Geeks Successfully Transport a 50-Year-Old IBM Mainframe to Former UK Top Secret Mi6 Base (ibms360.co.uk) 46
In April Slashdot reader Adam Bradley won an eBay auction for an IBM 360 mainframe computer. Then he began blogging "the saga that unfurled" in transporting it from an abandoned building in Germany to the U.K. (where Adam volunteers at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.)
"The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible," he writes today. "We definitely got Slashdotted. I was up until the early hours migrating servers!" Yet he's daring to send us another update. "We have now successfully got it back to the UK and to it's new home at a former Top Secret Mi6 base! "
Their blog post credits the discounted service they received from a "bespoke IT infrastructure solutions" company called Sunspeed: They confirmed that they'd be able to help, and because they recognized the importance of the project and how much they liked it, they were kindly willing to do it at a significant discount which was covered completely by the crowd funding donations... "Upon reading about the issues being experienced trying to find a large enough vehicle with a tail-lift capable of handling the weight, I knew we could help. We're really pleased we could help out and be a part of this amazing story to recover such a rare piece of IT history... I think we'll now have to change our marketing to: Whether you need to move a single server, an entire Data Centre or recover an extremely rare and sensitive IBM 360 Machine from Germany before Brexit, then Sunspeed is here to help....!"
They had tons of bubble wrap and pallet wrap, along with these fantastic cardboard corner pieces for the machines. They also had this fantastic plastic sheeting to go down on the difficult and uneven surfaces which made life a lot easier. Their plan was to wrap every machine in bubble wrap, and then wrap it in pallet wrap to keep everything safe before strapping it into the truck. This was much more than we were expecting so we were thoroughly impressed!
It's a tale of machine cables, loose panels, and a pallet of punch cards, with lots of fun photos from the move, as well as video of the vintage mainframe's triumphant arrival and unwrapping at its new home. "At that point, we were pretty tired and so we called it a day. We'll be heading back soon to start cleaning and cataloguing the machines to determine exactly what the specifications and state of them are. Needless to say, we're all terribly excited to get our teeth stuck into the project!"
"We can't thank everybody enough for all their help on this project."
"The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible," he writes today. "We definitely got Slashdotted. I was up until the early hours migrating servers!" Yet he's daring to send us another update. "We have now successfully got it back to the UK and to it's new home at a former Top Secret Mi6 base! "
Their blog post credits the discounted service they received from a "bespoke IT infrastructure solutions" company called Sunspeed: They confirmed that they'd be able to help, and because they recognized the importance of the project and how much they liked it, they were kindly willing to do it at a significant discount which was covered completely by the crowd funding donations... "Upon reading about the issues being experienced trying to find a large enough vehicle with a tail-lift capable of handling the weight, I knew we could help. We're really pleased we could help out and be a part of this amazing story to recover such a rare piece of IT history... I think we'll now have to change our marketing to: Whether you need to move a single server, an entire Data Centre or recover an extremely rare and sensitive IBM 360 Machine from Germany before Brexit, then Sunspeed is here to help....!"
They had tons of bubble wrap and pallet wrap, along with these fantastic cardboard corner pieces for the machines. They also had this fantastic plastic sheeting to go down on the difficult and uneven surfaces which made life a lot easier. Their plan was to wrap every machine in bubble wrap, and then wrap it in pallet wrap to keep everything safe before strapping it into the truck. This was much more than we were expecting so we were thoroughly impressed!
It's a tale of machine cables, loose panels, and a pallet of punch cards, with lots of fun photos from the move, as well as video of the vintage mainframe's triumphant arrival and unwrapping at its new home. "At that point, we were pretty tired and so we called it a day. We'll be heading back soon to start cleaning and cataloguing the machines to determine exactly what the specifications and state of them are. Needless to say, we're all terribly excited to get our teeth stuck into the project!"
"We can't thank everybody enough for all their help on this project."
Slashdotted? (Score:4, Funny)
Was the webserver running ON the 360 mainframe???
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I wouldn't be surprised if the chips inside of a $15 digital wristwatch are more powerful than th
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Christ.
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Some time pre-2000, a large financial institution wanted to put some services running on a Tandem mainframe on the web. They decided to use NT servers as the front-end to the mainframe.
After a week or so of pain and suffering, they reversed it and put the old mainframe in as the front-end to the NT servers, at which point all the pain stopped.
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That's what happens when you tell your mainframe people to work on an entirely different platform and don't give them any training. I remember the incident, it was written up in NT Mag as an example of how not to manage a project.
Since bankers are the only people on the planet cheaper than lawyers the company's (I think it was Merrill Lynch) management decided that no training was necessary in either web development or Windows server management, since "they're all just computers". Tandem supplied some nic
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The company I worked at then went the opposite way, they moved the web servers off the RS-6000 and Sun boxes and put them on my NT server because that was the only one that didn't have to be rebooted twice a week.
If your shop needed to reboot a Sun server twice a week, then your shop was incompetent...
m
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No, bad hardware we figured, but the company wouldn't admit to it. Since RAM for that box was so bloody expensive we didn't have any spares, and they wanted to charge an arm and two legs to send a tech to test. It eventually got migrated to something that didn't use much memory (phone system I think) and was happy.
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I work with a 'DevOps' that came from chase and yes, if this example compared with the one I know then it's not a surprising trend to see.
