> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company).
I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)
You still see interesting efforts today. Here is a dmesg from a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 booting 7.9 (released in May this year) that appeared on bugs@ just a few weeks ago (also, note who the person is that responds to that message):
You of course also have the absolutely insane luna88k support [1] and I have myself been looking into getting my hands on a landisk [2] box as the Hitachi SuperH CPU is fascinating (I only knew of it from old arcade boards and the Sega Dreamcast).
Because it's assumed that it's for desktop. The first iPhone demo had (if I recall correctly) the browser zoom into the NYT website. Which can work well.
I'd rather this than what I often see nowadays: sites with fixed width tables that overflow out of the mobile viewport with no way to view the info.
Because browsers, especially phone browsers, are broken.
A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.
The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
Very True, and one thing people forget, we need to keep the ability to read these old devices.
I was a operator (now admin) on a few minis in the early 80s that had these drives. The drive pack on the ones we had were removable and we used 256MB packs.
We would backup data from one drive to another on third shift, at the same time to reel tapes. The reel tapes back then where used for long term backup off site, the drives for short term on site. But who knows how many of these packs are out there just sitting around waiting to be read :)
I'd more bet that they are the critical infrastructure pillar everyone is scared to replace in a super important system, lol.
Maybe one of it saves the earth rotation control algorithm which the Earth Rotation Service requires for shooting their hidden ion cannons to keep it spinning.
I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)
NetBSD has wide old/obscure platform, with a wider community using it somewhat more actively on those.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=178663407424547
You of course also have the absolutely insane luna88k support [1] and I have myself been looking into getting my hands on a landisk [2] box as the Hitachi SuperH CPU is fascinating (I only knew of it from old arcade boards and the Sega Dreamcast).
[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
[2]: https://www.openbsd.org/landisk.html
(Or more precisely, not sure why "make the site look like ass" was chosen as the default, and making it look good is opt-in!)
I'd rather this than what I often see nowadays: sites with fixed width tables that overflow out of the mobile viewport with no way to view the info.
EDIT: I just checked. There are 77 HTML errors and warnings alone.
A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.
Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.
Ouch.
I was a operator (now admin) on a few minis in the early 80s that had these drives. The drive pack on the ones we had were removable and we used 256MB packs.
We would backup data from one drive to another on third shift, at the same time to reel tapes. The reel tapes back then where used for long term backup off site, the drives for short term on site. But who knows how many of these packs are out there just sitting around waiting to be read :)
Maybe one of it saves the earth rotation control algorithm which the Earth Rotation Service requires for shooting their hidden ion cannons to keep it spinning.