Not so much DIY, but H&S? Fail

[Mickymoody]

I used to manufacture hard drive systems, ie big boxes containing a PSU, controller card(s), and a harddisk, before PC's became big business, but for Atari and Amiga owners, would love to hear from anyone that had such a system...

Anyways, my job was to fit the controller, cabling and hdisk, test, and format it, and install software, and box it up, the PSU was pre-installed.

I used to deal with returns also. So one return had the power switch mounted on the front. Which we didn't supply. So removing the case, which had to slide off forwards, revealed a chocblock, to the new switch. Which prevented the lids removal.

NOW THE BRAINDEAD BIT; If it's through familiarity, or repetition, or boredom, which equal stupidity; I disconnected the chocblock, to release the lid, to get access to the workings, to leave two live wires poking about. No idea that it was still plugged in, no special trips in the workshop, so I dive in, and ZAP! My hand is thrown into an overhanging shelf, and the equal and opposite force of that throws my hand back onto the wire, ZZAP!! Crack! Another rabbit punch into the shelf above. Fortunately, that was enough, otherwise I'd be there to this day.

My hand looked like something that had been through a blender, both burned, and bruised.

And all that happens in a split second.

Seperately..we got a return one day...a nice shiny flightcase, with foam cut out to retain one of the hdisks that I built. But no details of a fault, no address, and no return address...The flightcase cost more than the hdisk..no idea who sent it..

So it was tested, it was formatted, but blank. No errors, nothing wrong, someone formatted it. Good to go.

Then a few months later, I gets an angry phone call, where's my effing music you loser, you steal from me!..and I'm like eh?

I'm getting verbal from the lead singer of UB40, that had their music stored on that harddisk.....while they were locked up for drugs on the Isle of Wight.

I also used to get anoymous phonecalls, from the devs, and manufacturers, playing one another off. Fishing for info. Bit like spying. Very covert, and exciting at 17.

Anyone has a harddisk system for an Atari or Amiga?

 

[ironsidebod]

Hi Mickey,

Sounds like a nasty inury but crazy times nevertheless!

I was well into the ST many moons ago and still have a working ICD hard drive set-up of the style you talk about!

Was it ladbrook(sp?) computing you worked for?

Phil

 

[joinerjohn]

I too used to own an AtariST. Bought it just to run Cubase on. The ST quickly became the music industry standard computer for recording and sequencing midi information on , mainly due to the fact that Sam Tramiel the then boss of Atari, chose to incorporate midi in and out sockets directly onto the computer.
Apparently Madonna did a world tour around the late Eighties/early Nineties and the Atari ST's were the only computers that didn't breakdown whilst on tour.

 

[Donkmeister]

I was told (by someone who knows these sorts of things) that the reason ST's stuck around so long in the music field is because they used a "proper" hardware clock for their midi interface, but most PC systems (apart from the super-expensive pro-interfaces) use something derived from the operating system.

On the Amiga front, I was one of the 4 or 5 people who actually bought a Commodore CDTV! It's still up in my parents' loft somewhere, I had the add-on keyboard and disk drive. My bro had an A1200 with an internal hard-drive, not quite the big old SCSI units Micky would have been building, but with a whopping 120 megabytes it was an unimaginable amount of space.

One of the faults with the later Amigas (A600, 1200, 3000 and 4000) was the ability to physically destroy your hard-disk from the operating system. The letters pages on all the Amiga mags were chock full of people who had chosen to do a "low-level" format and now knackered their hard-drive beyond repair. If I recall it was because the computer tricks the OS into thinking the IDE drive was actually a SCSI drive, but a low-level format could only be done on SCSI drives without FUBARing the file allocation table.

 

[Mickymoody]

Hi Mickey,

Sounds like a nasty inury but crazy times nevertheless!

I was well into the ST many moons ago and still have a working ICD hard drive set-up of the style you talk about!

Was it ladbrook(sp?) computing you worked for?

Phil

If it's ICD, sounds like Third Coast Technology manufactured it? That's where I worked. I recovered from the injury, youth on my side and all that, John, the choice at the time was an Atari with built in MIDI, or an Amiga, that loaded the OS from floppy at that time (Workbench 1.1 - I had 1.2 version!) - still very buggy and Unix biassed?

