Without documentation, this event would be lost. I wonder how many people have had a moment like this and nobody ever witnessed it. Sad. You passion is undeniable, congrats on getting it running. Your tenacity is fantastic !
You were servicing some of the stuff we used at GE in Utica NY. Without the service contract we wouldn't have kept anything working. We used VAX and uVAX at our location there and also in East Windsor NJ unitl at least 1991.
Interestingly, I initially tried with modern printer paper but it just wasn't coarse enough to really get them clean. Had to use that 80's spec Green Bar!
That's fantastic, Nakazoto! Good job. Your enthusiasm is infectious and left me grinning at the end. I'm glad the issue was just a config one, even if it took a while to realise it. Remember: you are essentially being a Centurion archaeologist and have limited primary sources of experience other than the wonderful Ken. If I had worked at Centurion I would be so stoked to see someone care so much about these computers.
Thank you so much Gunnar! It's hard to pinpoint what it is exactly about the Centurion that speaks to me, but I'm totally smitten with the machine and it'll be a mainstay on the channel for a long time to come as we build and restore new things for it!
@@UsagiElectric me too tbh, i think its a mix of the history, how it works, it uses really old HDDs but the filesystem is based on tape, how the cpu card and such are made with the eeproms having a ton of microcode, its just so much clever engineering and so unique and cool, even the os feels so dated yet amazing, i love seeing eny updates about the centurion
@@UsagiElectric I will say, because there are so few people doing work on the Centurion, all your heavy lifting, is helping differentiate this channel from the other vintage computer channels for sure! 👍It's great to see the wider circle of hardware get repaired and put back into working order (instead of seeing "yet another PDP-11" get restored 🙄)
Dude you are very strong in the most valuable technology skill I know: persistence. Sometimes it seems like you doubt your capabilities too much! Especially in the software side. It may just be appropriate and obligatory humility which is a cultural and social thing. I hope you understand that your achievements are inspiring and significant. So many times you have hit road blocks and overcome things you previously thought, like all of us watching, were insurmountable. Not giving up is a superpower. Also, combined with your enthusiasm, this is why you've galvanised a community of experienced collaborators and fans. I hope aspiring nerds take note of your journey and learn from it. It sure works. I love it and I look forward to next steps and future projects. Power to ya.
Congratulations on this epic milestone! Your channel makes me happy! It makes my inner electronics tinkerer happy. It makes my inner software nerd happy. It makes my inner cabinet maker happy, and the bunnies and kittens make my inner 10 year old happy. :)
As someone who used a PDP-11 back in “in the day” (1979-1981) it is so cool to watch your resurrection of the technology that fed my family in our first couple of years of marriage. I worked for an “international corporation” designing printed circuit boards using RACAL-REDAC running on a PDP-11. We had light pens, a “piano key” user interface and, of course, a terminal. I worked second shift for 2 years on that system spewing out design after design and yes, I remember of the the hawk drives. At that time, only authorized personnel were allowed near the hardware behind the sliding glass doors but I always looked over the shoulders of the DEC techs while they worked on the equipment. Given just how much power we have today in our iPads compared to that system I look back with pride for how many projects we completed thanks to the PDP11. Hope to see you at VCF-East.
Holy Moly. TH-cam also is really getting good. I recently saw some computer vids and they reminded me my Dad had a model of one of these for his company in the late 70s. All I remember is it cost thousands, and he hated it because it was always a problem.
Holy crap. I used to repair all that stuff when it was actually leading edge technology. My very first job was repairing 8 inch Shugart single sided FDD's at Computer Field Maintenance - Europes biggest 3rd party computer maintenance company. That was back in the early eighties. Jeez, it's all coming back now - Wang OIS, Molyebduim systems from the Paris underground, IBM system 36 mainframes and AS400's, the original IBM PC with green screen and 5mb RLL hdd, teletypes, Hawk 8 platter disk drives and so much more. God I feel old now.
It's really amazing what you've been able to cobble together out of improperly stored computer equipment. I'm honestly surprised that you were able to get it working to the degree that you have. I'm interested to see the next episode, and I'll be waiting to see if you get this project done in time for the computer show.
Thank you! Minicomputer stuff was really built to be tough as nails because they had to do every trick in the book to minimize the Mean Time Between Failures, which translates really well to longevity. The next drives to battle are going to put up much, much more of a fight though. Both the Finch and the Phoenix are much more complex and precise drives, so I'm not sure if we'll be able to get them going, but we'll certainly give it the 'ol college try!
