21 Nov
2014
21 Nov
'14
8 p.m.
On 11/21/2014 09:28 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
Well, still, compared to some other makes, IBM really cut
down on gold use in their
machines. The earlier SMS machines had a lot of gold in
them, quite similar to
DEC Flip-Chip construction, in fact.
I guess my experience with the IBM gear must have been the
later stuff, 360
models 50 and 65, and then I actually got to dismantle a 145.
Jon
Actually, IBM
gear had VERY little gold in them.
Have you seen the inside of a 4381? There is a
large array of
multichip modules, sort of forerunners of the air cooled TCM - each
one has almost 1000 gold plated pins.
So, a good-sized 360 mainframe had a couple Oz.
of gold, total.
The NASA model 67 reportedly had 66 ounces of gold in the CPU. Even
an
early model 30 could have 8 or 9.
It is true that midway through the S/360 period and into the S/370
period, the gold was really trimmed away to save costs - thus my wide
range of values for 3803 tape controllers (they usually have a random
mix of gold and tin backplanes).
--
Will