24 Mar
2010
24 Mar
'10
3:30 p.m.
On 24 Mar 2010 at 9:16, blstuart at bellsouth.net wrote:
I don't know about the ocean, but they did send
them off to
scrap yards and stuff to be demolished. I had a roommate in
college who had worked at one of these places in high school
and he had one of the 360 nameplates as a souvenir. And there
was more than just OEMs to consider. Back then they'd lease
you their grandmother but not sell much of anything. So
when something went off lease and they had a new model,
most customers were "gently" encouraged to lease the new
one and IBM would pull the old one. So what to do with
the old ones? Well, you can guess. Certainly couldn't have
the older model in the used market to cut into leases on
the new one...
There's another aspect to the problem, that CDC ran into during the
70's--that of used parts finding their way into the mainstream.
Apparently, this was enough of a problem that CDC ordered that any
decommissioned system be reduced to unusable junk. At SVLOPS I saw
CEs spend hours taking bolt cutters and hammers to disk drives and
one-of-a-kind systems (STAR 1-Bs) after stripping useful bits from
them.
It hur to watch.
--Chuck