My first job out of High School in 1991-1994 was working at Air Force Research Lab in Rome, NY. They had me writing analog circuit testing code in BASIC on a machine called an LTX 77. It was the size of 3 refridgerators, was LOUD has hell, couldn't be turned off because it would make the circuit testing equipment in it go out of calibration. The thing was OOOOLD...
@@UsagiElectric as far as your pdp-11, def look into the PiDP-11 project and group. It’s a custom built replica sub scale front panel of a PDP-11 driven by a RasPi running emulation software. I have one (as well as their PiDP-8 kits) and they are very interesting. Might be helpful to you when it comes time for software as they have a number of OS and software images for it.
I have a CDC Hawk buried somewhere in storage that should have good heads in it... I also at least _used_ to have a full set of eight good heads pulled from our Phoenix CMD (96 meg unformatted, 80 meg formatted to Wang's 256-byte sectors,) when we retired the Wang 2200 in the mid 1990s, but I haven't seen them for years and a bunch of stuff was stolen from one of my storage areas, unfortunately, so they might be gone...) but I DO still definitely have the internal platters (spindle of 3 fixed discs) and about 6 good removable disc packs...
I was originally interested in this channel, since I'm a computer tech who fixes tube amps......... It's cool that you got this old timer running again for history sake.
Dr Frankenstein is trying to mend the monster's broken body, again. I grew up on Vax and Prime mini, and a tiny bit of IBM 4341-II. It's a nice nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Big congratulations Nakazoto with this fantastic result. I had a big smile on my face when you finally showed the result. I truly wish so much I could visit this show and meet you with your Centurion but unfortunately as so many others I can only visit virtually since I'm in the Netherlands and can't afford a trip to the USA for this show. Anyway, I have no doubt the Centurion will look like brand spanking new when you will take it there. Thank you for taking us back in time, time, time.
Omedetou gozaimasu! I'm so glad you've got a working Hawk drive. How many folks in this world would even have a clue as to how to accomplish what you did? Truly amazing, man. I hope you have a blast at VCF! PDP-11? Wouldn't miss that for the world.
Using a kilowatt of power to store (5Tbytes/5Mbytes=) a million times less data at very slow speeds, while being susceptible to damage by the first micro-particle that collides with the heads... Ya, makes sense to me too. We both need a shrink.
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I bow down to you brother with such a huge old machine taking such work to get it up and running. I hope you had fun doing it.
Hell yeah! Happy to see that second drive working! Maybe after the show you can get the other two heads fixed up for the removable platter to have the hawk full working. I'd enjoy seeing you attempt that.
your enthusiasm is infectious - i'm only mildly interested in this subject and yet i'm subscribed and regularly watch your videos from beginning to end. 😂
I never thought I'd see a Pertec dual platter drive working again! Worked on 4 x these with Datasaab D15 back in the day - the noise was 'fun' and the cabinet used to wobble when all drives were working. The DCY backup and restore we unique too where the bottom platter was used to transfer the top removable to another disk.............memories .... great job getting to where you are now.
The reason why it takes longer to copy to floppy from HDD than the reverse is that writing information is a longer operation than reading information and the FDD is slower than the HDD in the first place. I'm not sure why writing takes longer than reading, but it's something which has been a feature of magnetic storage drives from as early as anyone can remember. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that it's because extra information needs to be written to the drive for error checking and for updating the map of used sectors during a write operation, which does not need to be done during a read operation.
Wow! this is the first time I've ever seen my own comments highlighted in a video, thank you Usagi, and I'm glad to know that my faith was never misplaced! I knew you could pull it off, and you most certainly did, with style and guts which is all anyone could ask. 👍 Two working antique Hawk drives from 40 years ago out of three initially dead and head-crashed drives. Who the hell would have EVER expected that after seeing your first videos after purchasing your first Centurion Minicomputer? Megaprops to you and Ken and everyone else who helped.
Sitting at the edge of my chair, excited. Waiting to hear "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." While I see on the other monitor CEN. After the show I expect an episode of restoring the removable platter heads.
The huge sense of relief when you got it to boot from the Hawk comes across so well. As always, amazing to see these old and unusual machines brought back to life. Absolutely love the, 'but I don’t care 'cause it works,' moment - have certainly had a few of those in my time! Great work!
Oh cool! My computing history began at NOAA in the 1970s as a work study student, debugging atmospheric models written in Fortran IV and run on a CDC 6600. I remember the row after row of hard drives, looking rather like washers in a laundromat, visible through the window of the computing room. CDC products will always have a warm spot in my heart.
