Re: Yes, those were the days - NOT
Hey, another Systimer!
I worked West Midlands between 1980-1988
Ah yes, the regular PM of SMD Drives...
Just before leaving DEC took over Systime in 1986 I brokered a deal for a bankrupt company to sell off their Systime 11/44 CPU as an upgrade to a Systime 5000 11/34 on a certain mediterranean island.
I supervised the packing and shipping and waved it goobye.
It wasn't so simple a CPU upgrade when it arrived. There was a persistant memory error and they had suffered a head crash on one of the CDC9762 drives.
I bribed our storeman for an upper and lower head and booked flights out to try and fix it.
Once on the island I found a CDC engineer with an alignment pack & tool that he could lend me (more bribery)
I couldn't get hold of the CDC tester to position the heads so had to write a routine to poke commands directly into the Control & Status Registers of the drive controller, and to plug each head into "head 0" to read the data.
I finally managed to swap and align the crashed head.
I performed the drive clean with some swabs, alcohol and a plastic ruler, whilst the drive was out of its pack.
Definitely a squeaky bum moment as the pack was loaded and the power button pressed, but it loaded the heads and read data OK!
What a fun company Systime was (escpecially coming from the dinosoar that was BT)!