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IBM shows off the old hardware in its basement
Jun 2, 2011 6:11 PM
Historical hardware from IBM's 100 year history is on show at its Hursley site
IBM IS CELEBRATING its 100th anniversary this year, and like any centenarian it has accumulated a cornucopia of bric-a-brac over the course of its life. At the company's Hursley offices near Winchester, however, this means bits of old mainframes and suchlike.
This is a card punch from 1949, used for preparing punched cards, the data storage medium of its day.
More card punch equipment bearing the Hollerith name. Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, one of the three firms that merged to form IBM in 1911.
A timestamping machine for workers clocking in. Another ancient product from one IBM's precursor companies.
IBM Type 77 punched card collator, dating from 1937. It could automatically sort and file two sets of punched cards, handling up to 240 per minute.
IBM Selectric typewriter from 1967. These models featured proportional spacing, and a golf-ball head to print instead of each key manually striking the paper. Some Selectric models could record text to tape, allowing for editing like a crude word processor.
A magnetic tape reel of the type used with the Selectric typewriters to record and edit text, pre-dating the word processor by many years.
Before RAM chips, computers used magnetic core storage for data memory. This unit dates from 1958.
A Transformer Read-Only Store (TROS) module, used by IBM to store microcode in some computer systems in the 1960s.
An early card assembly using plug-in modules built using integrated circuits (chips) instead of individual transistors.
IBM 5444 disk storage device, developed at Hursley in 1969 for the System/3 computer. The removable cartridge on top contains a single 14in disk storing up to 2.5MB of data.
Another early disk drive, showing how little the basic design has changed in decades. The disk platters and read/write head assembly are clearly visible.
An 8in floppy disk, originally developed by IBM for loading microcode into System/370 mainframes at power-up. Later, floppies developed into a widespread general-purpose storage medium.
Introduced in 1979, the IBM 3279 was the company's first colour mainframe terminal and could even display graphics.
The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and is the direct ancestor of today's Windows PCs. This model is a PC XT with a hard disk (early models had only floppy drives or a cassette interface), but shows the original PC keyboard layout and the bulky monochrome display screen.
IBM's PC Convertible, from 1986, was the firm's first 'laptop' computer. It weighed over 5kg, and had a detachable screen allowing it to be used with a monitor on a desk. It was costly compared to rival machines from vendors such as Toshiba, and did not sell well.
The ThinkPad 701, an early ThinkPad laptop model from 1995, featured a unique 'butterfly' keyboard that unfolded and locked together as the lid was lifted, to give a full-size keyboard that is wider than the system case. Later laptops had larger and wider screens, doing away with the need for such a feature.
Not an antique, but a modern z10 mainframe used at Hursley as part of IBM's software and services development, and safely behind glass to keep it away from the grubby hands of visitors.
IBM IS CELEBRATING its 100th anniversary this year, and like any centenarian it has accumulated a cornucopia of bric-a-brac over the course of its life. At the company's Hursley offices near Winchester, however, this means bits of old mainframes and suchlike.
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October 29, 2015 at 11:33 AM
The picture after the 5444 (the one with the disk vertical instead of flat) is of a IBM internal 640 MB drive. Its IBM internal code name was Piccolo. It was used in IBM System/34, System/36 and was the primary drive for a long time in the 1st System/38s. The drive was developed by IBM Rochester and not the main Disk group who created S/370 drives.
October 29, 2015 at 12:36 PM
Little more on the Piccolo as my memory comes back. The drive was developed by IBM Hursley England. The model was 62PC - where 62 was the IBM plant code for Hursley. The disk held 64MB (binary MB, not decimal) of data. But we sold a lot of these drives since I believe every product in the General Systems division line at one time could use this drive and most had multiple drives. So I am almost sure IBM Rochester MN made the majority of the drives for the U.S. market. There was a time when you could not fly Winchester HDA on airlines due to air pressure at altitude and I think the 62PC still had that requirement. Getting unexpected inventory replacement from England by ship would have caused a lot of problems plus at what then was high volume production of 62PC, there were financial reasons to make them in the U.S. The drive was vertical so that if you have sudden lost of power, the heads would fall down off the disk platter and not onto the disk platter possibly damaging the platter or the heads and losing data.