B800 Re: Burroughs B1955

From: Hans B PUFAL <hansp_at_citem.org>
Date: Sat Jul 24 08:14:02 2004

Joe R. wrote:

> The thing that I remember about the B800 (or B80?) was that it used an
> 8" floppy drive. I'd never seen one before. Before that we used tapes to
> load all the SW and to IPL the Burroughs machines.

Indeed, I worked on the development of the B80 and the 8 in floppy was
the system disk for some configurations. It held 1 M byte

> I remember the
> instructions for the B800 said that the floppy disk should be changed every
> 40 hours! That's less than a standard work week! And I remember the disk
> weren't cheap in those days but thinking oh well, banks own them and they
> can certainly afford the costs.

I suspect the 40 hour was working hours, so unless the disk was
permanently operational it should last considerably longer. I don't
recall any similar notices for the B80 floppy disks.

   -- HansP
Received on Sat Jul 24 2004 - 08:14:02 BST