I have to say, even if you think it was a stupid mistake with the divisor switches.... but its a dang near 50 year old piece of 30 years minimum forgotten hardware... its a miracle if anyone saw it, who knew how to build or service these. Or even remembered the little tricks all computers have to mess with. Great series... great archeology...
Excellent work! Copying from hard disk to floppy being slower than the other way around could be due to the OS verifying a correct write by reading the data back again. I.e. copying in one direction you have 1 hard disk access and 2 floppy accesses while in the other direction you have 2 hard disk access and 1 floppy access. The latter will be much quicker.
If the coils burned open, I'd think we'd see signs of overheating at 2:27. However, that solder joint at the top center looks sus. I also think there's more going on chemically at the solder joints than the coils. The wire is enamel coated, but the solder joint is joining different metals. As far as a microscope, the Louis Rossmann channel has moved to Austin TX and he holds classes on PC board repair, including MacBooks. He's big on repair He has trinocular scopes with camera. I think it's worth contacting him.
I know someone in new Zealand who might have hawk components. He's been collecting old drives for decades WRT the rack, what you probably want is a 18U APC Netshelter CX - this would fit your needs perfectly, is a LOT tougher than the cheap racks (CX are soundproofed, SX are not) and have integrated cooling fans
Watching this made my day. Your enthusiasm and joy is so infectuous! I'm looking forward to seeing the finished system, and I'm sad that I can't see it in person at VCF because ocean.
Not only is this super interesting, but your enthusiasm is great. I'm thinking of going to VCF East this year, and will look forward to seeing the setup!
refaire vivre ces machines ! c'est passionnant ! (même si je comprends pas tout... :) ) [ bring these machines back to life! it is exciting ! even if i don't understand everything ]
One thing with this glue and wax used to secure any kind of electronics in place... It worked great the days long ago, but over time a lot of that stuff gets hydrophile and collects moisture from the air. That corrodes anything inside. I have to fight that fault a lot of times when repairing old amateur radio equipment. Often oscillators and PLL stages fail because they are sealed with that stuff. If you remove it, many times the connections between the resistors leads and the resistors resisitive part has been eaten away. The printing on the diodes just leaves with the glue, but the diodes mostly survive just without color rings. And transistors get very corroded legs while, funny enough, capcitors seem to not being affected at all. That is, what I encountered a lot of times with ICOM, Kenwood and Yaesu from the 80s.
I heard the high-pitched borderline insanity in your voice when the drive started working after days of troubleshooting. I know that borderline insanity all too well. 😅 Congrats on keeping it together and hitting the goal. 👍
Fantástico, olha o tamanho deste HD, para quem gosta igual a min de ver estes equipamentos funcionando, muito prazeroso ver estes mecanismos funcionando, é muito legal você trazer vídeos assim.
Closest I've ever come to the experience was a Data General MV9500 Eclipse running AOS/VS II. The 9 track tape unit had vacuum columns. But the disks were SCSI com volumes named Hansel, Gretel and Witch.
I love it when people give the computers names. I had a law firm that named their big computer "Cinderella", and the two smaller ones where her step-sisters. The names are quite functional as it's easy to use and remember in a conversation. For example, I could ask a end user if they connect to Cinderella or Drizella and there's a good chance they'd know.
Holy cow! You rebuilt a Hawk drive. Dead heads, wrecked platter, blown PSU. Aligning the heads, checking all the ins and outs with a scope down in the guts of the hardware. That's amazing.
In the 90s we had still a TI 990/10 development system with AMPL emulator and 2 Hawk drives (labeled as TI DS10 Drive). Software for measuring gauges was made, using TI Pascal for standalone targets with TMS9900 microprocessors. Maintenance became costly, we had around 2 head crashes in a year. So we thought about a TI SCSI adapter for a modern SCSI drive. But this was dropped and the TI 990/10 system abandoned. Development was switched to MS-DOS industrial computers.
Awesome going man, how many folks would have chucked the towel in, a real rollercoaster set of videos, and been gripped with fascination from the start of the centurion series, yeah congratulations what a buzz for Sunday afternoon.
Thank you for bringing back my days when I was trained on use of the Texas Instruments for their removable Disk packs (Drum cartridge), it was pretty amazing as replacement of punch cards.
I HAVE A VIDEO REQUEST! I seriously want to see the entire process, unedited, no-narration (or little), of the entire process to boot the machine from cold & dark. That would really fill the gaps for people like me who can't travel to the other side of the world to see it in person! ( :( )
This is actually a good idea! I'll do that for the final episode in this little CPU46 build up process. Do a full walk through of the entire boot up process from cold all the way into a piece of software.
