18 Mar
2024
18 Mar
'24
8:03 a.m.
On Sat, 16 Mar 2024, Adam Bradley wrote:
Some of you may remember that I (Adam) and another
chap (Chris) rescued two
IBM 360/20 systems out of an abandoned building in Nuremberg back in 2019
and brought them to the UK (our blog is here: https://www.ibm360.co.uk/).
We have since basically found ourselves unable to effectively progress the
project due to personal & professional commitments. For various reasons
(explained in our latest blog post) we are testing the waters for making
the machines available to the right sort of people.
Sad to hear that.
We (Computermuseum Stuttgart) did place a bid, too. We were a bit
disappointed that instead of going just 200km, it went abroad to a now
non-EU country (which makes re-importing unattractive). But then, after we
saw the pictures of the house and the system, we were somehow glad that we
did not win ;-)
We realised that, first, the overall condition is unknown or bad, and
second, it is simply not worth more than a couple of hundred Euros
considering all the forthcoming costs and time needed to transport the
lot, store and restore it etc.
I don't know if History@IBM was interested, though (they have a working
360/20 system). And maybe the Vintage Computing Lab in Munich was
interested, too (they have a large mainframes collection, and also the
last IBM 705, although not complete).
I guess that the UK /360s are now "lost" for any non-profit/non-budget
museum in the EU.
Christian