Post #1167539
2026-04-13 17:33 UTC
Replies (4)
-
@bitsavers@oldbytes.space 2026-04-13 20:04
the use of a stylus for tracking must have been a nightmare. another doc I found said they were unreliable. you can see pictures of the media in cardboard boxes in the console desk drawer photo of the gamma-30 console from the bull musuem. it would be nice to get a photo of what one of the disks looked like. i wonder what the base material that the stylus moved across was
-
@jimluther@techhub.social 2026-04-13 18:39
@bitsavers@oldbytes.space When I worked as a field service engineer, I was amazed at all of the crazy products just IBM came up with. IBM printers, let me count the ways they could work.
-
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social 2026-04-13 23:59
@bitsavers@oldbytes.space And the block dot makes me think this was a hard-sectored format. This must pre-date things like FM, where they bit-stuffed the clock into the bitstream to allow synchronizing.
-
@vwestlife@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 15:12
@bitsavers@oldbytes.space There were some audio recording devices for dictation which used flat discs that had a magnetic surface where the audio would be recorded and played back, and also a groove that the tape heads would follow. This is the same idea, just used for data rather than audio.