In the 70s, Electronics was considered the world's most sought technology.
Computers
were somewhat holy and were housed in large air-conditioned rooms on "floating floors".
Unlike today's micros, 16-bit processors were built with
"Large Scale Integrated" (LSI) circuit and "bit slice" technology. Such
processors were found only in so called "mini-computers", the likes of the CDC's
Cyber17 or the
PACT, designed and built by Elbit Computers.
We used
Cartridge Disk Drives and
Tape (Vacuum Column Tape Transport) Drives for software and data storage.
The disk drives had two magnetic platters, one fixed and one removable (cartridge)
with a total capacity of no more than 10MB(!).
Lager disk drives, called
Storage Media Drives (SMDs) had a total capacity of 300MB(!), in large and
heavy removable packs containing up to ten platters.
Other peripherals used for data and programs storage and loading were
Card Readers for IBM punched cards or Suggart 8 inch flexible diskettes,
IBM (ball) printer, Centronics "matrix printers" or the larger and faster
"line printers" 300, 600 or 1200 Lines per minute(!) driven either by a drum
or a chain that pressed-printed the letters through an inked ribbon.
Occasionally we experienced a "hard disk crash" and were called on, to replace
the "scratched" magnetic platter(s) and heads. The newly installed heads had to be
re-adjusted ("cats eyes" technique) for "compatibility", using a specialised
Customer Engineer's cartridge ("CE pack"). To avoid such disk crashes, we
periodically vacuum-cleaned these drives and replaced their micro-filters,
as preventive maintenance.
![Elbit's PACT [1979] - Click for more details](images/s_PACT_bw.jpg)