Inside a Massive 1980s Hard Drive: 14 Inches of Fury!

A hands-on tour of a PDP-11/44 minicomputer system from the 1980s, covering its internal components including the FPU math board with AMD 2901 bit-slice chips, 64K cache board, 4MB RAM cards, a UDA50 disk controller, a 10-megabit network adapter (live on the internet), and an RX02 floppy drive. The highlight is the massive 14-inch diameter, 3500 RPM hard drive (the DEC R81), which is opened up to reveal its enormous motor and platters. The video also covers the R60 removable cartridge drives and the DMA bus grant signal propagation mechanism. The session ends with a power issue when trying to spin up the R81 while the computer is already running.