Sundry Reader Feedback on a Multitude of Things

Published: November 13, 2006

We like to have a dialog with our readers, so keep those letters coming. Here is a sample of some of the feedback we have received recently.

A general comment:

In a world where we hear far too few compliments, I just want to say "nice job" on your e-zines. The layout is well organized for my way of viewing content, allowing me to scan topics and read the first paragraph or so to see if I want to read more; advertising is tasteful and relevant. I get a boatload of technical emails and yours is one of my favorites. Thanks for the nice work.

--Chuck

Thanks, Chuck. That was exactly our intent.

--TPM

Reader Feedback on The Disk Drive at 50: Still Spinning

TPM: The Winchester .30-30 was not a shotgun. Here's a bit of the Wikipedia entry:

"The .30-30 Winchester/.30 Winchester Center Fire/7.62X51Rmm cartridge was first marketed in early 1895 for the Winchester Model 1894 lever-action rifle. The .30-30, as it is most commonly known, was America's first small-bore, sporting rifle cartridge designed for smokeless powder. The .30-30 has established itself as one of the most common deer cartridges in North America, selling more ammunition to deer hunters than any other cartridge, including the venerable .30-06 Springfield."

You must remember what a lever-action rifle is--remember the TV show "The Rifleman" with Chuck Conners?

Far be it for me to correct you on anything computers, but this stood out. Thanks as always for your stuff.

--Russ

Hi. I enjoyed your article about the disk drives, did not realize they were now 50 years old. Sure brought back some memories. I worked for an insurance company that was replacing their RAMAC 305 with an IBM 1401 that had two 1311 disk drives and six tapes drives. Never programmed anything on the RAMAC, but wrote the programs for the 1401.

It's absolutely amazing the progress they have made with disk drives and how that has changed so many things.

Just a note; the .30-30 is a Winchester rifle, not a shotgun.

--Rod

I really enjoyed the disk drive history lesson today. Very informative and interesting. Of course, I love history of any kind and if it's about our industry, I like it even better. Did you ever read Soul of a New Machine? About Data General's campaign to create a brand new computer back in the 1980s? It should be required reading for every computer programmer or administrator.

One correction to your story. You'll probably hear this from others. The 30-30 is a rifle, not a shotgun. I'm guessing you're not a gun person or you would probably have known that already. I've been around guns all my life and in fact, I carried a weapon every day for eight years when I was in the Air Force Security Police, so little things like that jump out at me.

Excellent history lesson! I'd love to read more articles like this!

--Shannon

Sad story, really. It deals for the major part with IBM history, and therefore it's got decline written all over it (keyword: rustbelt).

Maxtor is already history. Hitachi just might be history soon--how on earth did they lose 40 BILLION Yen just on hard disks? One reader expressed this equation in the forum: "HGST = IBM = DTLA = never, never, never again!" And I think Hitachi is still paying for this.

IBM was asleep at the time when the industry had moved to 3.5-inch disks. Spitfire and Alleycat were later than the competition. For all their excellent R&D (MR and GMR heads) catching up ultimately resulted in ketchup on the wall.

I am still mad at IBM after five years because among others, of an iSeries 270 with six disk slots and SEVEN times a replacement disk. Extra very expensive SCSI reliable? Hah! (And of course it's the customers fault coz he should have applied PTFs sooner.) Grrr.

--Michiel

TPM Responds:

Well, I sure don't know a Winchester, but I sure did watch "The Rifleman" as a kid, and if that was his gun, then I surely wanted one. And "Have Gun Will Travel" and "Gunsmoke" were my favorites when I was very young, not to mention "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" when I got a bit older.

Where I grew up in the Catskills, on the Delaware River, I hunted and fished; I had a trap line and went camping just about every other weekend. We gardened on a vast scale. We never had enough land to farm, but my parents now have a 189-acre place outside of Corning, New York. I drive through IBM's old stomping grounds a lot, and the family farm today is a stone's throw from where Thomas Watson, IBM's founder, grew up. We had a wood stove and a coal stove, and I split wood when I was angry at my family (as all teenagers are) to keep me warm three times: once in anger, once in exercise, and once when it was burning in the stove.

