Put on the hip waders AND FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER!!

or and First off, there were no "memory banks" on this machine (e.g., it didn't have any form of non-volatile memory such as magnetic core) other than the disk. The entirety of its storage, working registers (with exception of some flip-flop-based registers which would lose their content when the machine was powered off anyway) was on the disk. Erasing the disk (without destroying the timing tracks) would "remove" the military's code/data. (I put remove in quotes due to discussion below). The real question is, did the military actually put a program on the machine that would securely erase the data without chance for recovery as part of the de-mil process? As we know, simply writing 0's or 1's all over a disk doesn't necessarily make the data that was there before unrecoverable. It takes some pretty sophisticated code to really erase a drive and still leave it usable afterwards using software only. I doubt that back in those days they went to the level required to actually make the data unrecoverable by someone with forensics technologies of today. If one of the disk drives in pristine form were found, and it had been "erased" by the military back in the day, it would be my guess that it might be possible to recover some or perhaps all of the content of the disk prior to its erasure using forensics technologies. That'd certainly be interesting, for sure...and might get someone in trouble if they actually succeeded in recovering the code. Even today, it's my guess that the targeting calculations are something that the government would rather still be kept secret. My guess that any machine that ended up in a school environment would have had enough cycles of different data on the disk that it would be unlikely that anything could be recovered. I suppose that it is possible that the military created a device that would hook up to the drive and would effectively erase the register and code tracks through hardware (rather than writing code to do it). That might make the recovery of the data less likely. It's all supposition, because certainly the military would not have had any interest in releasing the means by which the machine were de-militarized. In order for the machines to be usable once they were released for donation to schools, the disk couldn't be bulk erased, or the timing tracks would have been erased, rendering the machine unusable. So, either the military just loaded up a program to erase as much of the disk as possible (by writing junk to the disk, eventually destroying the erasing program itself), or through some external hardware that performed the erasure, or maybe they simply didn't bother (probably unlikely). Tough to say at this point in time, unless someone out there actually has experience dumping out the disk of the machine when they were first received in the schools. It took quite a bit of work to get these machines to be usable in a practical way -- there were some articles written about how to interface these things to various peripherals to make them functional as a general purpose computer. In their original application, they really only connected to sensors and actuators when installed in the Minuteman I missile. There was an umbilical that a console device of some kind (as well as I/O typewriter and paper tape reader/punch) could be plugged into that would allow programs to be loaded, modified, and the machine tested out, but I don't know if the external devices that connected to this I/O umbilical were included with the computer when they were donated to schools. A report from the Minuteman Computer User group indicates that some folks at Tulane university had one of the machines that they had built a number of I/O interfaces for including a Friden Flexowriter, paper tape reader/punch, and some sort of "control console". That might indicated that the military only provided the computer, and none of the support stuff that they used for loading code onto them, as well as performing testing, etc. There were over 1000 of these computers made, and it's unclear how many of them ended up in universities. It's doubtful that all of them ended up in the education system. The question is, what happened to the rest of the machines that didn't make it into the education system? Were they destroyed (e.g., bashed to bits by soldiers with sledgehammers, run over by heavy equipment)? Maybe some of them "went home" with military folks to play with? Were these machine de-militarized? Hard to say. Needless to say, it'd sure be interesting to find out if the machine for sale on eBay actually has the drive intact. It'd be really interesting to see what's on it. It'd take a bit of engineering to build circuitry to pull the data off of the drive, but not unreasonable to do. Some read amplifiers with proper thresholds to detect 0 and 1, some head selection logic, and a pretty basic microcontroller could certainly extract the raw data. I just hope that what is left of this machine (not much since it appears to be pretty much gutted other than the disk) ends up in the hands of someone who will know how to handle it properly, and go about seeing if the disk can be refurbished and made to run again. Rick Bensene