Ah, the times when you can repair a hard disk. I had a 5'25 10MB double height one at the first '90 that had its MBR sector at the start of the platter scratched, so was unusable. Just move the reading head a pair of sector inwards to make the zero sector over an ok part of the platter and then worked again flawlessly.
OMG. Truly amazing dedication and determination. I doff my hat. Reminds me of the old days of computing and how far we've come, which is a long long ways. Way back in the 80/90's me and a poorly aging Wang system were exiled to the basement where I attended it's gradual disintegration and final crash! The goal was preservation of various financial data files that accounting "thought" they needed, using the term thought loosely. LOL Needless to say much went down with the ship! Alas in these days of effortless copy/paste and terabytes of cheap storage at our fingertips, only we grey beards remember how much effort it took to maintain even a few gigabytes of data...
Honestly I didn't even understood half of the things that where going on but i see the happiness and the genuine joy and i say congratulations amazing job to bring back this thing from the past back to us.
Congratulations job well done Glad it work out for you. I remember back when everything had dip switches, easy to miss one and a few frustrating day later you find it. Those were the good old day. LOL,
CDC made some really tough disk drives like I worked on some early 80s WREN five and quarter inch PC ESDI stuff and it was tougher than nails compared to Seagate consumer quality junk. A small full height drive would weigh like eight pounds built like a battleship. Great show you have thanks for the nostalgia 👍
The exact second the heads loaded on the first spin up, a road roller outside my house started making a heck of a racket. For a moment there I thought something went *seriously* wrong with the drive! 😰 Real happy to see she's alive and kicking
I worked with CDC Phoenix (32, 48 and 96MB) drives and S-100 bus SMD disk controllers back in 1980. I feel your pain. Later in the US Air Force, I managed a Wang VS minicomputer with 288 MB disk packs. About once a year, one of those would suffer a head crash. Sigh.
This is so amazing. The Hawk drive lives! Coincidentally, I have the 42U version of that same open rack in my workspace, although the equipment in there is by far less noisy ;-). I can't wait for the next episode of this adventure!
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Without documentation, this event would be lost. I wonder how many people have had a moment like this and nobody ever witnessed it. Sad. You passion is undeniable, congrats on getting it running. Your tenacity is fantastic !
Wow! This episode really took me back to 1985, when I was repairing similar drives at DEC... specially polishing the heads on a bit of paper!
Has to be 1970's "Green Bar" paper....! 😀
You were servicing some of the stuff we used at GE in Utica NY. Without the service contract we wouldn't have kept anything working. We used VAX and uVAX at our location there and also in East Windsor NJ unitl at least 1991.
I used 3x5 index cards.
Interestingly, I initially tried with modern printer paper but it just wasn't coarse enough to really get them clean. Had to use that 80's spec Green Bar!
Tedious and difficult tasks are the lifeblood of retro technology - it's the source of the the joy of getting things to work.
Agreed, it ain't no Centurion if it doesn't have a huge-ass HDD :)
Great job getting it to run! Winner winner, chicken dinner.
That's fantastic, Nakazoto! Good job. Your enthusiasm is infectious and left me grinning at the end. I'm glad the issue was just a config one, even if it took a while to realise it. Remember: you are essentially being a Centurion archaeologist and have limited primary sources of experience other than the wonderful Ken. If I had worked at Centurion I would be so stoked to see someone care so much about these computers.
100% agree! Glad it all turned out so well in the end. What you do is important to computing history, so thanks a ton for your enthusiasm!
I have really been enjoying the Centurion episodes. Thank you so much for sharing.
Thank you so much Gunnar!
It's hard to pinpoint what it is exactly about the Centurion that speaks to me, but I'm totally smitten with the machine and it'll be a mainstay on the channel for a long time to come as we build and restore new things for it!
@@UsagiElectric me too tbh, i think its a mix of the history, how it works, it uses really old HDDs but the filesystem is based on tape, how the cpu card and such are made with the eeproms having a ton of microcode, its just so much clever engineering and so unique and cool, even the os feels so dated yet amazing, i love seeing eny updates about the centurion
@@UsagiElectric I will say, because there are so few people doing work on the Centurion, all your heavy lifting, is helping differentiate this channel from the other vintage computer channels for sure! 👍It's great to see the wider circle of hardware get repaired and put back into working order (instead of seeing "yet another PDP-11" get restored 🙄)
Dude you are very strong in the most valuable technology skill I know: persistence. Sometimes it seems like you doubt your capabilities too much! Especially in the software side. It may just be appropriate and obligatory humility which is a cultural and social thing. I hope you understand that your achievements are inspiring and significant. So many times you have hit road blocks and overcome things you previously thought, like all of us watching, were insurmountable. Not giving up is a superpower.
