Restoring the IBM 1401

Slight tangent but check out ibm 1401, a user´s manual jóhann jóhannsson

http://open.spotify.com/album/3ZqqvWwHzoVCxwdsaUaF9z

Inspired by a recording of an IBM mainframe computer which Jóhann’s father, Jóhann Gunnarsson, made on a reel-to-reel tape machine more than 30 years ago, the piece was originally written to be performed by a string quartet as the accompaniment to a dance piece by the choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir. For the album version, Jóhann rewrote the entire score, and it was recorded by a sixty-piece string orchestra. He also added a new final section and incorporated electronics alongside those original tape recordings of the singing computer.

The IBM 1400 series is pretty significant in the history of computers and the 1401 was the first of it's line. So why are there so few out there?

Simply put, the average IBM 1401 is comprised of roughly five tonnes of gold-rich salvage material that hit the market at a time when old "new" stuff was basically worthless. Yes, antique chairs and china had value then, but not obsolete technology, records, or film. This was a time before VHS, mass market home video, and the notion that old celluloid was anything besides junk. The only surviving copy of Dreyer's cut of "La passion de Jeanne d'Arc" was sitting in closet in a mental institution in Oslo. This was a tough time to be an inconveniently large hunk rich in precious metals!

Laboriously scraping the gold off of connectors etc. is obviously a lot of work. That's not how the pro's did things. We're talking chemical baths, electroplating, you name it. I once had a prof who moonlighted as a computer salvager in the 80's. He admitted to being the final death of many large mainframes, including 1401's, that he dearly wished he could have saved if he'd known then what he knows now (or did at the time I took his course)!

The worthless becomes the precious. Maybe people with hoarding disorders are saner than we think! (Looking around me, I might have a touch of that myself...)

Part of why I love the IBM 1401 is because of how mechanical it is. So much of what the computer does is done in hardware. You can see and feel the machine running.

If you are able, I highly recommend visiting the 1401 exhibit at the Computer History Museum: http://ibm-1401.info/#how-to-visit

The "ibm-1401.info" site is maintained by the IBM 1401 restoration team. It contains nearly everything you'd ever want to know about the machine. It's a pretty dense website, so I suggest visiting these links first:

http://ibm-1401.info/1401GuidePosterV9.html http://ibm-1401.info/IBM1401_IEEE_SSCS_Mag_Jan2010-100DPI.pd...

I also really enjoyed learning how to program the 1401. I wrote instructions on how write a "Hello world" in the the "ROPE" simulator environment: https://github.com/jpf/ROPE

Per his tweets, Paul Graham seems very fond of this machine.

The IBM 1401 seems so primitive that it's strange to think that programming has felt continuous since then, but it has.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/522587988451024896

Hearing the fabric-tearing sound of the 1401's brutally powerful printers took me right back. Can't believe only 2 1401s left.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/522584973614673921

@alexia The first computer I programmed was a 1401.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/522474545073385476

Back in the day, I wrote a few machine language programs for that beast directly at the keypunch, including a one-card card deck duplication program.

I wished to see more detailed pictures. This was funny:

"Back in its era, it’s reported that 1401s ran for over six months before needing service."