Age

They are around, but no one does anything with them and the owners generally don't like to talk about them (probably out of fear of being bombarded with sales offers). I think at one point I had a running list of 12 or 13 survivors. Most were 40s and 50s, none were the real monsters. S/370s, for being newer (and I think more plentiful when produced), are in far fewer numbers. The list for them is only 3 or 4. I suppose they just don't have the prestige of the earlier models. What is going to be a big gaping hole in the mainframe line is that of the machines of the 70s and 80s*. As far as I know, no one saved any machines in the 30xx line. The last 3090s have pretty much been retired. Even ES/9000s are not doing well, although every so often one of the rackmount models (922x) appears on Ebay. The IBM clone ("PCM"s) scene of the 70s and 80s is very bleak - the list is 1, and that machine is not even complete. *Oddly, the true survivors are PDP-10s and Cybers, the two lines that died. IBM. Tough stuff. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org