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Oh man this is so good! Few people would like this, but today the outreach is global, so we have some dozens of it haha ah oh yeah, convergent technologies rocks big time and their logo deserves a game or a rock band

So... The emulator needs audio circuitry & possibly some heavy servos. To emulate the Kachunkachunka part.

So I don't have anything as old or exotic as a Hawk drive, but I do have a 4GB compact flash card as a hard drive in a Pentium 1 system as the original hard drive died. I miss the seeking and reading noises. I will be finding a replacement hard drive because the noises are part of the experience.

In the UK that date also moves but is set at 40 years. Currently January 1st 1984….

Procom plus has a BBS build into it. It was my first BBS as my dad had procom plus for work. Once I got my BBS going I switched to TriBBS. Back when I had a 8086.. Ah miss those days.

The grail for CDC drives would probably have to be a 9760 which is a multi-platter drive with 40MB of removable storage. It was also one of the fastest drives on the market when it came out in 1973, and was the first drive to use the SMD interface for which SCSI conversion kits exist. It was also made in 80MB, 150MB and 300MB versions.

30 years and older is vintage for computers.

I love those trapezoids, but then I love all those crazy '70s CRT terminals! A real hard drive is always best, but a disk emulator should be fine for fallback and for travel. You can't always throw a 100-lb hard drive in the van and drive around with it. As for the cut-off, yeah, the late 90s are kind of okay. And I have no problem with new homebrew designs from old parts. I just love the 70s and 80s electronics and programming both. I like to say that classic computers are easier to work on than classic cars because they can take up so much less space, but of course so much of this channel is about working with computers that aren't much smaller than classic cars.

6:35 you can tell you are both PUMPED about VCFSW. Love it!

And so comes another t-shirt: "Get the kachnka, kachnka going on"

Oh man, DE manglers. 3741 and a dozen dual 3742 fed the Sys36. Sneakered. Also used 5250/3180s over twinax. Girls were keying in lic reg for prod. Also other jobs. Fun. Get this, I had to assemble all the data, rewrite a 'master' 8 inch and pass it to the Sys3 and write with THAT to tape. No comm 3 <=> 36 No protocol convertor between the twinax and coax. EDIT: somewhere in South America is a box of 8" disks that I copied over from DE program. Very customizable. DE Entry or similar. It's on the box!

EXCUSE ME BUT this is RUclips shorts not longs! Love to see the long version of your intro at last. 🚀

So you basically want to build an TI-990/4 clone... I wonder if Al Kossow still has his Diablo drive tester?

Ironically my "like" number was "486" which would be a nice machine to restore and bring.

I’d say Usagi is just as much of a rockstar. Your work with these old and really cool machines are awesome and also helps us find others who make content about them (like this very show!). Just wish you could get your hands on a Cray-1, it’s still my favorite supercomputer of all time :)

A lectern is a piece of furniture with a slanted top surface, typically used for holding books, papers, or notes during a lecture, speech, or presentation. It is often found in classrooms, lecture halls, churches, and other venues where public speaking or teaching occurs. The slanted surface helps the speaker or reader to easily view and manage their materials while standing.

I love these episodes. Both of you just light up with just joy and it’s so contagious

Nothing wrong keeping the hard drives going in a fixed display museum setting but you need reliability for one that is going to be on the road and I don't think people would fault you for emulating it or at least have it as a backup you can swap in if it means that it will stay running to be enjoyed but that's me.

I love your vibes!

HDD emulators - yes. The real drivers are just too fragile. At least have it as a fallback solution. Even if you hook it up, you can still working on the drive, but in the meantime you have a machine that keeps running. Vintage age - I draw my line at 1995. Basically anything from before Windows 95. The reason, that was a line that finally turned the colorful, vibrant, 80s home computer era into a quasi Wintel monoculture on the desktop, which I despised back then. However, I completely understand that some people are also nostalgic about 90s PCs with Windows, and that's fine. To be honest, I also have a bunch of Super Socket 7 boxes, that I treasure - though they run other systems, not WIndows. But 1989-1990 just feels very arbitrary. Amiga 2000 is from '91. Amiga 1200 from '92? An Atari Falcon from 1994? A pre-PPC Mac? How are those not vintage? :) Even 1984 is a line that makes more sense, as that largely predates the 16bit homecomputer era.

I suspect that even if you had gotten the system up and running with an emulator backup, it wouldn't have been long before you felt tempted to fiddle with the disk some more. At least I can see myself doing that.

