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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!
> 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.
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. :-)
Kid, this was a mainframe, not an abacus. It didn't have a handcrank, it had a boiler.
It's probably still accurate to say it was operated by cranks though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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?