New answers tagged mainframe
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Reading through the other answers, it seems like the college I went to was somewhat unusual in this respect.
In 1982, they had an (already fairly old) CDC Cyber 170 (model 720--pretty much the bottom ...
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1
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
The CDC 'washing machine' drive was common about 1985. This held 300 MB in a demountable platter set in a blue plastic case, that pulled out upwards. We typically ran with two drives - one for the ...
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
In 1984-85 my school had a VAX 11-780(?), dedicated to the freshman class, which was 149 students, who each had a disk quota of 200 blocks. That's a mere 15 MB of storage for the frosh. Obviously, ...
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1
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
My university had a CDC Cyber 170 mainframe for a short time. I started in Fall of 1984, and the Freshmen programming classes were done on it. The university acquired it in 1981 and it was replaced ...
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3
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
This is just past the cut-off of "the 1980's" as this was from an installation dated around the opening of the new computer lab system as November 26, 1990. This was for an IBM 3090-170J ...
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
A typical Soviet BESM-6 mainframe installation (single processor) in the mid to late 80s would likely have up to 8 units of 7.25 Mb IBM 2311-compatible drives, and up to 8 units of 29 Mb IBM 2312-...
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Our university had two mainframes, one for the administration, and one for computer science. They each had two fastrand II drum units that stored 88 megabytes each.
My wristwatch has more "core&...
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8
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What was IBM VS/PC?
"Virtual Storage Personal Computing" seems to have been mostly as per the Wikipedia article, software for a distant IBM mainframe running a VS-family operating system. You needed a way to ...
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6
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Variation in Use Case
The "main problem" for any answer might be that being a mainframe already spans several magnitudes. For IBM/360ish machines that already started with a 1:20 spread ...
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19
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Marburg University in Germany has put the complete configuration of their IBM 4381 as of Dec 31, 1987 online. They list five "magnetic disk units" (Magnetplatten-Einheiten) of 2.52 GB each, ...
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13
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
In the early 80s, I was aware of a Burroughs mainframe running a building society with of the order of 3GB of back-end storage on a half dozen disk packs.
The installation was due to be upgraded from ...
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Well, no-one really thought of a -20 as a 'mainframe' - that was an IBM word.
The late 1970s, early 1980s disk in DEC was an RP06 drive, 176MB. Maybe two or three of those. These were removable-...
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