On 03/01/2017 02:54 PM, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote:
On 2017-03-01 3:14 PM, Charles Anthony via cctalk wrote:
Part of the iconic mainframe experience is the cold room
sounds; for early
Multics installations (and other systems) the sound of
the Selectric
operator's console.
I/O Selectrics are rare, expensive and unreliable.
They are all mechanical and stood up remarkably well to
hammering away day and night printing out the console log,
considering what they are, I would hardly think unreliable
fits.
Well, we still had a Selectric (1050) on our 360/65 at
Washington University up until the end. I'm pretty sure it
was the most unreliable part of the machine. It seems about
every two weeks it would break the timing belt, which meant
the clutch had to be rebuilt. IBM had two 1050's there, and
would swap them every time one broke. They really did run
the 1050 hard on that system, it was printing a line about
every 10 seconds for about 14 hours straight every week day.
Jon
