Das geeks hit crowdfunding target: IBM mainframes are coming home

Big congratulations to Adam Bradley and Chris Blackburn, who have raised enough cash to get their rescued IBM 360s back from Nuremberg. If you missed the original story the pair found themselves the owners of a pair of IBM 360 mainframes and assorted peripherals following some over-enthusiastic internet bidding in the pub. …

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Excellent story and start to a new week!

Here's to these brave guys!

I'm hoping El Reg will keep up a weekly/monthly column with information on the restore process done so far :)

[ForthIsNotDead]

That's a great idea! Have a beer!

[Flywheel]

All they need now is ..

An IBM 1419 MICR - no practical use of course, but it's such a beast of a machine and is really cool when it's running. It's also really loud!

[ProbablyUnknown]

Re: All they need now is ..

Great story. I remember seeing tabulating machines as a child in the 60's and thinking, this is the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All they need now is ..

I remember being taught how to program and operate tabulating machines (just punch cards, not MICR) in the late 60s because they were still the present. Smaller businesses still used them for accounting and inventory because they were cheap, didn't require much infrastructure beyond electricity, and a single high school student with limited training (like me) could program and run them.

[Ross Nixon]

Re: All they need now is ..

Correct. We had to wear protective earmuffs & little foam earplugs.

[Will Godfrey]

Love this bit!

"with the help of Peter Vaughan, responsible adult and volunteer at the National Computing Museum"

[PeterO]

Re: Love this bit!

There are multiple responsible "Peter"s at the museum :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Love this bit!

> "with the help of Peter Vaughan, responsible adult and volunteer at the National Computing Museum"

Yes, he's very genial.

[Ken 16]

well done them!

Absolutely crazy but who hasn't bought something on eBay by placing a low bit and saying 'it'll never sell for that' :D

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

Re: well done them!

Indeed. I used to primarily work on SUN E6500s and E10Ks and such like. I still have in my garage the frame / shell of an old 6500 that I bought on eBay for £200. I now keep my garden tools in it.

[Joe Montana]

How did it come to be there?

The building does not look like a typical data centre, it would be interesting to find out who set it all up and what they were doing with it there?

[Kubla Cant]

Re: How did it come to be there?

Also, I wonder how the card reader came to be "under a pile of Porsche parts"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"under a pile of Porsche parts"

Sometimes these places becomes something where people just stash things in - maybe the Porsche parts may find their way to eBay as well....

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: How did it come to be there?

Given the age of the stuff it was probably installed before data centres became typical. Business machinery installed in a business.

[imanidiot]

Re: How did it come to be there?

IIRC, the building had been rented at some point by a sports-wares manufacturer to digitise a boatload of old paperwork. After the work was done the machines were pretty much abandoned in place (Support contract ended, IBM didn't bother picking it up, the company moved out of the building. Leaving orphaned machines). Over the years following the building had all sorts of different users, but nobody fancied lugging the heavy equipment out of there so it was left in place.

Buildings like this (especially at the end of life) often end up as multi-user "ehhhh, I'll get to it later" storage/dumping grounds, then get abandoned with lots of goodies left in the place that everybody forgot about. Thus you get piles of mismatched stuff strewn all over the place.

[Doctor Syntax]

Gunther seems to be an A1 bloke. Good for him for all his help.

[Intractable Potsherd]

I was going to say the same if no one else did - thanks, Dr S!

[Chuunen Baka]

Die Geeks.

Plural definite article.

And for the record I programmed assembly language for IBM 360 on punch cards many years ago. Never actually saw the hardware as we weren't allowed into the machine room.

[phuzz]

Re: Die Geeks.

Ah, the good old days before DevOps, when programmers weren't even allowed to see the machines, much less have access to them.

[Martin Gregorie]

Re: Die Geeks.

Some of us had access back then.

I first worked for a small ICL service bureau in Wellington, NZ, first as junior programmer, later becoming a systems analyst and George 3 sysadmin in a small team - never more than 8-10 of us plus operators. If there was a rush job it was quite common for one of us to be given the computer room keys to go in Saturday morning, power up the 1903, do what needed to be done, power it off again and lock up afterwards. Very scary the first time I did it.

[JohnOates]

Re: Die Geeks.

Fair point but it would make for a rather aggressive headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

history of trousers

Explanation please. How did firms own stuff like this and all the ancillary staff and still make a profit in whatever business they were in?

Im guessing the setup costs in the early days gave some an unfair advantage.

Once the hardware became generic and cheap and compact that was that and those saddled with the large legacy sites and workforce eventually noticed their trousers were down.

Vast sites became broom closets but even that wasn't enough. The cloud is even smaller than broom closets.

No belt could cope with that.

(Actually what bugs me most is the dream of people hosting ther own wonderful and whacky website and service from home has been destroyed as everyone has been convinced to follow the herd to generic social media and its idiocy)

[Francis Boyle]

2+2

The company had the contract to distribute Porsche parts worldwide*. I bet there was a fair bit of dosh in that. Enough, at least, to tide them over until the savings from sacking an army of pen pushers comes on line.

*Pure speculation, but the principle is sound.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: history of trousers

"How did firms own stuff like this and all the ancillary staff and still make a profit in whatever business they were in?"

Generally it was rented, not owned by the user. When it outlived its contract it wasn't worth the expense for the actual owners to collect it - a whole new meaning for abandonware. I've seen that happen to much more recent kit. Ancillary staff hopefully smaller than staff needed to do it by hand. Prices set to cover overheads and make a profit; competitors would have similar overheads.

Does that explain it all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: history of trousers

For the most part I suspect the driver towards automation wasn't cost but speed (which was why the US Census Bureau had Hollerith develop automated tabulating in the first place). With computers such things as orders, shipments, and invoices could be processed overnight. Plus, businesses which grew beyond a certain size couldn't handle the volume manually.

[goldcd]

A white vinyl ElReg vulture would look lovely on that red

If they say wanted to offer some sponsorship..

[Doctor Syntax]

From their project history:

This eBay listing was unusual mainly because it didn’t actually list the computer as an IBM 360, but rather as an “seltene Anlage “Puma Computer IBM 2020”

So an eBay listing of an IBM 360 is a usual listing?

[Mike 16]

You call that old?

Check out the Texas company still (as of 2013 at least) running the business on pre-computer punched card gear:

TL;DR version for Da Youf:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2013/04/24/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today-1948/

A bit more info, but still "webish":

https://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html

Traditional version for those of us with flowchart templates (that have been used):

http://ibm-1401.info/402.html

[Aussie Doc]

Well done!

Well done to those guys.

Always great to bring old tech back to life.

Have a beer.