Top ten things to do with your old TK50 drive:

1) Stamp on it
2) Stamp on it some more
3) stamp on it again, this time harder.
4) Jump up and down on it
5) Emit insane laughter whilst repeating all of the above.
6) Put it on a shelf and verbally abuse it.
7) Give the drive to the people who lock you up - then they'll see why you are like that.
8) Throw it at salesmen (thinking about it, that's better done with an RA80.....)
9) Throw it at the people who thought up DECnet phase V
10) Give it to your worst enemy to back up his 2GB PC disk.

All of the above will probably have a benificial effect on your health.....

Al.




Al,  sounds like you attended a DECUS magic show in Atlanta or Nashville, many moons ago.  The speaker had a tool that could/did fix anything that went wrong with a TK50 drive -----A 20lb Sledge Hammer ---- and surprisingly enough the TK50 gave its usual performance after rapid and repeated application of the correction tool ... :-)

              - Dale


You might take them apart, platter by platter, let a jeweler put clock works in the center, and sell them.


My vote's definitely for #9. And yes, I *do* still have one lurking around...<g>

 Paul Sture [UK]




I have some data from a vax system.  The data is to be converted to the AS/400.  I cannot seem to interpret the double precision floating point numbers.  They are 8 bytes long.  Here are examples.

Hex:      A0 4B EE 47 00 00 00 00  is supposed to represent the integer 5252087
Binary:  1010 . 0000 . 0100 . 1011 . 1110 . 1110 . 0100 . 0111  then 32 zeros

Hex:  74 48 00  4B  00  00  00  00 is supposed to represent the integer 62539
Binary:  0111 . 0100 . 0100 . 1000 . 0000 . 0000 . 0100 . 1011 . then 32 zeros 

      I will send a check to the first person who can write me a routine in basic pseudocode that would convert  the above numbers correctly (I will rewrite it in RPG/400) Or even the first person who helps me to my satisfaction.  Thank You to anyone who contributes.