On Tue, August 19, 2008 12:06, William L. Maltby wrote: > > On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 11:50 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >> I don't recall that anybody referred to "DASD" connected to our IBM >> 1401; >> it was just "disk". Were we just a weird corner (I wouldn't swear they >> didn't use some weird term like DASD in the manuals, just that none of >> the >> people I worked with used it)? Or was that a later term, say from the >> 360 >> generation? >> >> (When I worked on the 1401, we were in fact well into the 360 generation >> chronologically, just not at the place I was working; that was in 1969, >> and we moved from the 1401 to a DEC PDP-11/20 just a couple of years >> after >> that.) > > Ditto here. But our 1401 stuff was being emulated on S360/30. During > that time, DASD became the lazy acronym used extensively to cover any of > the then-extant direct-access devices (drums, cylinders, "disks" - > euphemistically mounted in "pizza ovens (2314/19 IIRC). We emulated the 1401 on the DEC 11/20 for a while, first with a standalone emulator, later with a run-time system that integrated into RSTS and let us run the 1401 applications under time-sharing. I think of drums as being generally *before* then, and what are cylinders that differs from drums? But it *does* actually make sense to have a generic term for that class of storage; we just didn't have enough examples to need it, and "DASD" sounds stupid :-), and as an IBM mainframe term wasn't something we wanted to emulate. I suppose we're getting a bit far off-topic, but thanks for the stroll down memory lane! -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info