7 May
2015
7 May
'15
10:33 a.m.
1. IBM would very often lease rather than sell, and take back machines when
customers upgraded; it was obviously in their interests to control or
eliminate where possible the market in used machines.
2. Gold. A lot of gold in old IBM kit. I knew a scrap dealer in Chelmsford
UK that did nothing but break old IBM mainframes (only ever big boring grey
boxes when I was there in mid to late 1990s though!)
Mike
On 7 May 2015 13:16, "Jon Elson" <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote:
On 03/13/2015 01:32 PM, Al Kossow wrote:
CHM was able to obtain volumes 18-20 of the IBM
2050 drawings, which are
the microcode charts and ROS dump. I got them scanned and uploaded
yesterday
to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/fe/2050
This was one of the things that I had been trying to locate for a while
now.
Just a curious thing I've noticed. Given the historic significance, and
the
large number of machines produced, I'm kind of amazed at the incredibly
small number of 360's that apparently exist.
Yes, I know, any would-be collector could drag home a PDP-8 and put it in
his garage, even a whole rack mount system with an RK02 (or 3), dectape and
paper tape reader, and still get his car in the garage. And, the system
could be run off normal mains power.
You can't do that with a real 360 (some 360/20's were pretty small), even
a 360/30 was a pretty big box. And, you can't run a 360 off normal
residential power, either. Many of the peripherals used 3-phase motors,
and hacking the converter/inverter to run off single phase would not be a
task for any but the most experienced EE.
But, it sure is a shame that there appear to be a tiny number of machines
in existence. One list shows 15 or 16 machines, excluding the model 20.
Probably there are a couple more hidden somewhere, like the B1900 that came
to light so recently.
As fas as I can tell, NONE of these systems is complete enough to ever
run, with the possible exception of the 360/30 at the CHM, which does seem
to have a complement of peripherals, and maybe control units, too.
Given the number of DEC 10's that are actually up and running, this seems
a bit of a surprise. there might be some emotional attachments that are
behind this disparity.
Anybody have some comments?
Jon