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Burying a Mainframe In Style
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
It deserved a burial at C!
taking it up the freight elevator, and pushing it off the roof ala bofh is more fun.
> It leaves behind some 25 servers that are now needed
> to run these systems
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
changes...
25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
vendors.
25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
25 servers that will be decommissioned in three years at
``end of life''.
This is progress.
Shame they'll still be paying IBM for it for the next three years.
And here I was picturing the way they decommissioned that printer in Office Space after reading the article title.
Surely 25 Msec is over 17 hours, and corresponds to 40uHz.
Was the handcrank extra or did they come standard?
Been skipping your medication again? :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Manitoba is in Canada. As in the rest of the civilized world, we use the metric system over here.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm fed up about these brain dead measurement units used by only a minority of only three unimportant countries around the world. Time to wake up.
The prices should be in Canadian Dollars as well, then it's a little cheaper than what TFA says. :-)
Deleted
I'd rather desert.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Nunez!
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
In the mid 90's I picked up an old Vax 725 at auction for pocket change because it was filled to the gills with serial ports and was a cheap way to get a bunch of modem's on a T-1 (at the time we were experimenting with a local ISP business). When I moved out of the house, I left the Vax in the basement 'cause it was so heavy and no longer of any use to me. The house was torn down as soon as I moved out. Over the time I lived in the house I had annual lobster bakes; stoned filled pit in the ground, etc. Each year the pit was dug somewhere else in my yard, used and then covered over after the consumed lobster carcasses were tossed in. I can't help but wonder what some archeologist, 10,000 years from now, will think should they uncover the mass burial of probably close to 1,000 lobsters (20 yrs, ~50 /yr) on a 1/4 acre plot, 100 miles inland from the ocean, all arranged around a mishmash of old hardware, including the Vax. If I did not know the details I would find it very puzzling. Did the lobster operate a small NOC? Was it some sort of pilgrimage for them? Was ritual crustacean sacrifice common in the early stages of the internet?
How would you feel about your weight being published online?
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Damnit! Why can't people leave me alone?!
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
How many times have we seen something like this? ... The Amdahl Millennium runs a 5890 emulator. The 5890 machine runs a 3090 emulator. The 3090 runs an Amdahl V7 emulator, which simulates an IBM system-390. That 390 runs a system-360 emulation kernel. The 360 runs a 1401 emulator. And, the 1401 runs the 650 emulator. The original grade-report and transcript program, which was written in 650 machine code, was running on that 650 emulator because the only copy of the source deck was destroyed by mice in 1963. The upgrade was made possible after a student working in the registrars office last semester rewrote the whole system to run on a laptop. Next year they will hire another student to secure that laptop. ;-)