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Resurrection of a CFEI 100 KVA Induction Furnace
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awemawson:
We had quite a bit of kit on gas and oil rigs. Your Barrow one would be part of the Morcombe Bay field. I had staff on rigs there but loads of other places as well from Bacton in Norfolk to Port Harcourt in Nigeria as well as Orkney & Shetland with monitoring at Dyce near the airport.

Glad those days are over - my phone never stopped ringing day & night  :bugeye:
John Rudd:
I'm glad those days are gone too, the Easington terminal that I moved to after, had a Taylor system, again with Hawke disc drives.....Great when they had a head crash!! not!!    Especially at 2-3 am ...and got called to site to repair/rebuild....
awemawson:
Disks were a major step forwards. Mobil's Coryton refinery had two Argus 500's with Burroughs 2 megabyte fast disk storage - 20" platter, 100 heads each side flying on compressed air but these were fast memory access not for loading - that was from a paper taper reader.

I remember one night having to change the disk enclosure (a three man lift due to weight) and the reload took (I calculated) 14.1 MILES of paper tape. because it was from Fortran source code that had to be compiled on the way in  :bugeye:

I HAND WOUND every inch of that tape - it was a long night !

(An other enclosure change on a hush hush site involved taking the platter the length of the M6 under military escort  so that they were able to witness it being cut to pieces with oxy-acetylene - a bit extreme, but it did contain the NATO fleet deployment details !)
AdeV:

--- Quote from: awemawson on August 06, 2020, 04:35:48 PM ---(An other enclosure change on a hush hush site involved taking the platter the length of the M6 under military escort  so that they were able to witness it being cut to pieces with oxy-acetylene - a bit extreme, but it did contain the NATO fleet deployment details !)

--- End quote ---

It would have been just as effective, surely, to attach the platter to the back of the landrover on a piece of rope and drag it behind? By the time you reached the M6 it would have been ground into dust.... much shorter trip!

I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to miss those early days of computing; by the time I entered the fray, desktop PCs were normal, albeit not entirely across the organisation. A little prior to that, whilst at North Staffs. Polyversity (it actually changed to a "University" in the middle of my course), I got some experience with a DEC VAX machine, which left me with an enduring soft spot for VMS. To the point I currently have 6 MicroVAXes..... As much as I'd like an 8800, I don't think I've got suitable storage space for it!
awemawson:
Ade there were a myriad of ways that we could have ensured total destruction of the data, ranging from strong magnets, to acids to dissolve the nickle plate (magnetic layer) off the brass platter, but when you are dealing with these official bodies, and their 'expert' has made a plan they won't budge !

The easiest way would have been to force a 'head crash' on all 200 heads by over pressuring the flying mechanism . . .but no . . they probably wanted a nice day out . . but all they got was Wythenshawe in Manchester :lol:
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