I worked with an ex-IBMer who told me about this thing. It was nick-named "The Noodle Snatcher" - with a puff of air it wiggled the mag tape and wrapped it around a drum for read/write. It had a nasty habit of mis-handling the tape. He told me that during a sales presentation to a customer, this happened, it wrinkled the tape wrapped it around the drum, and then put the crumpled tape back in the holder. The IBM salesman, without missing a beat, said, "and when it finds BAD data..." ________________________________ From: cctech <cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Jay Jaeger via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 1:04 PM To: cctech at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Researching IBM rare equipment from 50s to 80s On 12/14/2018 4:41 AM, Peter Van Peborgh via cctech wrote: Well, if your intention is to actually find one, can't help. I do know that Wisconsin DOT had one back in the day, on an IBM 360/50, but it was gone before I started work there. I think that I have a large negative of the beastie lying around somewhere. No, it is not stuffed anywhere. Indeed the building that formerly housed it (and was home for me during my career) was razed just this year. In general, even if IBM still had such records, I am sure that they would not release them, and doubt that they would be indexed in fine detail such that you could find customers of any particular machine type (unless they fed them to Watson ;) ). Leased units would have been turned back into IBM. Purchased units would have been mostly traded in and scrapped. A Google Search found these instances of customer units (there may well be more - I stopped after a few pages) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/datacell.html https://www.facebook.com/HealthManagementTechnology/photos/ibm-2321-data-ce… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM2321DataCellAtUMich.jpg JRJ