It woz The Reg wot won it! Big Blue iron relics make it back to Blighty The team behind the mission to rescue a pair of aged IBM mainframes are celebrating after finally getting the hardware back to Blighty. The size, weight and delicacy of the ancient machines, along with limited crowdsourced funds, were threatening to put the kybosh on the whole project. Despite months of searching, they could …
As long as it has a FORTRAN IV compiler the biggest problem would be memory size. I remember porting ADVENT (the Jack Pike version) in the late 70s, it wanted 40K memory and the ICL system I was using had 25K max. Took a lot of tweaking with DA files to hold the message arrays but I got there in the end! As long as their system has 24-32K it should be doable. Happy memories!
They've got two CPUs (CPU in this case referring to the entire cabinet, not just the chip), and they've found one has 16K (apparently the max for that model), I'm not sure about the other.
They're 360 2020's if that helps.
Got my PET operational recently. It only needed the keyboard cleaned but I recapped the power supply as a precaution anyway. The surprise came when I bought an emulator that works like an IEEE 488 disk drive. Turns out a previous owner had pulled one of the ICs that the IEEE 488 bus uses...
In the early 1990s I operated a SMB installing Windows for Workgroups, and the occasional Windows NT server. I was asked to install Windows NT on eight Compaq servers in the Exxon Baytown Refinery glass house. The room housed an IBM 3090 - 600E which was cold, dead, turned off, replaced by two RS6000s and 8 Compaq servers. Exxon had received 2 bids for the old hardware, one was removal and Exxon would pay the company $2,000 for the service, the other was for removal and the company would pay Exxon $2,000 for the machine. I was told the machine eventually wound up somewhere in South America.
As John Mashey's internet signature said: "No one escapes the attack of the killer micros."
55 ain't old
Depends on the milage..
(Spouses Morris Minor is a year younger than me and has had all the rotten bits replaced. Shame I can't do that with my dodgy bits.. MM is at ~ 110K miles and still using the original 1098CC engine. Phear the mighty power of the Austin A series engine!)
OT: If you need new parts:
a previous CEO/GM of Rover got f**ked off with the crippling&growing infestation of parasites (clueless corporatites, middle nonmanagers, etc), and bailed out. On his way out, he bought from them all the original designs and a lot of the machines to make the old Morris parts. He then set himself up (in Bristol IIRC) to re-make brand-new parts. Focussing his marketing on Morris Minors because that was where nearly all the demand was.
Old fans of Morrises (like me: Morris Oxford Series 3 1957 & a pre-official release 1956) will know that Mr Morris was IIRC the first to design a vehicle range that had all-interchangeable parts. So any of those parts will fit/can come from an MG ("Morris Garages"), Oxford, Isis, Major, etc.
And yes, rack&pinion steering on a separate chassis allows for quite startling cornering if you know what you're doing :D -- leave modern cars for dust when it gets twisty.
if you need new brake(drum)-pads or clutch, you can pop down to your local farm machinery suppliers (if you live anywhere near farmland) and get them to manufacture them from scratch. Same technology/materials, you see, and farm kit's so variable they still make them by "hand" locally.
"The model 20 was introduced 55 years ago. Big Blue didn't need to get rid of the engineers, they died."
This is what training is for.. So one generation can pass knowledge on to the next. Of course, someone needs to be interested in being the trainer, and someone needs to be the trainee.. Difficult to find either when dealing with mid 60s hardware/software.
The model 20 was introduced 55 years ago
One of the CPU units was made in 1965 - the year I was born! And it was another 12 years after that that I first got to play with a computer (a 4-bit single board one - from memory it had very low memory (256 bytes?) and a 8-digit LED display..
Further duckduckgo-ing reveals it was a MK14:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK14
After playing with that for a year or so we upgraded to a Nascom 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nascom_(computer_kit)).
Now I feel old(er).
I worked a shop with 2 360/65s, a 360/30. a 7080. and eventually a 360/40 on which HASP was initially installed (my understanding being that this certain large corp had one of the first instances after Houston). I started to learn PL/1 on that as well as get a good grasp on JCL (well, as much as was possible), and later learned COBOL on a different site's 360/50 which was upgraded to a 370/155 (?). Memories; faded at best.
sigh, the /20 was the bastard stepchild of the system/360 lineup. it only has 8 16 bit registers, instead of the 16 32 bit of the rest of the 360 line, and its instruction set is very subset and incompatible. The /20 had 4-32KB of core memory, and you needed at least 12KB to run the DPS OS which wasn't very compatible with anything else in the 360 lineup. its a shame its not a 360/40, those could at least run the mainstream DOS/360
restoring that thing to full operational state is likely going to be a major project. they used DTL logic, and ceramic hybrids rather than integrated circuits, which IBM called SLT. The DTL logic can be either 0-3V or 0-9V. I know a retired guy who restored an IBM 1130 of the same generation a couple years ago, it was about a 2 year full time project to get it fully functional. Part way through it, the front panel lights started dying of old age, and they were an unobtanium 'grain of wheat' lightbulb, so he ended up having to engineer and fabricate a LED based front panel replacement
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