IBM 3850 / was Re: Amdahl 1015 on ebay

[Brent Hilpert]

Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
> Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
> > Anyone collect Amdahl stuff?
> 
> I was talking to a chap the other day who came to drop off bits of an IBM 3850
> mass storage system*; he was ex-Amdahl and by the sounds of it some of their
> systems were pretty darn nice. Lots of gold content though (although I gather
> that's less true of the later systems - maybe this one's light enough on gold
> that the scrappers won't get it)
> 
> * One of these:
> http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850.html
> ... sadly all he had was the tape head assembly and a couple of cartridges,
> although the mechanism's pretty darn impressive. Would be nice to see a whole
> tape silo / robot assembly functioning, though :-)

I recall seeing one of these in the 'cathedral'* at CERN around 1985. IIRC,
one could look in the end of the unit and see what was like a long corridor
with the honeycomb compartments filling both sides of the corridor and the
robot mechanism in the middle (although I don't think I actually saw it move).

(* The cathedral was the colloquial name of the main machine room for the
computing division at CERN: an acre of raised floor filled with machines and
open for several stories high (to assist with cooling I expect). Was quite
impressive to walk into.)