Re: [comphist] Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Michael Meissner <meissner@spectacle-pond.org>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 10:44:53AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> Okay, so they're 2.4 megabyte removable cartridges?  How big?  Are they tapes 
> or disk packs?  (I.E. can you run off of them or are they just storage?)  I 
> know lots of early copies of unix were sent out from Bell Labs on RK05 
> cartidges signed "love, ken"...

IIRC, rk05 was a removable disk drive, 1 platter to the assembly, about the
size of a large pizza box.  They were the standard disk drives for small DEC
machines of the era.  My memories from 30+ years ago, say they were maybe 10
pounds each.  I would imagine you are confusing tapes with disks (ie, tk<num>
instead of rk<num>) in terms of the release media Bell Labs sent out (at least
I never saw a disk with the media, and I did have a job of trying to port the
V7 compiler to a V6 system).  It could be the very early customers got disks,
and the later ones got tapes.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
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