Also, combined with your enthusiasm, this is why you've galvanised a community of experienced collaborators and fans. I hope aspiring nerds take note of your journey and learn from it. It sure works. I love it and I look forward to next steps and future projects. Power to ya.
"I took a break and wrote an assembly program " 😂
i felt that dip switch misconfiguration on a spiritual level
Congratulations on this epic milestone! Your channel makes me happy! It makes my inner electronics tinkerer happy. It makes my inner software nerd happy. It makes my inner cabinet maker happy, and the bunnies and kittens make my inner 10 year old happy. :)
Thank you!
And if we're being honest, the bunnies and kittens are the true stars of the show!
As someone who used a PDP-11 back in “in the day” (1979-1981) it is so cool to watch your resurrection of the technology that fed my family in our first couple of years of marriage. I worked for an “international corporation” designing printed circuit boards using RACAL-REDAC running on a PDP-11. We had light pens, a “piano key” user interface and, of course, a terminal. I worked second shift for 2 years on that system spewing out design after design and yes, I remember of the the hawk drives. At that time, only authorized personnel were allowed near the hardware behind the sliding glass doors but I always looked over the shoulders of the DEC techs while they worked on the equipment. Given just how much power we have today in our iPads compared to that system I look back with pride for how many projects we completed thanks to the PDP11. Hope to see you at VCF-East.
Holy Moly. TH-cam also is really getting good. I recently saw some computer vids and they reminded me my Dad had a model of one of these for his company in the late 70s. All I remember is it cost thousands, and he hated it because it was always a problem.
I just love these vintage rare computers! Keep them coming.
Holy crap. I used to repair all that stuff when it was actually leading edge technology. My very first job was repairing 8 inch Shugart single sided FDD's at Computer Field Maintenance - Europes biggest 3rd party computer maintenance company. That was back in the early eighties. Jeez, it's all coming back now - Wang OIS, Molyebduim systems from the Paris underground, IBM system 36 mainframes and AS400's, the original IBM PC with green screen and 5mb RLL hdd, teletypes, Hawk 8 platter disk drives and so much more. God I feel old now.
It's really amazing what you've been able to cobble together out of improperly stored computer equipment. I'm honestly surprised that you were able to get it working to the degree that you have. I'm interested to see the next episode, and I'll be waiting to see if you get this project done in time for the computer show.
Guy, you've just made a HDD by you own hands - cool!
Who can repeat the experience nowdays?
Thank you!
Minicomputer stuff was really built to be tough as nails because they had to do every trick in the book to minimize the Mean Time Between Failures, which translates really well to longevity. The next drives to battle are going to put up much, much more of a fight though. Both the Finch and the Phoenix are much more complex and precise drives, so I'm not sure if we'll be able to get them going, but we'll certainly give it the 'ol college try!
My first job out of High School in 1991-1994 was working at Air Force Research Lab in Rome, NY. They had me writing analog circuit testing code in BASIC on a machine called an LTX 77. It was the size of 3 refridgerators, was LOUD has hell, couldn't be turned off because it would make the circuit testing equipment in it go out of calibration. The thing was OOOOLD...
Was debating hitting VCF this year, but if you're coming with this beast I HAVE to go!
Hope to catch you there!
@@UsagiElectric as far as your pdp-11, def look into the PiDP-11 project and group. It’s a custom built replica sub scale front panel of a PDP-11 driven by a RasPi running emulation software. I have one (as well as their PiDP-8 kits) and they are very interesting. Might be helpful to you when it comes time for software as they have a number of OS and software images for it.
I have a CDC Hawk buried somewhere in storage that should have good heads in it...
I also at least _used_ to have a full set of eight good heads pulled from our Phoenix CMD (96 meg unformatted, 80 meg formatted to Wang's 256-byte sectors,) when we retired the Wang 2200 in the mid 1990s, but I haven't seen them for years and a bunch of stuff was stolen from one of my storage areas, unfortunately, so they might be gone...) but I DO still definitely have the internal platters (spindle of 3 fixed discs) and about 6 good removable disc packs...
That's awesome that you've got so much cool old CDC stuff!