Donk - the comment regarding the hardware clock has some meat behind it, as the company were at the cutting edge of 'genlocking' at that time, which involved framing computer graphics to a moving picture at the time, ie for credits or special effects, but basically the architectecture at the time, wasn't good enough, so needed a supercharged Atari, hence the later mods, 68020, with a co-processor, additional RAM, modfied ROM, etc..but by then, others had developed more and better alternatives.

You bought a Commodore CDTV? I bought a Philips CDi, and when it broke, I bought another, as I still believe that it has more potential than even the latest computers, if the technology is evaluated.

Remote control, internet access, DVi games, (ie films you interact with), not seen that yet on the PS3/Wii/XBox...was able to play DVDs when they came out, additional kit, such as a keyboard available.

My modern day DVD player still plays those early edition DVD generic versions, although you do have to change the disk half way through the film! And Philips CDi disks are readable on a PC.

So maybe a Philips CDi can be ressurected into a under TV solution, for web access, DVD player, games player, and PC all in one?

Oh - on another note; Donk, I found it a REALLY BAD idea to store my old computers in the loft. Even my Sega Megadrive nearly gave up the ghost, as dust and carp gets into the slots/drives/controllers, and they don't work anymore....

For all you retro kids that remember the Amiga/Atari era, then you must recall the BBC era, of typing page after page after page of code, onto a BBC computer, only for it to say "Error at line 70"...........????

 

[gregers]

yep i remember that,i had a commadore vic 20 with an impressive 16 k ram pack that went up its arse,many a saturday wasted with a vic20 mag typing in for a so called game to be told errors every where,iirc i dont think any of the code games printed in the mags did i ever get to work,
but that was about as far as my computer skills went

i remember when i was at school a m8 was doing various types of programming,in fact it turned out he knew more then the computer teacher and was left alone to do whatever he wanted,most lessons he used to invent games etc.clever bloke.

 

[Mickymoody]

yep i remember that,i had a commadore vic 20 with an impressive 16 k ram pack that went up its a**e,many a saturday wasted with a vic20 mag typing in for a so called game to be told errors every where,iirc i dont think any of the code games printed in the mags did i ever get to work,
but that was about as far as my computer skills went

i remember when i was at school a m8 was doing various types of programming,in fact it turned out he knew more then the computer teacher and was left alone to do whatever he wanted,most lessons he used to invent games etc.clever bloke.

I'm sure the magazines posted typos, so you would buy their magazine the next week (remember this is before internet!)..

BUT a VIC 20 ? Those were the cheap solution to the C64 weren't they? I went even more bizarre, the upstanding Texas Instruments TI99/4A..

There is an emulator for PC for this, and the games are cool, and it also has programming.

I recall the Amstrad CPC464, that had a series of adventure games, but I never really experienced that? Green screen, miner type game? Anyone?

The game that I miss mostly, is Chocks Away, on the Archemedes computer, the dynamics of the game were so realistic, on dual play, but the Archemedes computer died a death.

 

[Mickymoody]

If anyone has a MAME reconstruction of the game Chocks Away, on the Arc, then I will personally give them a hug.

Munchman, and TI Invaders or Mousetrap, gets a little boring after 20 years, still a little fun - better than your average flash game.

 

[ironsidebod]

If it's ICD, sounds like Third Coast Technology manufactured it? That's where I worked. I recovered from the injury, youth on my side and all that,

It is ICD - memories eh?? The big quantum is a later addition but no longer likes to fire of it's own accord. The orignal quantum is still going strong some 20 years later! 155Mb in total, seems a world away...

 

[Mickymoody]

Those boxes had a rough feel to them didn't they? The Third Coast boxes were metal, and more elongated, the ICD card was as is in the picture, the PSU had a cover, but the hdisk was normally in front of the ICD card, or a blank was fitted, and positioned as in the photo, as 5.25" drives were often used, probably before the era of this box, as I think the max was 65Mb..

Or a 3.5" hdisk, with a frame, to fill out the blank at the front.

The Quantums were the Daddies. They were the serious end of hdisks..and even into the late '90's you can get them going by a squirt of WD40 on the external drive motor (most used on the Western Digitals of the era), and a sharp crack on a desk, to free the heads...but often resulted on swapping over the control board from another hdisk..You just throw away an IDE disk away today! Especially for 10-65Mb worth of data!

Isn't it nice to see an unprotected PSU, waiting to zap someone? In the current society of health and safety?

Great photo, thankyou.