William Donzelli wrote, re S/360 coming in colors: >Blue, red, yellow, gray, and white...and green and brown with an RPQ.
ObAnecdote: The University of Waterloo computing center was built around a two-story "pit" -- the machine room -- with glass-walled classrooms around the second-floor perimeter (so you could watch the operators ignoring your tape mount requests, apparently). The room had red walls and floor, and was known as the "Red Room". It also had one of the first (probably THE first) System/360 model 75 machines in Canada; ultimately this machine had a whopping 3MB of memory -- one of real core, two of newfangled solid state. The 75 was blue, as was its companion, a model 44. The story as I was told it (and this may be entirely apocryphal) is that they were supposed to be red, but either IBM stopped offering the machines in red or someone realized that red machines in a noisy, red room with a red floor was a recipe for psychotic operators. (I know, "How do you tell a psychotic operator from a normal one?") I spent many a happy hour playing on the floor of the Red Room as an 8-year-old; a decade later, I was working there (well, not IN the room, thank &deity, but I had access). When the 360 was finally retired (and the 44, and the 370/158), several 4341s replaced them. With all the floor space now available, the tape racks were rolled into the room, then gradually migrated back out as 3350s multiplied. We used to give high school students tours of the room; I think those ended after some kid flipped a 3350 to R/O, with the predictable ensuing hilarity. Now, alas, the Red Room is no more -- it was paved over at the second floor level a few years ago. Good times...! ...phsiii (who wonders how much of what he wrote is inaccurate due to faded brain cells) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
