LAUGHTON ELECTRONICS |
|
The IBM 1130: an unusual repair, to say the least |
|
 |
Wish I could make up stories as loony as this. But this one happens to be true. |
|
One night I had just finished a service call on a Linotron 303 when I noticed that some of the other machines in the department were idle. This customer used to use an IBM 1130 and a System 7 to send jobs down the wire to the typesetter. Unfortunately the IBM 1130 computer had quit working, and the operator informed me that he was waiting for the IBM service rep to arrive. Operations in that section were at a standstill. I leaned over the 1130 console and admired — not for the first time — the famous IBM Selectric typewriter mechanism inside. (Here it was used simply as a printer, part of the CRT-less operator interface.) Naturally there were a lot of little levers and springs inside. For some reason I laid my finger on one particular spring that looked sloppy to me — too slack. Well, that spring was weak, and it turned out that a little extra tension was all that the mechanism needed to resume operation. In fact when I touched the spring the whole computer sprang to life! It had evidently been hanging in a software loop waiting for the printer mechanism to finish a print statement. And I knew what my next step would be. I didn't bill for the troubleshooting I did that night. To me it's reward enough that I'm able to brag about the time I repaired an IBM mainframe, despite having no training or documentation, and in less than five minutes... using a rubber band! (In 2018 I learned of another person performing the same feat. See the comment by norbertnorris in this discussion on Hacker News.) |
|
|
 |
|