If you're looking to rehome some of it, shoot me an email at Nakazoto at gmail dot com.
I was originally interested in this channel, since I'm a computer tech who fixes tube amps......... It's cool that you got this old timer running again for history sake.
Thanks for taking us on this journey! So good to see everything working again as it should!
Thank you!
I'm exhausted just watching that. Amazing work Dave, I'll call on you when I need to get my DEC RL02 drive spun up again after 30 years... :D
Dr Frankenstein is trying to mend the monster's broken body, again. I grew up on Vax and Prime mini, and a tiny bit of IBM 4341-II. It's a nice nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Time to break out the blowtorch and the rivets.🙂
5:56
I didn't understand electronics, but I can understand that feeling of having the sounds & motions of an engine doing mechanical clock work
Big congratulations Nakazoto with this fantastic result. I had a big smile on my face when you finally showed the result. I truly wish so much I could visit this show and meet you with your Centurion but unfortunately as so many others I can only visit virtually since I'm in the Netherlands and can't afford a trip to the USA for this show. Anyway, I have no doubt the Centurion will look like brand spanking new when you will take it there. Thank you for taking us back in time, time, time.
Your work on the Centurion platform is nothing short of amazing, and your excitement is palpable. Excellent stuff (and cute bunnies too!)
Omedetou gozaimasu! I'm so glad you've got a working Hawk drive. How many folks in this world would even have a clue as to how to accomplish what you did? Truly amazing, man. I hope you have a blast at VCF!
PDP-11? Wouldn't miss that for the world.
Using a kilowatt of power to store (5Tbytes/5Mbytes=) a million times less data at very slow speeds, while being susceptible to damage by the first micro-particle that collides with the heads... Ya, makes sense to me too. We both need a shrink.
I bow down to you brother with such a huge old machine taking such work to get it up and running. I hope you had fun doing it.
Hell yeah! Happy to see that second drive working! Maybe after the show you can get the other two heads fixed up for the removable platter to have the hawk full working. I'd enjoy seeing you attempt that.
Wow... So thrilling... Love your enthusiasm 👍
That is absolutely awesome. You're very brave taking the drive apart and swapping heads around. I'd be too terrified to even try. :) Mega congrats.
your enthusiasm is infectious - i'm only mildly interested in this subject and yet i'm subscribed and regularly watch your videos from beginning to end. 😂
I never thought I'd see a Pertec dual platter drive working again! Worked on 4 x these with Datasaab D15 back in the day - the noise was 'fun' and the cabinet used to wobble when all drives were working. The DCY backup and restore we unique too where the bottom platter was used to transfer the top removable to another disk.............memories .... great job getting to where you are now.
The reason why it takes longer to copy to floppy from HDD than the reverse is that writing information is a longer operation than reading information and the FDD is slower than the HDD in the first place. I'm not sure why writing takes longer than reading, but it's something which has been a feature of magnetic storage drives from as early as anyone can remember.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that it's because extra information needs to be written to the drive for error checking and for updating the map of used sectors during a write operation, which does not need to be done during a read operation.
Great video as always!
I think I spy Teletype model 14 in the background there. Very excited to see that!
Wow! this is the first time I've ever seen my own comments highlighted in a video, thank you Usagi, and I'm glad to know that my faith was never misplaced! I knew you could pull it off, and you most certainly did, with style and guts which is all anyone could ask. 👍 Two working antique Hawk drives from 40 years ago out of three initially dead and head-crashed drives. Who the hell would have EVER expected that after seeing your first videos after purchasing your first Centurion Minicomputer? Megaprops to you and Ken and everyone else who helped.
So glad and so enthused by your positivity!
Love the joy my brother. Been here for the whole ride and this is great.
Thumb's up also for the bunny at the end! Adorable!
Sitting at the edge of my chair, excited. Waiting to hear "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." While I see on the other monitor CEN. After the show I expect an episode of restoring the removable platter heads.
The huge sense of relief when you got it to boot from the Hawk comes across so well. As always, amazing to see these old and unusual machines brought back to life. Absolutely love the, 'but I don’t care 'cause it works,' moment - have certainly had a few of those in my time! Great work!
Awesome progress! Congratulations!
Oh cool!
My computing history began at NOAA in the 1970s as a work study student, debugging atmospheric models written in Fortran IV and run on a CDC 6600. I remember the row after row of hard drives, looking rather like washers in a laundromat, visible through the window of the computing room. CDC products will always have a warm spot in my heart.
