20 Jan
2014
20 Jan
'14
3:46 p.m.
I think the whole IBM 360/370 Mainframe telecommunications environment is
worth preserving but I suspect most of it has long been junked or recycled.
This started in the 60s, exploded in the late 70s and 80s and came to a
crashing death in the early 90s. IMO in terms of telecommunications impact
on society there is little to compare with IBM and its followers until the
IP era
The environment would include
- IBM TSO
- IBM ACP (Airlines Control Program)
- Access methods such as QTAM, TCAM and VTAM
- Dumb telecommunications controllers like the IBM 270x and the
Memorex 1270
- IBM NCP and associated smart controllers like the IBM 3705 and
Memorex 1370 including their software
- The various terminals that attached with protocols like Async,
Bisync, SDLC, etc
I know of no organization collecting same.
FWIW, I have been looking for a Memorex 1270 for the CHM but so far without
luck. I think the last one probably went to the scrap yard in the late 90s,
but u never know what might turn up, particularly for old government sites.
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: Al Kossow [mailto:aek at bitsavers.org]
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2014 9:21 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: What to preserve from the pre-IP era
Just throwing this out to see what other people think.
I suspect we're at the tail end of the usage life
of devices that don't
speak IP.
I'm mostly thinking about networking devices
80's > 00's
So, what needs to be preserved? How much of this does
CHM need to do? Is
any other
collecting institution already covering this? How much
is within scope?
We've been having curatorial discussions about
this for years inside CHM,
and have
been doing some directed collecting since before the
big exhibition was
locked down
in 2010, but it is a big topic and there were a lot of
evolutionary dead-
ends.
What got me thinking about this is I've been
working with someone who has
storage
units full of mid-80's IBM SNA stuff and it's
taken me months to scan a
fraction
of it. I know there are huge swaths of telephony and
networking that I've
never
even looked at. It's pretty overwhelming,
actually, to get my head around
from the
software side.