Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Finished batch of PARC disks, got stand for my HP 2621A terminal

HP 1000 SYSTEM RESTORATION

Stand for 2621A (ET) Terminal

A friend found a base for my ET terminal and gave it to me, along with some cables, a keyboard and boards for the HP 1000 system. All I needed was the terminal and keyboard, the rest went to Marc to support his big HP collection.

FINISHED BATCH OF 25 CARTRIDGES FROM PARC

We finished up the remaining cartridges from the group of disk cartridges we borrowed from Xerox PARC, producing archive images of most of them. A few were already scratched, with two having serious bends to the edge of the platter, but most were read okay.

These old disks have surfaces that are deteriorating - specifically the binder that holds the iron oxide to the aluminum platter is allowing some release of surface powder. These build up on our disk heads and either cause a crash immediately, if sizable, or require us to remove, clean, remount and realign the heads. 

These will be returned to PARC and a new group of 25 cartridges will come over to the lab for archiving in the coming weeks. Eventually everything will be saved from these packs and they can be delivered to the Computer History Museum physical archives. 

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