1996-1997 Hewlett Packard

My first real job opened the door to a world of leading edge product design and manufacture. This 1 year contract was arranged through the University of the West of England to gain valuable experience in the field of product engineering.

The product I worked on was a 24GB DAT tape backup system, quite special for 1996 standards.

My final year project was to design a set of flexible tools that extracted customer usage and drive performance data from a memory chip.

The product

HP C1533 4mm Tape Drive Specifications

Capacity

Interface

Recording Format

Data Compression Algorithm

Media

Transfer Rate (Sustained)

Transfer Rate (Burst)

Dimensions and Weight

* All capacities assume 2:1 compression ratio. Actual rate may vary depending on the nature of the data.

24 GB (native) to 48 GB (compressed) with 6-cartridge autoloader

SCSI-2

ANSI/ISO/ECMA DDS, DDS-DC and DDS-2

DCLZ

90 and 120 meter Media Recognition System DDS cartridges

Typically 1MB/s with data compression*

asynchronous 3.0MB/s - synchronous 7.5MB/s

5.3 in. H x 6.5 in. W x 10.6 in. D; 10.6 lbs.

Printed circuit inside (later generation)

The bare drives

The People

Me and my three computers! 486 PC (left), HP 100LX palmtop (middle) and an HP 3000 workstation (right)

Me and Andy

Arthur Woo & Andy Hanna

All nights seemed to end like this. This one is after a night at the Brewery Tap.

The crème de la crème of R&D (Fancy dress competition)

Leaving do. I'm centre right, in blue holding up a sword.

The Place

Very nice location in Filton, North Bristol, right next door to a building site that became the 'Defence Procurement Agency' which employs 4,600 staff!

'The Farmhouse'. This was the training room, gym squash at rear!