Congratulations. I love seeing your enthusiasm
Amazing. I could feel your joy radiating at me through the screen. :)
I have to say, even if you think it was a stupid mistake with the divisor switches.... but its a dang near 50 year old piece of 30 years minimum forgotten hardware... its a miracle if anyone saw it, who knew how to build or service these. Or even remembered the little tricks all computers have to mess with. Great series... great archeology...
Excellent work! Copying from hard disk to floppy being slower than the other way around could be due to the OS verifying a correct write by reading the data back again. I.e. copying in one direction you have 1 hard disk access and 2 floppy accesses while in the other direction you have 2 hard disk access and 1 floppy access. The latter will be much quicker.
Also possible the copy utility of this memory-constrained system paces the amount of read-ahead/buffering to the write speed of the slower device.
Hawks were my friends in my first job.... Alpha Micro AM-100! This put a big grin on my face.
If the coils burned open, I'd think we'd see signs of overheating at 2:27. However, that solder joint at the top center looks sus. I also think there's more going on chemically at the solder joints than the coils. The wire is enamel coated, but the solder joint is joining different metals. As far as a microscope, the Louis Rossmann channel has moved to Austin TX and he holds classes on PC board repair, including MacBooks. He's big on repair He has trinocular scopes with camera. I think it's worth contacting him.
Great news! I love your enthusiasm, it's really infectious. Looking forward to next video.
Thank you so much!
Nice to see you fought it and won. Nice to see a unusual machine going again.
I just randomly watched this , don't know much of technical language, but best part for me is after @21:30 , Congratulations on your success.
I know someone in new Zealand who might have hawk components. He's been collecting old drives for decades
WRT the rack, what you probably want is a 18U APC Netshelter CX - this would fit your needs perfectly, is a LOT tougher than the cheap racks (CX are soundproofed, SX are not) and have integrated cooling fans
Watching this made my day. Your enthusiasm and joy is so infectuous! I'm looking forward to seeing the finished system, and I'm sad that I can't see it in person at VCF because ocean.
Not only is this super interesting, but your enthusiasm is great. I'm thinking of going to VCF East this year, and will look forward to seeing the setup!
refaire vivre ces machines ! c'est passionnant ! (même si je comprends pas tout... :) ) [ bring these machines back to life! it is exciting ! even if i don't understand everything ]
The only things more enjoyable than the tech is your enthusiasm! Thanks for this series!
Well done! I love seeing repairs like this.
Amazing work! Congratulations! 😀
One thing with this glue and wax used to secure any kind of electronics in place... It worked great the days long ago, but over time a lot of that stuff gets hydrophile and collects moisture from the air. That corrodes anything inside. I have to fight that fault a lot of times when repairing old amateur radio equipment. Often oscillators and PLL stages fail because they are sealed with that stuff. If you remove it, many times the connections between the resistors leads and the resistors resisitive part has been eaten away. The printing on the diodes just leaves with the glue, but the diodes mostly survive just without color rings. And transistors get very corroded legs while, funny enough, capcitors seem to not being affected at all. That is, what I encountered a lot of times with ICOM, Kenwood and Yaesu from the 80s.
Congratulations on this remarkable achievement!!
Thank you!
I heard the high-pitched borderline insanity in your voice when the drive started working after days of troubleshooting. I know that borderline insanity all too well. 😅 Congrats on keeping it together and hitting the goal. 👍
That is Mega COOL! :D I love this old hardware and people keeping it working! Good job!
Fantástico, olha o tamanho deste HD, para quem gosta igual a min de ver estes equipamentos funcionando, muito prazeroso ver estes mecanismos funcionando, é muito legal você trazer vídeos assim.
Man, I couldn't stop smiling during this whole episode. Such awsomeness!
Woo! So happy you got this going!
I f'n love this channel 🥰
woah! congratulations man! i wasn't sure if you were gonna be able to pull this one off, but wow! Be proud my friend!
congratulations!, men... you are a beast (in the good sense)
da best beast in the town!
i dig that teac over there.... A6010 vibes mannnn
Closest I've ever come to the experience was a Data General MV9500 Eclipse running AOS/VS II. The 9 track tape unit had vacuum columns. But the disks were SCSI com volumes named Hansel, Gretel and Witch.
I love it when people give the computers names. I had a law firm that named their big computer "Cinderella", and the two smaller ones where her step-sisters. The names are quite functional as it's easy to use and remember in a conversation. For example, I could ask a end user if they connect to Cinderella or Drizella and there's a good chance they'd know.
