[jedberg]

This video brings back lots of nostalgia. I had the chance to tour the shipping facility in Fremont, and see all those machines in action. It was amazing how many disks they could process, and how much innovation was there.

They had machines that could verify the checksum of the disk in three seconds by reading the entire thing with multiple laser heads. They had machines that would OCR the sleeve and mark it for replacement if it was too dirty.

They had printers that could print the entire address on the envelope in about 300ms using multiple offset print heads, so that the sorters could run at full speed.

I wonder what will happen to all those machines. I know that sometimes they allowed bulk mailers to rent the envelope printers/sorters in the afternoons, I wonder if they'll just sell those to bulk mailers.

[awiesenhofer]

> They had machines that could verify the checksum of the disk in three seconds by reading the entire thing with multiple laser heads.

I would love to be able to buy such a drive, would be great to rip all my old discs.

[jedberg]

I don't think the machines could save the data. They just loaded into RAM, took the checksum, compared it to the known good checksum, and then moved on.