For the longest time (Score:5, Interesting)
I always though IBM hardware was boring and dull office appliances. That couldn't be further from the truth. Their enterprise hardware is well engineered and so different from anything in the PC (or even old UNIX) world. You can order a new mainframe today that will natively run binaries from that S/360 machine. The AS/400 is another architecture that is utterly alien when compared to everything else. You want to talk about hypervisors and virtualization? IBM was doing that at the hardware level in the 1970s. Do yourself a favor and read up on this old hardware, its fascinating.
Re:For the longest time (Score:5, Funny)
'' we only have computers because of space''
Silly Wabbit, were you denied Playboy mag as a child?
Because everyone knows the only reason we have computers today is the development of technology necessary to provide us with sufficient variety, quantity and quality of Porn.
Woosh! (Score:2)
He was apparently beinf sarcastic.
I get how one could not tell though. :)
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You just reminded me of someone having a large ASCII-print image of a naked woman from probably the 70s. Yes, image resolution has improved a bit since.
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How many got to "Germany"...
What they wanted to do and what skilled experts they got for the work.
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The AS/400 is another architecture that is utterly alien when compared to everything else.
It was. Then its processor was replaced with glue on top of POWER.
Re:For the longest time (Score:4, Informative)
The software architecture is the alien part. Everything runs on the TIMI virtual machine, with 128-bit pointers, and all storage mapped into the address space. That's how it's survived multiple CPU architecture changes without breaking software.
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I try to explain it to Windows and *Nixies that it's a kind of dual abstraction layer.
Then their heads get the "quizzical dog" tilt, but explaining about not needing to re-compile software when the underlying architecture changes, they get interested.
Interesting design approach - OS400, the operating system, was designed *before* the hardware.
Neat! (Score:2)
It's one of those with the spinning tapes. The kind shown in movies and tv shows from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Did any tapes come with it?
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TFA is mostly pics, and you'll see piles of tapes, boxes of punch cards, etc.
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"Nuremberg Site Visit 4 – An unexpected emergency return!' has more on the parts.
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We were still doing data transfers by sending those 9-track tapes via Fed Ex to the credit card companies in 1999. I was handed the job of getting rid of the tapes before the drive finally failed for good, and we ended up with a collection of methods including modem transfer, encrypted email, and FTP. The very last, and worst, one was American Express. They had me connect to their FTP site as Anonymous and drop the unencrypted file in a folder named with our account number. I was able to freely navigate
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A IBM computer was exported to "Germany" in the past.
The IBM mainframe is moving from the EU to another part of the EU.
Brexit...
To a former MI6 site.... in the UK.
So it could be a MI6 computer used in Germany
Brexit, Burger King...Kia... keep reading for BMW 1 Series, Russian religious art, Mercedes Vito 116 CDI, Hertz, AirBNB,
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From Germany to "Creslow Park, formerly Creslow Transmission Station". A IBM computer was exported to "Germany" in the past. The IBM mainframe is moving from the EU to another part of the EU. Brexit... To a former MI6 site.... in the UK. So it could be a MI6 computer used in Germany ... or a normal Germany computer on the way to the UK... to a former MI6 site in the UK ... before Brexit.
Brexit, Burger King...Kia... keep reading for BMW 1 Series, Russian religious art, Mercedes Vito 116 CDI, Hertz, AirBNB, Carrefour.
Hey Huxley; that is what happens when you pour mescalin into a 360 mainframe. BTW you are not supposed to snort or smoke peyote the result does not alter your doors of perception is fucks them up big time, just in case you haven't already noticed.
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Enjoy reading the rest for the parts about Brexit, Burger King...Kia and MI6?
What exactly is hard about this? (Score:2)
You take it apart into its modules, you put something protective on a pallet, you put it on there, using the same thing they used to put it there (like a forklift?), you wrap it in strong plastic so it doesn't get wet, and you tie it down with lashing straps. Then put it in your truck, using a forklift, add some padding so it doesn't tip, amd drive off.
Wow! Somebody moved! Newsworthy!
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Apparently these geeks have never done any manual labor, so wrapping junk in bubble wrap is pretty advanced. And yes, this is junk.
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There really aren't modules on something like this. Cabinets weighing hundreds of pounds filled with hundreds of circuit boards in card cages. More cabinets filled with fragile core memory and all the brittle discolored cabling. Documentation and inventory needs to be carefully completed.
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Took some reading to find the news on the IBM parts.
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You know I was thinking of writing a sarcastic "why is this on slashdot article", because literally every article gets one these days. Then I naively though that part two in a series about buying, moving and restoring a truly historic mainframe and installing it in a computer museum for all to see couldn't possible not be considered "news for nerds". Oh how wrong I was.
Look, if you don't like nerd shit, that's fine and honestly not particularly unusual. But would you mind taking your objections off a websit
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Moving an old mainframe, reverentially, is one of the nerdiest things there is. It belongs here.
A joking response, "What is this nerd article doing on a political outrage troll site" would be more appropriate.
original packaging (Score:4, Interesting)
They would have been more impressed with the original packaging. Heavy wooden packing cases, everything bolted in place. We had two cubby houses made from some of these boxes when I was a kid.
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IBM boxes (one generation later) had no problem running the original Colossal Cave Adventure.
Saving Big Iron (Score:3)
Well that's Brexit's computer needs sorted... (Score:1)
I'm looking forward to Pong in 4 years time.
128 MB RAM upgrade (Score:2)
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For 1982, that's an almost unbelievable amount of RAM. Those were serious machines back in the day.