I think there's not really a good "age" for vintage but more of a metric of how rare or unusual something is. I LOVE to see machines you never see in the wild.

Spotify for Podcasts…

I now feel really old knowing you both are younger than I am! But I’ll just keep telling myself that having fun with old tech like this (reminding me of my past) is what’s keeping me young.

If there was only a way to have the hawk spin up and ca-chunk-a-chunk but still run the data off the emulation, best of both worlds! As cool as emulators are, nothing beats the feel of the old school equipment especially something that not many of us ever experienced.

If you have a drive with dead or missing heads, but will otherwise spin up and move the head assembly, Frankenstein an emulator into it that can move the head assembly in time with the emulated track changes. People could experiemce the kachunkachunka while it responds like a functioning drive.

I worked on instrumentation tape drives from early 80's to 2001. When we tape types heard of disk "head crash" we always smiled that this never happens with tape. Much higher data rate and density on tape vs. disk was a tradeoff for all manner of other horrible happenings with tape. In this battle, disk won. So I am curious - what is (was?) the main cause of period disk drives head crash?

Emulation is a great option for most people to experience vintage computers who don't have the space for storing and don't have the capability to repair such machines. So it's even cooler to see the authentic machines in person, and I feel emulating a harddrive does take away a little from the experience it doesn't entirely hurt anything eighter drives do cash in ways that can't be recovered and repairing them at some point may not be possible I wonder if anyone is working on recreating the hardware components or finding a way to reproduce some of the more popular hardware. Maybe coming up with authentic sounding Emulation and vibration recreation with drive emulators it's not for everyone but the older these machines get the harder it will become to source donor parts and Emulation should go beyond function and emulate the noise and vibration I love listening to 80s and 90s harddrives spinning up and seeking.

Isn't 25 years at least one definition of "vintage"? I think that's true with cars anyway. But maybe anything before 1990 or so? Early Macs would be "vintage", right? The Wikipedia article for "vintage computer" claims Silicon Graphics workstations are "vintage", but they were used in the mid to late 90's. Definitely anything made after 1997, the year the first VCF happened, would seem wrong to be called "vintage" in my opinion. That will obviously change in another 5-10 years.

Google just got rid of their podcast so I would like to know how to get podcasts on my android phone.

i think its hard make a date on what is vintage and not because .i don't consider a high end pc from 2007 as vintage it can even run windows 10 but a low end pda with windows ce or palm os or Symbian could be seen as vintage since its just obsolete and uses very archaic hardware and software and design that has no modern equivalents. but another strange thing about 2000s and late 90s computers is that something like RUclips could have worked on them in theory .but it doesn't anymore because RUclips changed around a lot of things same for most of the internet even wikipedia wont work .so trying to play a youtube video on those computers now is way harder than in 2005. and you have to pre download the video and play it offline. i like to divide things into a few different eras today to 2012 is modern because that is when windows 8 came out and most of the things i use now existed in 2012 . 2012 to 2001 is old most of the hardware is not very usable anymore apart from high end systems. but these systems could handle doing a lot of modern things well its just that with the internet you are going to have a hard time using it the same way you did when it was new. there was also some strange stuff still coming out like the handheld systems i mentioned and that short period you could get a dedicated card just to improve physics in games . 2001 to 1993 is retro or early modern i am not sure what to make of this era but it was the begging of modern computing with multimedia and the internet and cd rom but while thing started getting more standardised. you still had odd stuff like sun workstations or the be box .and on the pc you had a period when the first 3d gpu's came out and you need a sperate card for 3d and 2nd graphics and every card had its own look and way of rendering graphics and had games that only worked on certain cards and sound cards also still mattered .so it was quite different from modern computing. 1993 to 1977 is vintage i think its because in 1993 the c64 and zx spectrum and most of of the old micro computers got discontinued leaving only pc and mac not counting handheld and high end systems like sun workstations. and things were just very different compared to modern times with how many unique systems you had every company as doing its own thing .and the culture was very different sometimes in a bad way like certain companies looking down on video games but its extremely interesting for a collector .and pre 1977 the prehistoric age of computers because very few people used computers back then so they may as well didn't exist in the view of most people and its very hard to collect those computers .

When I was working for HP, I got to see a lot of future computers that were in pre-production. The head of Manufacturing at the time said. "You know how tell if a computer is obsolete - if it is shipping, it is obsolete".

