I'm pretty sure that the thing I saw was significantly older than
650. The bits were so big that they were using an oscilloscope to see
them. I don't recall if they said what machine that drum connected
to. I had gone there for some big deal event and it was very crowded.
Anyway, it's worth checking with CHM for interest in any old but
historically significant hardware.
/Leonard
Seymour J Metz wrote on 1/25/2024 5:55 AM:
I started on a 650, and that had a 2,000 word drum. The 305, before my time,
had a 2400 character drum. I'm not aware of any IBM drum smaller than that.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי
נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Leonard D
Woren <ibm-main...@ldworen.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2024 12:37 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: OT-ish: Very old IBM hardware & manuals available
Maybe contact the Computer History Museum https://computerhistory.org/
. They probably have the resources to ship anything they're
interested in.
Their collection includes IBM hardware that predates any of us having
seen a digital computer. It's been quite a while since I was there,
but they were working on fixing up an IBM drum storage device which I
think was the size of beer keg and held something like 550 bytes, no
typo, or maybe it was a few kbytes.
/Leonard
Robert Prins wrote on 1/23/2024 7:57 AM:
Hi all,
My father worked for IBM in the Netherlands for more than 30 years,
starting as a CE in the late 1950'ies. Last year he was diagnosed with
Alzheimer, and over the past few months my siblings and me have been
emptying his apartment and storage room, and we've come across a sizeable
quantity of IBM "stuff", from manuals for the 650 to old square cm
"integrated circuits" and even a magnetic core memory card. My siblings
weren't in the least interested in any of it, so I took it, and although
it's nice to look at, our house is already full enough as it is, so...
If anyone thinks they can offer a good home to these things, and I will,
hopefully soon, put pictures of everything that surfaces on my website,
feel free to contact me off this list and we can take it from there. You'll
most definitely be paying for shipping (from Lithuania), and based on what
I'm going to find out on fleabay, I might ask for a bit more.
Robert
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