Brian Whatcott wrote in news:rmBxl.21117
:

This was a step back in one way: you could lose power on a core
computer and when it came up again, the code and data were still there
in core. Not so with solid state memory....

But I'll stop here....
Brian W



A local Catholic church gave me a complete IBM Systems 32, including OS
and small business software for a small manufacturing firm. It had two
fixed drives, huge noisy ones; an 8" floppy drive that had a boot loader
on floppy and a large data cassette drive to backup the big drives. I
can't remember how much data the big 14" drives stored, but I remember
something about 108MB or 128MB each.

The main computer was about chest high, about 4' wide and maybe 10'
long. It ran on 3-phase 208VAC/416VAC, your choice. There were 4 IBM
terminals to feed it and massage its output and a massive half-ton chain
printer that could eat a whole box of z-fold tractor paper in about 4
minutes printing not X characters/second but X LINES per second at a
furious pace. It sounded like a buzz saw trimming the bark off trees in
a sawmill when printing, even inside its "quiet cabinet" included in the
package.

A few of us were rummaging around in my storage building looking for
something and the group stumbled upon my Systems 32. One of the guys
was in the trucking business and had a big warehouse wired for 3-phase
power. He volunteered to power it if we trucked it over there in one of
his vans, just to see if we could run it. There were 4 huge boxes of
cables.

We got it wired up next to one of the large forklift chargers in the
warehouse and, after actually reading the manuals a bit, we dared to
toss caution to the wind and flip the big switch to ON. The floppy
bootloader found what it was looking for and all 4 screens lit up with
the original company's text-based logo. It was still loaded with their
current inventory from the day it was unplugged and replaced. We
ordered vast quantities of industrial supplies and entered over $480,000
to accounts payable in the next few hours. We had a great time. We
stole boxes of paper from the warehouse office and dumped the inventory
and vendor lists to the printer making an awful racket!...(c;]

As the "new" wore off our toy, we shut her down and rolled her back into
the truck. I stripped off some really impressive power supply
components from the main console and saved a couple of single-phase fans
I thought might be useful to my projects. The rest of it we backed the
truck up to a very large dumpster and put a big ramp from the truck
tailgate to the dumpster's lip. I bet that driver had trouble picking
that dumpster up over his cab to dump its half million dollar contents
into the crusher in the back that week.....(c;]

I dumped the manuals later on with the software backup disks while
cleaning out some file cabinets to put church organ manuals into a few
years later. Pity....money poured right down a hole it was....