Floppies becoming obsolete

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:39:39 -0400
dan at geer.org wrote:

> Well, he had single handedly made the 3.5" floppy
> a standard so he expected to be able to do it again.
> (On the original Mac, he got Canon drives at cost
> on the very basis of the boast that he would make
Talk about incompatibilities...
I worked on a Burroughs mainframe in Miami. Our parent, Pillsbury had
Honeywell (former GE) 36 bit systems. The only media of ours that they
could read was punch cards. If we sent them a mag tape (EBCDIC) they had
to send it to a service bureau for conversion. 
We finally set up a communications system where we could send data (in
card images) to them. Yet, we were able to communicate with POS devices
(PDP8) in 1500 restaurants every night. (Converting 12 bit oriented
binary data to byte oriented data was done in COBOL with embedded
assembler no less). 


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20040909/8f49cffb/attachment.sig>