[personal] UK Computer Museum on TV

[Mike Hatch]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Holmes" <roger.holmes at microspot.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 8:19 PM
Subject: Re: [personal] UK Computer Museum on TV


>
> I presume you mean the contacts with the dash-pot attached, not the 
> switches at the end of arm's travel as these are fairly bullet proof.  Now 
> I've said that, they will of course fail next week!
For sure !.

Yes, not the limit switches. The Pyestock TM4's were serviced regularly so 
the switches rarely gave trouble, chambers cleaned weekly.  The ICL TM4's 
were dreadfull, no spares, took quite a while to get it running. Other 
analog drives on site had to be cleaned daily.

>> There were also TM2 drives on a LEO3 #26 at Charles House in London
>> maintained by ICL for running gas bills. I gather quite a number of  the 
>> Leo
>> machines used TM drives.

The Leo machines used to get tapes from other sites for processing.
Quite regularly their drives seemed to be skewed as we had to "coax" the 
tape across the head with a cotton bud to get a good read, heven knows what 
it did to customers bills.

Mike.