In the mid-90s, I was working for an OEM of large industrial machinery. I was about nine months out of engineering school and had just completed my first major project. This particular project included the installation of the first PC-based HMI that my company (and the customer) had ever used. This HMI was a very complex system for its day.
The system also had extreme environmental challenges due to the shock, vibration, and dirt. We ended up with the Allen-Bradley T60 computer for hardware, which was about the only system on the market that would survive more than a week. I was also pushing the envelope of DOS and the available hardware, so much so that I needed a third-party memory manager to manually allocate each program to make it work.
One of the key features of our new PC-based HMI was that the customer could now extract fault information from the machine to analyze it in the office, and even store long fault and maintenance histories. Due to the equipment’s location, network cabling to the office was not possible and wireless connectivity was still a number of years off. However, "Sneaker-Net" (or in this case, "Steel-Toe-Boot-Net") was a breakthrough solution. The ability to save the fault data to a floppy disk and load it back to the computer in the office was a major development for our customers.
After a lengthy onsite commissioning process, I returned to the office and everything seemed to be going well for the customer. But that changed. I started getting phone calls from the electrical maintenance supervisor saying that the information downloading process was no longer working. This started an in-depth troubleshooting process. Was the raw data good on the HMI? Yes, shutting down the graphics still allowed the raw data to be read on the hard drive.
Was it copying correctly? Yes, the files could be reread after the download. It appeared to work every time, but the files were totally unreadable in the maintenance office. We even swapped out the floppy drives to see if the vibration on the machine misaligned the drive heads.
After going back and forth like this for some time with no solution, the only thing left was to walk through the process and see if there was anything anywhere that could be corrupting the data. I asked the electrical supervisor to tell me step-by-step what he did. He verified a freshly formatted disk -- good. He put the disk in the HMI drive -- good. He went through the proper download process -- good. He waited for the drive light to go out -- good. He removed the disk and put it in his shirt pocket -- oops.
Reading through all the things you had to do in that era brings back memories. The third party memory manager, the floppy disks to transfer data. The problem with the magnetized screwdriver... Much has changed, and improved, since those days. Fortunately, the storage devices we now have are much more resilient.
The other big change is that back then the Maintenance Station was considered a tool for the Maintenance Department, just like their meters and scopes. Same thing for the "lunchbox" computers (i.e., the precursor to the laptops and tablets) that were used for system support. Today's systems for those functions require multiple layers of signoff by IT.
Talking about the era of disks, I recently noticed that the icon for saving Word files (in the upper left-hand corner) is a floppy disk. Funny that's still the image that Word uses all these years after the disk era.
I used to work on hall effects so naturally we had tons of magnets lying around - we had to be super careful keeping them away from any media. I remember when 5 1/4" floppies came out in different colors - we thought that was SO COOL!
I remember the colors when they came out, too, Nancy. It seemed so surprising. I was never a big fan of the disk. They failed so often. I remember sending articles to magazines on those disks. Every so often the disk would arrive at the editor's desk unreadable. Quite a pain.
Kids today have no idea how dedicated you had to be in order to be a techie back in the day! 3 1/2"s were a big improvement and CDs were phenomenal...WOW! We can really store some stuff, baby!
Seems USB drives are the storage of choice now...which I must admit are much hardier - they are almost teenager proof! A friend of mine told me you can no longer buy a new car that will take a multiple CD deck even after market - USB ports are the only game in town.
At my first job out of college, I used a CAD station that had a 50 Mb hard drive and a 3 1/2" floppy. As there was no e-mail or network, it was hard working on a project was we had to save to floppies to transfer between engineers. We ended up installing compatible tape backups on the computers that would allow us to effectively transfer files between computers (as long as they were not above 50 Mb).
I have used the 3 1/2 inch floppy disk for many years and not had one fail, except for those that either got wet or had pop spilled on them. The cheaper drives were not so reliable, though.
But do you really want to give out multi-dollar memory sticks to pass out documents of only a few dozen K? when a floppy disk, not discounted, cost maybe 5 cents? And I do know several folks who have had memory sticks just die on them, and nothing was recoverable. At least from a disk it is often possible to recover most of a damaged document. IT might not be good for code, but recovering most of a document has a lot of value.
Also, we discovered that the 3 1/2 inch floppies were not so very easy to damage with a magnet, although it certainly was possible.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 3
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