Posted on 07/25/2017 6:12:16 AM PDT by gaggs
No computer can be hacked if it isn’t connected to the Internet. You can bet these computers do not share with the world wide web.
Nope. Not the 8-inch ones.
My first real job was working for IBM in 2000 and we still had a shop floor control program written by a team of programmers in Pascal in the ‘80s. Management spent million$ to replace it with state of the art shop floor control systems but at certain parts of the process (cutting a wafer into 1000s of heads) they were not able to replace the program because the newer programs ran too slow and made bottlenecks.
The team that wrote the control system had retired except for one cranky old character that management hated and repeatedly tried to fire. But he had become irreplaceable to the business as the only one who could support the legacy program. When I needed things done I would show up with a can of Pepsi and listen to him complain about the systems they were trying to replace his with and him brag on how good his program was while he would move my request up to the front of the queue and get it done right there.
Something about the discipline of having to fit your algorithm into a limited number of precious punch cards made that generation of programmers wizards at writing tight, well optimized code that ran fast and light on memory. He bragged his program was so well optimized that the average response speed to the shop floor was less than the rated seek times of the drives while the newer software had to do several seeks on the drives before they could respond to the shop floor. All those seeks added up to operators waiting for the system before they could move parts.
Hacking is not just an internet-based thing.
I remember back in ‘92, when I had a Pentium computer, with just 100 meg, and it was infected with a virus (I forget what it was called). And, that computer had no capability to get on the internet. The virus had been spread via removable media.
...Floppy diskettes go round-and-round continuously...Yes, they do. 8" drives can unload the heads, but they don't stop the spindle motor.Nope. Not the 8-inch ones.
This is a lesson that hasn't been learned yet by banks and retailers. Some things just don't need to be connected to the Internet!
I wouldn’t be surprised if a krafty person could make 8 inch floppy drives at the kitchen table. They were created in a time when some people were still hand wiring magnetic core memory.
>> Nope. Not the 8-inch ones.
> Yes, they do. 8" drives can unload the heads, but they don't stop the spindle motor.
Actually, what I originally meant by "continuously" was "repeatedly" -- in other words, the magnetic oxide goes over the head many times during an operation, not once as in tape recording mechanisms, and therefore is subject to orders of magnitude more wear.
I designed and built both 8" and 5-1/4" floppy drive subsystems for my various home brew computers back in the 1970's and early 1980's, and I found that both size drives have controls for unloading the head(s), but (as I recall) only the 5-1/4" drives could shut off the motor without having to power down the drive electronics. The 8" drive motors were always on (Shugart).
However, it's possible that some 8" models could be spun down as well as the heads unloaded, I never had such myself. Probably it was because spinning up the 8" spindle (which had a substantial flywheel mass) took a few seconds, and even back then, operator patience was at a premium. The little drives spun up pretty quickly, since they have much less rotating mass.
I remember when agents would drop USB sticks in the parking lots. Unsuspecting employees would pick them up and stick them into their computer to see what was on it and infect their computers. Before that, viruses would be spread by floppy disk.
Hacking predates and is not dependent on the internet.
I meant to say 8 inch floppy discs.
Yep! (See comment #48 above) I didn't make the drive mechanisms myself, but I designed the controller electronics and built those from scratch, and I think I used my desk rather than the kitchen table...
My first setup required "hard sector" diskettes -- with a sector hole punched for every sector on a track (8 as I recall). But I accidentally purchased a package of "soft sector" diskettes -- only one "index" hole. So I had to remove the diskette medium from its plastic enclosure, punch a bunch of holes, and reassemble the enclosure. It worked, sort of.... I was VERY glad when the soft sector style took over for good. Hard sectoring was primitive.
I always found Hollerith cards and paper tapes quite messy.. 11 inch floppies shrank to 8 inch size, and eventually even smaller rigid disks. It still took a dozen and more to get anything loaded.. I can imagine these poor nuke operators if the disks were out of order in the stack.
I think I still have a copy of Leisure Suit Larry somewhere on floppy.
I learned my chops from the punch card guys also.
What passes for programming nowadays makes me laugh because I get paid by so many people to fix that crap.
Mine was eaten by a grue.
We really were cutting edge at the time weren’t we?
With our CGA monitors and 64 MB of RAM ... we were hot stuff!
Can’t we just emulate it on a Raspberry Pi? Run it off a 9V even /s
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.