Loved this episode! I tend to have two levels of "vintage" - but I cut my teeth in the late BBS early "public" internet days - now, that's "old" to me, vintage being pre-90's and antique being pre-80's

My $0.02 on your questions: Given the complexity and fragility of hard drives, combined with the fact you can't get replacement parts for them, I think it's totally OK to emulate the drives. Save the working physical drives for being able to archive any data packs that may surface in the coming years. Sure having the table shake is cool, but if you think about it, most users even back in the day using a terminal would be in a different room than the drive so they wouldn't experience that either. And I also consider the term "vintage" to be 25+ years old in the computer world. Windows 98 is in the clear. Windows 2000 is on the cusp but I'll give it a pass. WinXP, nope- not yet at least!

I'd use the 1985 cutoff myself for vintage computers. Why? Because it's memorable on multiple fronts. It's the early half of the biggest decade for personal computing growth. It's also the year of the very last carbureted Mustang. It's the first year with DNS. It's the year that introduced the autofocus SLR camera. The NES came out in '85. Route 66 died, and Windows 1.0 was born.

My take is that you’ve got wonky power at a show and limited spare physical drives should you get a full platter crash. Use something to emulate the fixed harddrive bubble, and you can leave the removable pack unmounted. Just not a ton of hawks available to sacrifice anymore. Also permits a more stable platform that allows folks to drive the Centurion OS. Also also, may save your back with reduced weight. 😂 You do you though.😊

Pentium 2 we don't call vintage, we call it e-waste :)

24:00 Hrmm....if you can get the emulator to slow itself to the same timing as a Hawk drive, could you gang the two together and just run an ailing Hawk with the heads lifted, mirroring the emulated activity? You'd get the whirrrr and kachunkachunk but have 100% reliable data coming down the pipe from the emulator.

Mechanical stuff: use it or lose it

Using an emulator might be "interesting" but it should not be faster than the real thing. And if possible, make the right, real noises and shaking... Maybe by putting the emulator inside a drive that has crashed heads....

31:43 ok i am still significantly younger than you but i expected you to be older because or your grey hair and you got some of the oldest items out of any retro computer youtuber .so i assumed you were early gen x but you grew up in a vaguely similar time period .i also collect things older than me but that is easy because computers were more common when i was born.

It got it's name Lector because the Project managers constantly stood behide the unit a the programmer was working on it giving the room a lecture on what not to do and how to do it right.

low-power software-defined radio base-stations to emulate 50 year old cell phone networks to get the original experience sounds pretty neat to me, although it will likely require some coordination with regulatory authorities. device security and crypto has a possibility of being broken in the future. I'd like to think jailbreaking an early cellphone will be as easy in the future as cracking a crypt() password file from the 80s today. yes, kachunk kachunk has no physical proxy. I still have very fond memories of working with a decstation that had a couple expansion boxes with full-height 5.25" drives. The head movement transferred through the desk to the keyboard and you could literally feel what the disks were doing rather than only hear the head chirps. my alma mater had a pair of Sequent Symmetry S81s, ("itchy" and "scratchy",) both with Fujitsu Super Eagles which I assume are descendants of the drives you have. In the twilight of their working lives, one of them handled NNTP for the school, with the news spool handled by the Super Eagles. The machine room's air conditioner died when they were decommissioned.

Unlistenable audio. Sounds like you’re both in a shower or stairwell together on an A.M. radio

I see nothing wrong with emulation as a backup - it takes away from the real thing, but a partially working real thing is better than a nonworking thing.

One thing that might make the emulator more fun is to record the "kachunka-kachunka" sounds and have the emulator play back the sound when it's 'accessing' the drive

An idea regarding using an emulator at a show---have the full drive, and use the real hard drive, but at a scheduled time or times during the show. This reduces the chance of problems, and risking the vintage and somewhat delicate hardware. Use the emulator the rest of the time. That would allow those who really want the experience to schedule their time at the show so they can have the experience, but still let others who are less concerned about having the actual hard drive experience the chance to experience the rest of the computer's interesting features. Just an idea to allow the "best of both worlds". Love your channels, and love this collaboration!

In our museum we have the only PDP-9 in existence that is fully operational. We have a "desktop" PDP-8 as well. We probably jabe the largest collection of PDP equipment around. We also have a PDP guru who keeps it all running. If you ever need expert PDP help, let me know

Funny how I haven't done a lowlevel format of an RLLor MFM drive since the late 80s, but I still remembere debug g=c800:5. Crazy what the brain stashes away. I am loving your channel. It's got so much fantastic content. /spins propellar hat.

As far as the Hawk drive is concerned, at least no one tried to spit on that thang!