[Gllug] Old i386 with "Winchester" drive

[Christopher Hunter]

On Wednesday 24 Mar 2004 8:01 pm, Stephen Harker wrote:
> John Winters wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 18:50, Richard Jones wrote:
> >>According to the web, and this I did not know before, "Winchester" was
> >>the name of an early hard drive technology developed by IBM.
> >
> > At (IIRC) their Winchester research labs - hence the name.
> >
> > Also, although my memory is definitely slightly hazy in this area, I
> > seem to remember it's a particular kind of HDD.  A Winchester is a
> > semi-sealed unit, unlike the removable washing-machine type of HDD.
>
> I thinks also, this is where the device name "wd" for IDE drives in *BSD
> comes from = "Winchester Disk".
>
> ie. /dev/wd0, /dev/wd1 etc...

That's right.  I used to work on machines with Winchesters, and one of the 
first viruses I ever saw played a tune using the drive motors (they were 
quite loud!).....  Didn't do much for the reliability of the drive!

Chris

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug