Adcadet
Storage Freak
I was reading at the Redhill site, and came across a discussion of MFM and RLL, something that is totally new to me. At least I think it is.
My first computer was a Tandy, I believe a 386 that I got in the fall of 1991. My second computer, which we got around 1994, was a hand-me-down/gift from a distant not-related-by-blood but very nice guy, who I imagine is very similar to our own Merc. It was made of all used components, and over it's lifetime of about 4 years, nothing ever broke on it. The case was an old, all steel, heavy duty case that in today's terms would be called a full tower. I believed it used a SCSI drive, definitely plugged into a controller card that was in what looked like an ISA slot. I remember this guy talking to my dad and me when we picked it up, and I distinctly remember his saying that the hard drive, because it was somehow special, contained double the amount of storage as a regular drive. I believe when formatted it gave us a total of 640 MB of storage. Years later, I assumed that I had mis-heard him and that he meant that the HD was twice as fast, being a good SCSI (?) model or somesuch. But after reading about RLL at Redhill, I'm wondering if it was not only a SCSI drive, but also formatted with/by/as RLL, and hence the larger capacity. Could this be?
The computer was replaced by a Gateway 266-M (P2-266 with 96 MB of RAM) in the Spring of 1997 right before I went off to college. The old computer was then used sparingly by my parents, before they got the Gateway when I upgraded. Around 2002 I built my mom a new computer (Athlon XP 2500) and my father continued to use the old Gateway until Christmas of 2006 when he bought an HP with an Athlon X2 3800.
My first computer was a Tandy, I believe a 386 that I got in the fall of 1991. My second computer, which we got around 1994, was a hand-me-down/gift from a distant not-related-by-blood but very nice guy, who I imagine is very similar to our own Merc. It was made of all used components, and over it's lifetime of about 4 years, nothing ever broke on it. The case was an old, all steel, heavy duty case that in today's terms would be called a full tower. I believed it used a SCSI drive, definitely plugged into a controller card that was in what looked like an ISA slot. I remember this guy talking to my dad and me when we picked it up, and I distinctly remember his saying that the hard drive, because it was somehow special, contained double the amount of storage as a regular drive. I believe when formatted it gave us a total of 640 MB of storage. Years later, I assumed that I had mis-heard him and that he meant that the HD was twice as fast, being a good SCSI (?) model or somesuch. But after reading about RLL at Redhill, I'm wondering if it was not only a SCSI drive, but also formatted with/by/as RLL, and hence the larger capacity. Could this be?
The computer was replaced by a Gateway 266-M (P2-266 with 96 MB of RAM) in the Spring of 1997 right before I went off to college. The old computer was then used sparingly by my parents, before they got the Gateway when I upgraded. Around 2002 I built my mom a new computer (Athlon XP 2500) and my father continued to use the old Gateway until Christmas of 2006 when he bought an HP with an Athlon X2 3800.
