Full immersion emulation

[Jon Elson]

On 03/01/2017 02:54 PM, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote:
>
>
> On 2017-03-01 3:14 PM, Charles Anthony via cctalk wrote:
>> Part of the iconic mainframe experience is the cold room 
>> sounds; for early
>> Multics installations (and other systems) the sound of 
>> the Selectric
>> operator's console.
>>
>> I/O Selectrics are rare, expensive and unreliable.
> They are all mechanical and stood up remarkably well to 
> hammering away day and night printing out the console log, 
> considering what they are, I would hardly think unreliable 
> fits.
Well, we still had a Selectric (1050) on our 360/65 at 
Washington University up until the end.  I'm pretty sure it 
was the most unreliable part of the machine.  It seems about 
every two weeks it would break the timing belt, which meant 
the clutch had to be rebuilt.  IBM had two 1050's there, and 
would swap them every time one broke.  They really did run 
the 1050 hard on that system, it was printing a line about 
every 10 seconds for about 14 hours straight every week day.

Jon