Debugging the 1959 IBM 1401 Computer at the Computer History Museum

and this is our IBM 1401 er - IBM 1401 here's the one we call the German one because I'm a bought it and brought it from Germany thanks with the printer and the tapes and here's the Connecticut one that was found in a in somebody's basements in Connecticut fully equipped with the printer and tapes and they're wired by the card reader and puncher and reverse order and a bunch of 26 key punches these take a whole chunk of 20 people to keep going it I've never seen them run more than two weeks at a time so we're in constant debug mode but most of the time we have one of them running in France IBM's new design so here's the throne panel hopefully we'll turn it on in a minute it will work and oh this is just very beautifully made it's everything isn't those doors like these take them off and then it's made out of those SMS cards bunch of cars each cars about no 2 to 6 transistors on it but 20,000 transistors the Machine 2,000 cards first transistorized computers for another business machine there you go and we have a card filling every now and then every couple weeks one fails power supply on this side and on the other side that's where the know the quality machine is as a 4k memory system and the counters for Irish out there this is the core memory block for the 1401 that's a 4k memory with little fried cores here so this is 4k one bit and there's a whole bunch of planes for each of the bits some are specialized planes for the printer and the puncher they have less cores adjusted an amazing piece of technology and that was of course the most expensive bit of the computer that's the printer which to me is still amazing by this to this day and age it's a flying chain you don't really see the chain but it just keeps turning or flying characters around and they're these 130 hammers and they hammer a dress at the right time and produce characters and it just goes at 600 lines per minute so it has the paper moves so fast it has a hydraulic ram which means we have leaks I'd roll elixir lip and here is the 1402 card reader the main way to feed programs and information into the machine and this one is giving us fits it always has but now more than ever it doesn't work at the present so probably going to work on it today 600 HIV cars per minute when that syncs going it really smokes one few of the volunteers and original IBM guys running for their shift smile you might be on TV good morning German machine works out of 220 so we need a big converter to make it work internal automatically over go 220 volts three phases and then we need a little bit of cooling and that's yeah there you go we should be in business I can feel the breeze and then this is the easiest thing to do you go power on yep and that's it that's all it needs put it up because there is nothing to put it up let sure and and and it did right so the machine works right this one is good all right you should run something on it I'll turn the tapes on because I like them so much and so here's my favorites the deep drive that you need to work on them today see if I can load a tape if I press through that would be better hope it goes and it's a vacuum column tape right so here tip coiling at the bottom you get that one working it has a problem too much fun after the game and again this one is unhappy didn't have enough tape so I need to stop that one okay it will fix that that should work better now you i brunch Smurfs group stuff bringing of deep ready Oh all right so deep is not responding right so we have a new problem of the day that's totally usual right this tapes don't work you know the words two seconds ago and now we have a right light failure right hand the Gator right edge and we already have the schematic book open I hope all right should we go do it yeah all right Karlis so our deep controller is toast we're going to try to untoasted this is a gate down here take it oh you know it's sexy I'll do yeah so the location of each card is written in code over here and actually get xhi v8 Elle is where I should be in the news we cam so I should tell us where the car is so we think now that card is bad got the wrong cigarette butts we need to do is replace it with an equivalent one and the only one we have as a problem with it means that they fixed it those are cute little transistors you know the original ones yeah so they replace it with silicon transistors yeah while holding the camera this is recommended that's right hire other see that works better now so we changed that one that one that one and that one so nothing so we just pulled that card out is that fellow and then with no signal coming out of it now the reset tourists right light is out so something was not right with this either signals coming in or the signals coming out are you going to puddle in a program what's wrong with it oh yeah not acceptable always very dim these are the address switches sure how'd you do that that's why they call it deep drive

Channel: CuriousMarc

Views: 121,657

Keywords: IBM mainframe, IBM 1401 (Computer), IBM (Award Winner), History Of Computing Hardware, Computer (Industry), Computer History Museum (Museum), CuriousMarc

Id: PwftXqJu8hs

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2015