Author: Adam Bradley

So, if you read our last post, you undoubtedly know that we were looking to relocate the collection to an organisation that was going to display it and potentially restore it. We had many, many interested parties reach out to us from museums all over the world to private collectors interested in acquiring the machines. When we set out to rescue the 360’s Chris and I decided that our main goal was their preservation, and everything else was by the wayside. We evaluated each and every opportunity presented to us for a new home for the 360’s, and found an organisation who we considered to be exactly what we’d been looking for. System Source Museum got in touch with us very shortly after we made…

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Hello! If you’re still here reading this blog, I’m impressed. We haven’t posted anything of note for some years now and frankly, thats because we haven’t done anything of note with the project. The machines have been sitting in their home, virtually untouched, for 4 years now. Chris & I (Adam) are just too busy with our respective professional and personal lives to give them a second look, and we’ve come to the difficult decision that it’s time to look at letting the systems go. When we originally moved the systems to Creslow, part of our agreement was to provide PR visibility for the services offered by ecom. Whilst this initially obviously garnered some visibility, our lack of progress with the project has obviously had…

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Dear Reader, Wow, it’s been a while since our last post here, almost 2 years! Time has totally flown by. I checked the traffic this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see that we’re still getting 2,000+ hits per month which is just incredible given that we haven’t published any updates. So, I’m guessing you probably want to know whats going on and why we’re not posting here. Let me summarily answer your most important questions below: Are all of you okay? – Yes. Is the project dead? – No. Do you have any updates for us? – Unfortunately, not really. So, the reason we haven’t been posting here is mainly because, well, nothing has changed. Chris & I have both been insanely busy with…

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Well, what can I say. It seems as though the last update was a lifetime ago. The world has changed so much! As you might imagine we have been unable to complete any work on the IBM 360 over the last couple of months due to the lockdown restrictions in place in the UK. We are hopeful that in the coming months as the lockdown eases we will be able to return to the project and start posting regular updates again. We have received a few items off of the Amazon wishlist, and I will post the proper thanks in due course, I am currently unable to do so as they get delivered to my fathers house and due to the self isolation policies I…

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We know we’re a few months late, but we want to wish all of our readers a happy new year! And to kick off the new year (even if we are a bit late) heres our first post of 2020! We’ve all been rather busy in our personal and professional lives of late, and as such the updates haven’t been as regular as we would have liked. We’re hoping to get quite a few days of work in this year, and we promise we’ll update you all as much as possible! We all agreed to meet on Sunday the 1st of March to resume work on the machine. We didn’t really have any set goals for the day, except to continue cleaning the machine, and…

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Another week, another blog post! So, there’s probably going to be a trend of things in the next few blog posts, and one of them is going to be, well, you guessed it! Cleaning! The machines were all very dirty when the arrived and it’s going to take us quite some time to clean the outsides, let alone the insides, so please bear with us whilst we post about it; hopefully you’ll find the process as satisfying as we do! Over the past week or so I’ve been conversing with a chap called Simon Van Winklen about working with us, and very kindly he’s volunteering some of his time to come and assist us with the restoration process. Simon is a retired Engineer who’s career…

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So we mentioned in some of our earlier posts that we have a plethora of manuals that we found in the original building. These manuals are a rather obscure size being slightly longer than A3. This makes them very inconvenient to scan as they don’t fit on a regular scanner, and as such we needed a much bigger scanner. A0 scanners are particularly scarce, especially on the used market, and they command a high price (usually in the thousands). After browsing eBay for a while I happened upon a listing by a recycling company located fairly near to me for a Colortrac SmartLF Cx40 in unknown condition. For the price (<£100) it was worth a punt! I won the bidding for just under £100 and…

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Well, where to start! The last few weeks have consisted primarily of anticipation, excitement, and towards the end, utter exhaustion. But finally, FINALLY, the IBM is home! It all started after our friend John Oates at the register shared our plight as detailed in our last blog post (see here). This was read by a chap in Melbourne, Australia called Kevin Silk, who then saw a LinkedIn post by a chap called Dan Apperley and left a comment: I had no idea any of this was going on until the following day when I received a call in my office just after 9am. The caller introduced himself as Dan and said he was from a company called Sunspeed. Dan told me that he had read…

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So it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything here, and we apologise for that. We’ve all been rather busy with our respective personal and professional lives and it’s not left much time for us to work on getting the machine back to the UK. We’ve recently begun engaging with various transportation providers and we’re somewhat struggling to find anybody capable and willing to move the machine, but we will persevere! We’re determined to get the machine back before the October 31st Brexit deadline if at all possible, this is especially important as nobody knows what the importing costs will be post Brexit and we don’t want to end up paying thousands more in storage costs in the event of nobody knowing whats going on…

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Yesterday Afternoon (21st of May 2019) I received a WhatsApp message from our German Auction house contact (come Photographer extraordinaire), Günter Hiller. It was a series of photographs, firstly of the roof of the machine room. It would seem over the weekend that the roof had leaked significantly right onto where the punched cards and the processor had been stored! It looks like we removed everything just in the absolute nick of time! Included in the photos were bits of IBM equipment, along with some engineering manuals. These had apparently been found in the room behind the room the computer was in, buried under a load of Porsche parts! This came as a surprise to everyone as they had previously been informed these rooms were…

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