Holy cow! You rebuilt a Hawk drive. Dead heads, wrecked platter, blown PSU. Aligning the heads, checking all the ins and outs with a scope down in the guts of the hardware. That's amazing.
Congrats!! Awesome dedication and support from key gurus!
In the 90s we had still a TI 990/10 development system with AMPL emulator and 2 Hawk drives (labeled as TI DS10 Drive). Software for measuring gauges was made, using TI Pascal for standalone targets with TMS9900 microprocessors. Maintenance became costly, we had around 2 head crashes in a year. So we thought about a TI SCSI adapter for a modern SCSI drive. But this was dropped and the TI 990/10 system abandoned. Development was switched to MS-DOS industrial computers.
You made it through Boot Camp! Congratulations, Centurion!
Learned how to work on these as a Field Engineer in 1980. Used it with a PDP/11 based OCR system for the USAF.
Awesome going man, how many folks would have chucked the towel in, a real rollercoaster set of videos, and been gripped with fascination from the start of the centurion series, yeah congratulations what a buzz for Sunday afternoon.
very very good man !!! this is amazing work !!!!!
Great, great, great. I wish I could work like that on the Ericsson 230 I was learning in the early 80ies.
My heartiest congratulations! Good work, mate! Superb!
Absolutely brilliant! I take my hat off to your patience and perseverance.
You are legend! Your persistence, enthusiasm, and intuition continues to pay off. Congratulations on your successful resurrection of the Hawk drive!
Thank you for bringing back my days when I was trained on use of the Texas Instruments for their removable Disk packs (Drum cartridge), it was pretty amazing as replacement of punch cards.
Nicely done sir!
❤ happy for you ❤
I HAVE A VIDEO REQUEST!
I seriously want to see the entire process, unedited, no-narration (or little), of the entire process to boot the machine from cold & dark. That would really fill the gaps for people like me who can't travel to the other side of the world to see it in person! ( :( )
This is actually a good idea! I'll do that for the final episode in this little CPU46 build up process. Do a full walk through of the entire boot up process from cold all the way into a piece of software.
@@UsagiElectric thanks mate , can't wait !
Ah, the times when you can repair a hard disk. I had a 5'25 10MB double height one at the first '90 that had its MBR sector at the start of the platter scratched, so was unusable. Just move the reading head a pair of sector inwards to make the zero sector over an ok part of the platter and then worked again flawlessly.
OMG. Truly amazing dedication and determination. I doff my hat. Reminds me of the old days of computing and how far we've come, which is a long long ways. Way back in the 80/90's me and a poorly aging Wang system were exiled to the basement where I attended it's gradual disintegration and final crash! The goal was preservation of various financial data files that accounting "thought" they needed, using the term thought loosely. LOL Needless to say much went down with the ship! Alas in these days of effortless copy/paste and terabytes of cheap storage at our fingertips, only we grey beards remember how much effort it took to maintain even a few gigabytes of data...
Honestly I didn't even understood half of the things that where going on but i see the happiness and the genuine joy and i say congratulations amazing job to bring back this thing from the past back to us.
wow you still working on those hah i been wacthing your channel from day one
Congratulations job well done Glad it work out for you. I remember back when everything had dip switches, easy to miss one and a few frustrating day later you find it. Those were the good old day. LOL,
CDC made some really tough disk drives like I worked on some early 80s WREN five and quarter inch PC ESDI stuff and it was tougher than nails compared to Seagate consumer quality junk. A small full height drive would weigh like eight pounds built like a battleship. Great show you have thanks for the nostalgia 👍
Great perseverance! Congrats
Amazing work! Great job and thanks for sharing
The exact second the heads loaded on the first spin up, a road roller outside my house started making a heck of a racket. For a moment there I thought something went *seriously* wrong with the drive! 😰 Real happy to see she's alive and kicking
This is a crazy amount of knowledge! Super interesting seeing the process for getting such an old storage medium working!
Congratulations!! 🥳
Wow, strong effort, congratulations!
Congratulations on getting it working!
That is amazing!! Now you need to source 2 more good heads and fix the removable platter! :)
I worked with CDC Phoenix (32, 48 and 96MB) drives and S-100 bus SMD disk controllers back in 1980. I feel your pain. Later in the US Air Force, I managed a Wang VS minicomputer with 288 MB disk packs. About once a year, one of those would suffer a head crash. Sigh.
This is so amazing. The Hawk drive lives!
Coincidentally, I have the 42U version of that same open rack in my workspace, although the equipment in there is by far less noisy ;-).
I can't wait for the next episode of this adventure!