Memorex / Burroughs / Unisys Experience

Yes, three company names in one job. Burroughs bought Memorex.  (The consumer tape business, “Memorex will bust your glass,” along with the name was sold to Tandy.) Then Burroughs “merged” with Sperry-Univac forming Unisys. Although officially a merger it was a shotgun wedding and Burroughs held the shotgun. At least the new company used the old Sperry headquarters. Anything, I suppose, to leave Detroit.

For my non-historian readers the mainframe / disk drive connection worked like this:

IBM Mainframe to...
...Multiple channels. Each channel to...
...Possibly multiple Storage Control Units (SCU)...
...Each SCU provided a “CTL interface” to...
...Possibly multiple disk controllers each connected to...
...As many as 8 disk drive spindles.
Sometimes multiple SCU’s could share a disk controller. I believe it was also possible for multiple disk controllers to share a group of 8 spindles.

On the 3350 and 3380 [IBM’s numbers] spindles came in pairs. Just to put things in perspective a 3350 spindle could hold 320Mb. Two spindles made up a washing machine sized drive. Today, I have a mp3 player with a 1 gig SD flash card...

ATS, a Minicomputer-based Tester
CPU Microcode
RS-232 multiplexer
Snoopy, Standard Microcode with Added Features
Woodstock, Standalone Tester
Other good Stuff

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