The first gun I ever shot was a musket, when I was about 8 years old, and it damned near killed me. The older boys who asked me to try this out thought it was very funny watching me fly through space backwards, head under heels, and they neglected to tell me about keeping the stock tight on my arm. Hard way to learn a lesson.

The only guns I ever had much time with was a Crossman pellet gun and a .22-caliber rifle (don't recall which one, since I didn't own it). I nearly had my head blown off by a 12-gauge shotgun when a grouse spooked a friend of mine and he tracked it and shot really close to my face. I prefer a precision weapon to a meat grinder, as a matter of principle. I was quite fond of my bow, although I never hunted with it and it was not an impressive compound bow like those all of my friends had. I just liked to hit what I was aiming at. That is the fun part for me.

And I could hit just about anything with the pellet gun, provided it wasn't too windy. I used to sit on the back porch and shoot at a steel pole way down in the backyard so I could hear the "ping" of it hitting the pole. Once, I must have hit it perfectly, and the brass BB came almost perfectly straight back at me and hit me in the earlobe. It stung like reading Dickens…. I am glad I didn't lose an eye.

And even with my eyes gone weak from too much time in front of the computer screen for the past two decades, I did manage to shoot the branch at the top of an oak tree in my parent's front yard, thereby getting the hornet's nest out of the tree. (It could have been wasps, I am not sure.) My wife had never shot a gun before, and she had tried to hit the nest and missed. And my brother-in-law (who knows how to do everything, mind you) was trying to show her how to do it and he failed after like a dozen shots, too. I got it on the second try--the sights were off, so I am not sure it was my fault--but on the second shot, I cut the branch in two. (It was not a big branch, but it was a good shot.) The good news is that I looked skillful and country in front of my city-slicker wife, Elizabeth, and in front of my Mom and Dad. The bad news is that a hornet's nest plummeted to my feet, and I am allergic to bees.

HA!

Anyway, I won't be forgetting that a Winchester is a shotgun any time soon. (I AM KIDDING.) Yes, I know, it is a rifle. And thanks for calling me on that, everyone, and anything else I screw up.

--TPM

Another feedback letter on a comment in the same story:

If you weren't so loyal to the demi-gods of IBM, you might have a clue. The Atari used Seagate 20 MB hard drives. That was in 1982, oh yeah, BEFORE IBM's PC. The Atari had four voice channels of eight octaves each. 256 colors. 4.77 MHz bus speed. The IBM PC can say nothing of that. You say, "not a real computer," I and a lot of my peers cut their teeth on the Atari/Commadore/TRS80. If not for the Atari 400 I would not be in this field. God, you people really annoy me with your pomposity. IBM was stupid enough to turn down the contract on UNIVAC and it went to RCA. Now go back to being IBM's lap dog and learn what you're talking about before trashing other systems.

--Fergy

I had plenty of clues, and I grew up on the same machines.

Take a valium.

--TPM

Unfortunately, of the many drugs I did, Valium was not one of them. Keep writing, I'll keep reading. Until the next vent. . . .

--Fergy

Reader Feedback on As I See It: Behavioral Redlining

As usual, Victor, I really enjoyed your article about data collection and how it's being used to market to us and punish us. The scary part is I think that what you've touched upon is only the tip of the iceberg.

Have you read the book SpyChips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID? According to the book, using cash won't help because there are plans afoot to place RFID chips in cash. When you take it out of the bank, it will be linked to you--isn't that nice? The book is stunning and scary. If you haven't read it, I urge you to. It's a pretty quick read. They've done a ton of research on patents and industry publications, etc., and it makes 1984 look tame.

Keep up the great work!

--Jonathan

This was an absolutely fantastic article! I know I'm appalled at the amount of personal information readily available. And, even more so, at the people that appear to be oblivious to it. All those sci-fi books I read as a kid seem to have hit a lot of it right on the head. As well, as books such as Anthem. Scary stuff out there today. Anyway, once again, you've written a keeper. . . .

--Paula

Thank you for another thought provoking article.

--Ed