SCO.com and Caldera.com dead

[Henry Spencer]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Michael wrote:
> And what is the MTBF on hard drives from 17 years ago? Okay, a drive
> made in 1985 would have been at most what? 20 MB? (Okay maybe it was
> an enterprise server running some database so it had a 800 MB drive...

Fujitsu Eagles (about 400MB formatted capacity), circa 1983, were bulky
and ate a lot of power, but seemed to have a near-infinite MTBF.  Many of
them were retired, still running just fine, a decade or more later because
people needed more capacity or less bulk or a more modern interface. 
Their reliability was legendary.  There was a time when you could walk
through a Unix trade show, and see disk drives whose front panels were
various colors with various labels, but all had the same distinctive shape
because they were all Fujitsu Eagles inside.  People who could afford
them, had them; people who couldn't, coveted them. 

(Fujitsu unfortunately never quite equaled that level of quality again. 
The immediate follow-on, the Super Eagle, was a disaster.  Later Fujitsu
drives were merely ordinary.)

If the drives were Eagles, I could believe 17 years of nonstop operation.
Not that I have any great faith in this particular claim, mind you, but
with the right hardware it's not a *technical* impossibility.

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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