Re: That's the Hi-Tech option...
I was involved with a PDP-11 microprocessor system that ran off a solid-state disk in 1982. But the SSD was volatile, and had to be loaded up from magnetic tape. The system could not boot directly from tape, so we had to type in some magic octal numbers to boot the tape.
In fact there were two tapes: (1) to load a main-memory system to read the second tape, and (2) the image of the SSD. The final stage was to tell the memory system to boot from the newly loaded SSD.
The SSD was impressive: directory listings that normally took ages came out in a few seconds. I called it the "square disk".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
