IBM Thingy strikes again!

Joe, I talked to one of the Field Engineers tonight who know what your THING is. Believe it or not it is a piece of test equipment that is used to diagnose several different types of IBM equip. AND it is still used today. In fact he said I was sitting next to 2 of them this morning when I was in the CE office!! They are used to test devices like 3380, 3480, 3490 Disk drives. These drives are the humongo mainframe drives ( they stand over 6' tall) although they are very old technology. He also said that the device is used to diagnose communication problems between remote controllers and the main system. He also said that as a stand alone device it is pretty much worthless....unless you want to copy diskettes...but I don't know of too many people who need 8" diskettes copied!. He was surprised that you "found" one. He said that it could have been left behind at a clients location by a repair person and forgotten about.....or the CE's use to keep them in the trunks of their cars and it could have been taken from one. I asked him what you might be able to do with it...he said (jokingly) that one option would be to sell it to a competitive maintenance company (like bell Atlantic) who would want them so that they could service IBM hardware.??

> > I powered up the THING today. It says it's a Stand Alone Terminal >Exorciser, PN 08309930, date 01/84. It passes the self test and brings up a >menu that lets you select 327X Tutorial, 327X BSC, SDLC/SNA or R-LOOP. >Selecting the R-LOOP option brings up another menu for 8775 Device or 3276 >Device. That's as far as I can get in the menu, after that it asks for a CU >address or will autoscan for it but of course there's nothing connected so >it doesn't find what ever it's looking for. Do you think you can find any >more about it? > > > Joe >