The 8" floppies are about the oldest media I've actually had to use. As a journalist, we occasionally typeset our stories using this horribly antiquated piece of equipment that stored its results on 8" floppies, which we would then hand-deliver to the publisher.
From there, they'd generate a film with the text typeset upon it, which we'd wax the back of, so we could slide it on the mock-up sheets. We'd use blue pencils to mark errors (unless you're one of the damned idiots from the public affairs side of the office, who would wander in sometimes and make their own marks using a black ball-point pen, effectively forcing you to spend money on more film).
We've come a ways in publishing since then.
From there, they'd generate a film with the text typeset upon it,
which we'd wax the back of, so we could slide it on the mock-up
sheets. We'd use blue pencils to mark errors (unless you're one of
the damned idiots from the public affairs side of the office, who
would wander in sometimes and make their own marks using a black
ball-point pen, effectively forcing you to spend money on more film).
Fleeb - you forgot the x-acto blades and border tape. I miss the days of hand done graphic design.
CNC milling mashines still use punch tape for programming. they simply are more durable in a working environment.
most probably bigger sites network them.
Loved using x-acto knives to carve notches to do a double density job on an elephant disk (cause, ya know, and elephant never forgets)...
Tried the hole punch, but must not have been hole punch smart as I just ate the edge of the disk... Ugh. Well, even given that, I just loved dd'ing a disk over just programming a menu listing program on the other side of the 45 minute tape! Ah, the 5 minute wait to see if you just lost everything versus distributed code repositories... I might be showing my age some though ...
Let's try it!
Oct 28 2010 4:00pm from IGnatius T Foobar @uncnsrd
Subject: Re:
I wonder how that would compare in cost to simple cache memory on board
the drive assembly? It certainly has coolness factor.
I never got why they don't have one long strip of 'head' spanning the width of the disk, you could read the entire platter in one rotation. zero ns seek time.
How hard could that be?
I never got why they don't have one long strip of 'head' spanning the
width of the disk, you could read the entire platter in one rotation.
zero ns seek time.
How hard could that be?
From what I know of hard drive construction, the main issue with what you're describing is that the "head" would be reading singals from all the tracks at once. The problem with that is how to separate out the signals for each individual track. From a certain point of view, that really wouldn't be any different from a wireless radio having to sort out multiple digital bit streams.
However, that would mean that each track would have to be encoded in a way to distinguish it from the other tracks. That would most likely decrease the amount of actual data you could store on a track, or decrease the speed at which data could be read, or both. Either way, it would be added complexity to the drive electronics, which could up the cost.
Now, multiple discrete heads on the arm, on the other hand, would be able to read multiple tracks at once, but things get a little more complicated depending on how far apart the heads would be spaced and how data would be organized on the platter.
Drive Binder
I'm sure we're not the first people to think about multiple heads, though.
There's got to be a very good reason why it hasn't been tried.
Subject: Re:
If I'm reading Ford's message correctly, I think he is proposing one
head for every track? If that's the case, the problem is that you
probably can't build heads small enough for the track density of a
typical disk platter.
I'm sure we're not the first people to think about multiple heads,
though.
There's got to be a very good reason why it hasn't been tried.
yes, basically a head per track, but it wouldn't be an entire head, it would be something that could read the information off the track. I think the idea that you need an entire head assembly (whatever that is) is old and antiquated and I'm thinking by now there's some slick tricky way of reading off multiple (or even all) tracks at once and being able to separate out which track was which.
The reason multiple heads aren't done I'm sure are basically what spell said, it's expensive and doesn't buy you much.
And that wouldn't fly for most commercial uses, might as well buy two cheap drives and run them in parallel. There are your two heads.
Maybe there isn't enough important applications that require REALLY REALLY fast disk reads, or nowadays you just use flash or like those fucknuts at foursquare just keep everything in memory if it's that important that it go fast.
But you could probably kill flash on speed if you had a way to read all the tracks at once.
Or here's a good halfway idea. A head-bar so that you could tell the head which track to read without having to physically move it acrosss the platter.
You'd save tons of seek time. and wouldn't have to build anything as complex as something that could read all the tracks at once.