A 1970s disk drive that wouldn't seek: getting our Xerox Alto running again
http://www.righto.com/2018/03/a-1970s-disk-drive-that-wouldnt-seek.html [www.righto.com]
2018-04-12 16:32
Our vintage Xerox Alto has been running reliably for months, but a couple weeks ago the disk drive malfunctioned and the heads stopped moving. With a drive that wouldn’t seek, our Alto wouldn’t work. After extensive debugging and studying the drive’s complex head movement control system, we discovered that the problem had a trivial fix. This blog post discusses our adventures debugging the Alto’s Diablo hard drive and how we got it to work again.