Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
In junior high school I did a one-day "shadowing" trip to NASA/Goddard, where I tailed an acquaintance of my dad's who ran one of the several data centers there. I was in the machine room when one of the mainframes lost a system volume to a head crash, which regrettably curtailed my tour, as my host had to go oversee the recovery efforts.
Fast forward a few years to the interregnum between my first and second attempts at college, and I found myself a console jockey in that very facility in the basement of Building 1. Alas, the 360/75 and /91 were long gone, replaced by a 3081K, tho the group's other machine room over in Building 22 had a pair of elderly Amdahls, a V6 (serial number 1 in fact) and a V7, which provided a front end for one of CDC's Cyber205 supercomputers.
Oh, and the long-ago head crash? The division head who I'd shadowed still had a mangled platter from that event hanging on the wall in his office.
Feb 17, 2025, 9:11:05 PM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old