I Bought the Biggest Hard Drive Ever Made For the PDP-11!

[HisVirusness]

Your PDP series will never cease to be interesting.

[HappyCat]

My company had a lot of legacy DEC equipment, mostly VAX but some PDP and Alpha. Being the only person old enough to have used it all and remember it all I got to do not only the legacy sys admin and software support but the legacy hardware support as well. Including trying to find working, not DOA, parts on Ebay. Kludging together old hardware to make new systems is an art form. This video brought back a lot of memories.

[digitaltoaster]

I have affection for the sound and tactile sensations of a spinning drive. it's a tangible part of my nostalgia for old systems.

[RodCleaves]

Dave, thanks SO VERY MUCH for the memories. When I worked at DEC in Maynard we were able to purchase rejected parts for 10% of MLP (Maynard List Price.) I built my own PDP 11/03 with both RX02 and RL02's. It heated my entire apartment and got me through my masters in computer science. My wife also worked at DEC, she stayed through the HP days while I jumped ship to Data General at the first smell of trouble. We were in different divisions. YES!!! Sticktion was a huge problem. I hadn't heard that word since about 1988 at DG.

[fonkbadonk]

Old HDD sounds are like ASMR to me. A friend's dad from elementary school (late/early 80s/90s) had a file server based on Netware with a bunch of old drives in his home office, where we kids would often hang out. It was a really cozy European timber frame house, heated with a charcoal oven, and his mom's cooking scents were always lingering in the air. It was such a peaceful and lovely location and time, and these sounds were always whirring and clacking in the background. That's where they take me back to, to this day.

[HappyCat]

There was a manufacturing problem when the RA90s rolled out, they all suffered from sticktion. My field service guy, he was like 6'5", would grab one by the handle and windmill it to dislodge the heads. (This technique also works on ketchup bottles.)

[kellingc]

I love your sense of humor - stereo instructions written by someone who's been up for 48 hours!

We had a 9 platter drive that was about 2' tall on our PDP 11/73. When my boss would give tours of the computer room, he'd lower the drive off the parking stand, Nd have me compile one of my pascal programs. We'd laugh at the drive walking across the computer room.

[martpr]

It's so cool that Dave's almost at 1 million subscribers so quickly.

[coldlyanalytical]

As a child I once visited a computer centre with a - wait for it - a PDP-1 (one, not eleven!)
It had a Type 24 disk drive .. with a capacity of ... under one megabyte!
The drive was mounted in a massive concrete block in the centre of the room.
The system monitor was large and circular like a radarscope.

[deechvogt]

It always amazes me that this old hardware can function so many years later. Thanks for sharing the epic tale of the DEC RA-73 spining rust hard disk drive.

[lesmorton]

The RK05 drives on my DEC LSI 11/23 were 2.5Mb removable disk packs. I thought we had all the storage we would ever need!

[virtuous-sloth]

16:14 That special feeling of watching a computer perform some long-running task that took you hours or days to figure out how to get all the moving part working together.

[XxXaRvoxXx]

You made me realize that even as a kid i was a spoiled little brat.. It felt like such a hazzle to enumerate a bunch of SCSI drives, and remembering to include the terminator.. But now i know better and can appreciate the magic of sata plug-n-play in a new light.

Thanks for sharing! 🥰

[karenhenson]

Totally hooked from the begining!! Got to have more of this!!

[vmisev]

Hey, congrats! Kudos for making working BSD - that tar trick is brilliant! 3:20 AFAIR DEC used to sell sound mufflers for hard drives under the name "DECwriter" 😉
You got extra points from me for golden key being actually yellow 👍
Thanks for the video, and please do more PDP and DEC videos 🙏

[annihilatorg]

Feeding all of those retro manuals into ChatGPT is brilliant.

[brianjohnson]

never used RA73's but did use RA70's on VMS, dual porting was an innovation, happy days

[Ranchhand]

Dave deserves a Presidential Award for resurrection of ancient computational machines !

[dugmeister]

This video series is great. I used PDP-11s at Uni and have a very soft spot for them.

[eugenezenzen]

What a great story and great storytelling, thanks so much for this video!