21 Nov
2014
21 Nov
'14
7:28 p.m.
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