It can be
made. In some cases, the machine can be fooled into thinking
it is getting three phase power.
How?
Most of the time, the three phases get split up and sent to banks of
single phase power supplies. It is reasonably easy to rewire these
power supplies all to run off the single phase, although it might
involve a few transformers to get the voltages right. The remaining
three phase requirements will probably be for motors, like the fans
and for the disk drives (in older DASDs). You may still need an
external converter (rotary or otherwise), but now the power
requirements are much smaller. In IBMs, you will also need to fool the
phase rotation sensor, otherwise the machine will not start up due to
a power check.
Check the archives for more on three phase conversion.
--
Will
