[OT] G4 goes West

[stephen barncard]

Richmond -  you might consider copying your old ZIP disks to someplace safer
 as soon as possible - they seem to have some kind of 'disk rot' and can die
quickly in a few years. Remember zips are still 'floppy disks' with higher
density and the failed 'Bernoulli' technology. All of your old zips will fit
in a tiny corner of your current hard drive. There's not much between your
archive and the 'ping of death' (zip drive users know what I mean).

iOmega has made a lot of junk using this bernoulli technology and it was so
unreliable across their product line over that I refuse to buy anything with
iOmega in the name, even today. I bought into the format big time, so
desperate I was for storage. Fortunately for me it all went to Hard Drive in
1999 and I haven't looked at it since!

I remember when Solid State Logic (maker of over-rated professional audio
consoles) finally offered a  'hard drive' for their console series in 1994.

SSL for years had relied on a very ancient mini computer (PDP-8 type) with
some questionable hacks ( the graphics card was a BBC hobby computer grafted
onto a blank card ) and legacy hardware, including the disc interface called
SASI ( the predecessor to SCSI) which are / were pretty much unobtainable.
These interfaces were hooked up to 8" SASI floppy drives.

So what was the new 'hard drive' ?? A SASI 8" Bernoulli in a huge plastic
case. They also offered a pair of SASI 400k plastic-type 'floppy' drives in
 a rack mounted chassic for only $2700.

[more OT rambling below]

It was so ironic that non-technical people were so enamored with the SSL,
not knowing how really ancient the control systems was.  We techs were
constantly putting it down for its design shortcuts and mistakes, but we had
to work on it because it was responsible for more 'hits' than any other
single console and the brand brought in the business. The engineers just
learned the string of keystrokes and the ones that could figure it out
became stars ( read: Bob Clearmountain ) and the others had assistants run
it.

The biggest irony was that as I brought modern computers into the studio
(ok, Macs) in the late 80s and the audio engineers started using them for
email and amusement, the semi-command line interface of the SSL really
showed how far we'd come. We spent hours trying to figure a way to simplify
the interface using our new macs, but the SSL just had no hooks for outside
control and the core code itself was a labyrinthine noodleworks of
'spagetti' code with no source - it was in some guy's head - and he had left
the company.  There are still hundreds of these things out there today.



On 12 June 2010 06:22, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Back from the dead (or very nearly):
>
> Well:
>
> I removed one of the hard disks in the G4 MDD from the cage that sits
> over the heat sink; allowing me space to install an 80 mm 12 v fan
>
-------------------------
Stephen Barncard
San Francisco