 3" disks (192 KB) ...

You mean those "newer" 3 1/2" disks don't you? Those were exciting when they came out.

[cjolley]

Nice CRAM article here .
interesting
chuck

[xortam]

CRAM

Here's a decent description of CRAM ...

... NCR had solved the random access problem by putting 8 metallic rods across the top of a hopper and hanging 256 mylar cards from the rods. The ends of the cards were notched in a very clever way so that each of the 256 cards was individually "addressable" by turning the rods. Programs sent an instruction to the CRAM unit to address a particular card, the unit caused the correct combination of rods to rotate, and the card was dropped down into the hopper where a vacuum grabbed it and pressed it onto a drum which rotated under a Read/Write head. This system gave random access within about 200 milliseconds to nearly a megabyte of data (if my memory serves me correctly), and we thought it was fantastic. ...

A CRAM deck is simply the stack of 256 mylar cards (each about a foot long maybe), which are stored in a plastic box.

[cjolley]

PS and a funny story about them here

[xortam]

Originally posted by cjolley
PS and a funny story about them here

Didn't see that. I need to poke around that site some more sometime. Feelin' like an old geezer now.

BTW ... the CRAM unit we had must have been about 15 feet wide by 7 feet tall and would sound like a jumbo jet (especially when the Plexiglas doors were opened).

[VJ]

Originally posted by xortam
You mean those "newer" 3 1/2" disks don't you? Those were exciting when they came out.

Nope, I mean 3" disks, as used by Schneider and some Commodore machines
in the late 1980s. They looked a bit like the 3.5" ones (hard plastic
casing, disk itself is behind a sliding door), but could hold less than
192 KB.

(and before anyone asks: no, I don't have a working 3" drive anymore )

Jörg

[xortam]

Originally posted by VJ
Nope, I mean 3" disks, as used by Schneider and some Commodore machines
in the late 1980s. ...

I never ran across those diskettes. Pretty small capacity for 3" at that time.

[GNEP]

I think those 3" disks were made as a bit of wrong guess at the future of the diskette market by one manufacturer or another, and Commodore and Amstrad (in the UK) bought a bulk lot of the drives and media for certain models of their home computers on the cheap.

[VJ]

http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/D_Joyce.HTML

It was 169 KB (unformatted), even worse than I thought...



Jörg

[borat]

thanks for that guys, ive just realised how good windows GUI is when messing around at the command prompt nd getting nothing done slowly

[Umfriend]

bah. CLI rules

[Faramir1966]

Workbench forever