Good Ol' Tandy Days

[Mike Schwartz]

> The original hard drive for the Model II was an 8in drive with 8 meg
storage
> and came with chirping bird sounds.  If one powered it up before removing
> the shipping strap on the bottom, it would toast the $4,500 drive.

    There was one beautiful summer Saturday that I had to spend in the
office at American Can, restructuring our "orders" database and then
rebuilding the indexes. The entire data base was probably only about 3 or 4
megs and consisted of perhaps 1,000 orders.  We had two 8 meg drives, and I
had to backup all the other databases onto floppies and then delete them
from the hard drives so that I had enough drive space to work.  Then I sat
and listened to those things chirp and chirp and chirp all day and into the
evening!   

     I was really sick of the chirping sound after listening to those things
chirp away in my little office for a year or two.  Finally we got a new
system with a couple of 15 meg drives to replace them.

     I can still hear the chirps in the back of my mind, but wish I had
taken the time to make a short tape of that chirping sound!  If any of you
have an old 8-meg and ever fire it up, I'd love it if you would send me a
sound clip to play back!

Mike Schwartz