(no subject)

[stormdog]

I said I was taking apart a drive. This is the read/write head assembly, arranged so that you can see the way that the copper coils on each side of the heads would slide back and forth in suspension within the semi-circular magnetics. You can see the tiny little wheels on the top and bottom of the unit that rode mirror-finished cylindrical rails as the assembly moved the heads themselves in and out across the platters, traversing the drive cylinders like a draftsman's pencil sweeping across a piece of velum.

God/dess, it's beautiful. Some days I wish I could design things like this. Sitting at a drafting board and scribing line after perfect, magnificent line until I had this device sitting on a page in front of me would be like a form of worship. It inspires the same awe and wonder that I felt when I watched my instructor plug in a cable and saw the spanning tree protocol embedded in a stack of five Cisco Catalyst switches automatically configure their ports, creating paths that connected every port on each of them to the rest, yet eliminating loops and redundancy. It was just... beautiful. Like this. So many hours of work are represented by this little copper and ceramic widget here in my hands....