Solidstate disk drive for wheelchair from back in the day?

[spinnaker15136]

Was wondering if someone by chance might know this person I meet back in the day. I guess it was the early to mid 80s. Atari was pretty much in the mainstream for only a couple of years. Anyhow I met someone in Pittsburgh that designed and built a solid state disk drive for someone confined to a wheelchair.

 

Can't remember how I met this person. I did work for a computer store around then and I think we may have sold Atari for a very brief period. Don't remember if I met him there or perhaps it was at another store maybe even previous to when I started working there.

 

You have to admit that it must of been a heck of a feat to design something like that long before the internet.

 

Just throwing it out there in case someone happens to remember such a device being built.

 

 

 

[Rybags]

SSD was a pretty broad term before the modern day flash types came along.

 

There was bubble memory which was promising for a while and nonvolatile but didn't go really far.

 

I worked on mainframes and "solid state drives" were common - typically they were boxes with multiples of 32 Meg of RAM which were high speed and configured to look like normal volumes (although somewhat smaller, the typical smallest volume in the mid 80s was about 800 Meg). Fairly sure they could also have battery backup.

A common use was for paging since main memory sizes were usually 32-512 Meg and paging to mechanical drives was pretty slow.

[spinnaker15136]

SSD was a pretty broad term before the modern day flash types came along.

 

There was bubble memory which was promising for a while and nonvolatile but didn't go really far.

 

I worked on mainframes and "solid state drives" were common - typically they were boxes with multiples of 32 Meg of RAM which were high speed and configured to look like normal volumes (although somewhat smaller, the typical smallest volume in the mid 80s was about 800 Meg). Fairly sure they could also have battery backup.

A common use was for paging since main memory sizes were usually 32-512 Meg and paging to mechanical drives was pretty slow.

Yes. That is it. He said it was bubble memory. I was thinking in today's terms.

 

Yeah I used to work on a PDP 11/02 system that loaded its program and database all from cassette tape. It would take at least a half hour to load. What should happen was it booted up into its operator terminal software. Often you would get the deadly @ symbol which meant you had to load all over again. But I had one system that had magnetic core. If there was a power failure and the battery backup failed (which happened often too) all I needed to do was restrat the software by jumping to an address.

[+x=usr(1536)]

FWIW, I can remember being at a demo c.1989 of an Acorn Archimedes with some form of battery-backed external RAM disk. It was functionally the same as any other attached storage device, but was nonvolatile as long as the battery was kept charged.

 

My recollection is that it was essentially a motorcycle battery in an enclosure with charging circuitry, RAM, etc.; it was designed to keep the RAM powered for an extended period of time in the event of power loss. Think of the beige metal APC shoebox UPSes from the late 1990s / early 2000s and that would be about the form factor of the one that I saw.

 

Cannot recall who made it, but do seem to remember that it was expensive in comparison to HDDs of the time while not offering the same amount of storage.

[+Nezgar]

Someone I know was telling me of a 512KB "Core Memory" drive that was probably intended for mainframe/minicomputer use but adapted to provide instant switching between 64 8KB cartridge games on an Atari 800. The thing weighed a ton, was the size of an appliance, sounded like a jet engine when it was running, but it would retain its memory when powered off.

[Rybags]

I'm fairly sure static RAM with battery backup has been common going back to the mid 80s at least.

 

Re HDD alternatives - random access devices haven't been competitive ever re pricing overall or per Megabyte until the modern day with cheaper flash drives (maybe except for optical drives but they suffer re speed and reliability).

[spinnaker15136]

I'm fairly sure static RAM with battery backup has been common going back to the mid 80s at least.

 

Re HDD alternatives - random access devices haven't been competitive ever re pricing overall or per Megabyte until the modern day with cheaper flash drives (maybe except for optical drives but they suffer re speed and reliability).

 

 

I don't think it used battery backup. Pretty certain it was bubble memory as mentioned above.

[+x=usr(1536)]

I'm fairly sure static RAM with battery backup has been common going back to the mid 80s at least.

Yep. I remember having a real-time clock cartridge for the ST around 1988/1989, and it was battery-backed. Thing is, that was just a CR2032 or similar inside of its case - the external RAM drive on the Archimedes was essentially powered directly from a UPS. It probably wasn't the first time that something like this had been done, but it was the first time that I saw it in action.

 

Re HDD alternatives - random access devices haven't been competitive ever re pricing overall or per Megabyte until the modern day with cheaper flash drives (maybe except for optical drives but they suffer re speed and reliability).

True. Interesting that not much has changed in that regard in 30 years, though the gap is (slowly) narrowing.