I'm glad you got this instead of someone who would just rip out the keyboard and send the rest to a scrap yard. This is a museum quality peice that deserves to be preserved

@sbrazenor2

9 ай бұрын

That's a similar thought I had. If you're going to look for a machine like this, it should be to keep it preserved and not just take a small piece and leave the rest to be scrapped. This thing is a work of art. You can see the quality and craftsmanship in the way it was built. Simply discarding something like this should be a crime.

@bobweiram6321

9 ай бұрын

Keyboard poachers are shameless!

16:34 ish that disk is stunning, love that you can see the insides by default!

Thank god this got picked up by you instead of parts reseller or a scrap yard. Hope to see more videos featuring this beauty in the future!

@donsurlylyte

9 ай бұрын

imagine how much stuff got scrapped!

I had two of these back in 1986, *(Yes, mine WAS the possum computer that corestore obtained!!!!)* They came from a hospital laboratory in the Southern Ontario area. One of them worked for a while and the other I used for spare parts. I couple of years later, it stopped working, and I didn't have enough knowledge as a high school student to get it functioning again. They both sat around for many years in a damp family garage and got very rusty. Back in 2005, I found a fellow who wanted both of them, as well as a complete set of manuals, and floppies. He and I sort of lost contact, so I'm uncertain if he was ever able to get it to function again.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

That was the first system I ever read up on. While time did a number on it I thank you for being hesitant to send them to the scrapyard. I know that almost all the documentation and diskettes did eventually get archived. I'm actually using copies of them right now!

The metal loops in the spare parts box are wheel stops, they slide on the floor side of the wheel, and wedge the wheel to keep it from moving around.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Now that I'm thinking of how it seems a tiny stone on a floor will stop a pallet jack, that makes sense!

@tekvax01

9 ай бұрын

@@CelGenStudios at 600 pounds yup, it's a heavy beast! It took five of my high school friends to do a controlled drop slide down the stairs into my parent's basement! I got pinned against the wall as it slid down the stairs! I certainly had no idea it was 600 lbs back then... :)

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Even on carpet this thing felt like it was made of depleted uranium @@tekvax01

@stevenrais9360

8 ай бұрын

My dad said the same thing (IBM service tech 1979-1995). Wheel stops. We enjoyed watching this video.

You are nuts - in the best possible way. I laughed when you mentioned the keyboard. My daily driver is a 1987 IBM Model M - I do appreciate a good input device. But sacrificing a whole machine for the sake of a keyboard is silly.

The green bar paper you mentioned is known by so many names. In New Zealand it was called "lineflow". Printed many 10,000's of miles of this paper back in the day. On a good night the company using IBM mainframe printers got through about 120 miles of lineflow!

Thank you for preserving all this .... and giving us a tour. I had a s/34 and a 5362. The '34 was very similar design elements to your '32 but larger ... and the OS was "SSP" System Support Program. I had an IBM "twinax" terminal and a third party one, plus a dot matrix printer with twinax adapter on the back. I was sad to scrap them but I had no space to store them.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

I have a friend a few hours away who owns a System/34. Great machines. He also has several twinax printers for it and a number of terminals.

39:50 seeing the System/32 with the display mirror installed, I had a flashback to 1960's Star Trek. I believe there was a similar display built into a counter either in Capt Kirk's quarters or in the conference room. or may have even been on the bridge somewhere. been so long since I watched that show. . . 😀

The 62GV, or "Gulliver" was the first swinging arm voice coil hard disk. It was developed at IBM Hursley and introduced in 1974. You are correct about its 5MB capacity. There were later 10MB and 15MB versions. I believe there was support for four of those disks.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

I'm assuming those would of been in a set of expansion cabinets also roughly the height of a desk?

@douro20

9 ай бұрын

@@CelGenStudios Or inside the main cabinet itself, as in the System/34 and later models.

@douro20

9 ай бұрын

I looked it up again. The /32 only supports a single disk of 5, 9 or 13MB. The multiple disk support came in the later models.

@brucereynolds7009

7 ай бұрын

As used in the IBM Series/1 (model 4962), the non-fixed head versions supported 9.3 and 13.2 M Bs. @@douro20

About the 8 inch diskettes used as input: I worked in retail and the sales from the IBM cash registers were mailed to us from all stores on these 8 inch diskettes and read on a System/34 for the business necessities. Fun times!

The printer is very similar to the IBM 5256, which was used with the System/34. I've got my 5256 connected to one of my S/36 5362's, works great and you can still purchase the ribbons today! :)

@douro20

9 ай бұрын

I saw a 5262 in a thrift store when I was still in high school in the late 1990s. It was fully working.

My gramos got one of these back in the late 80's and saved it from the junkyard. Unfortunately it didnt survive several moves til today, so it got parted out for engineering bits as my gramps was an electronics & broadcast engineer. Also in BC. Still has the system 32 badge though. Glad some of IBM's oddball machines still survive for restoration. And no keyboard sacrificers.. though maybe I wish gramps kept the keyboard, thinking back. I daily an IBM PS/2 era M. It's damn good enough, and standard layout to boot. Just buy an M, new or old, if you want a lifetime great keyboard. Dont destroy and ancient computer history exbibits. Also, is that an AMC Eagle? Lovely car, my gramps always wanted one. Awesome 4wd and clearance for camping.

You are glad to finally have your system 32, and someone out there is glad they don't.

After studying from 1978 on at IBM campus in Böblingen Germany "general information technology" and learning Cobol and BASIC programming , in 1983 i was working at a Radio Shack dealer in Stuttgart, Germany ( right: hometown and birthplace of Mercedes-Benz and Porsche ) We wrote commercial bookkeeping software for small companies on TANDY Model 2 Z80 computers. One day a client showed up and said: thans for supplying our new hard- and software, we want to get rid of our old IBM monster. So i went there and picked up a complete fully functional /32 for free with my friends truck. took it home to my parents garage, played with it for some time and forgot it for some years. I had to clean out the garage later and having several modern and up-to-date 386/486/Pentium PCs (my first IBM PC and IBM XT and IBM AT are still in storage) the /32 was only old iron for me without any value. Oh boy i regret trashing it to the local dumpster. as i am retired now i stil loved to put my hands on one of there /370 /1 series where i started with. punching cards - i stil have my first program in punched stack....

I wrote a total of one RPG program for the S/32, which consisted of two lines of code, and about fifty lines of comments. I confirmed that it would compile on a S/34, then took the code to our Bermuda location, where the S/32 would be made to look like a mainframe running HASP for a VAX back in the states. The code worked the first time tried, and I got four days in Bermuda before flying back to the U. S.

She looks lovely! Good work on visual restoration so far!

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Thank you!

I worked on one of them as a computer operator in November 1979. November this year it will be 45 year since I started in I.T.

it looks very good, it is nice to see it preserved and not torn apart for the keyboard.

When we upgraded to a S/36 in the mid 80's, we scrapped the S/32 and I kept the mirror box as a souvenier. Not sure if I still have it.

@CelGenStudios

4 ай бұрын

Oh nice! Yeah if you ever think if finding it a new home drop me an email and we can talk. :)

What an interesting old machine ❤️

What a nice machine. Hopefully you get to use it soon.

My dad worked for Lenkert Electric in Burnaby in the 1970s. He wanted to work there so badly and was hired on the spot when he brought in something electronic that he made to the interview. Anyway, they had an HP minicomputer for testing that he said crashed all the time until it got replaced with a more reliable model of computer. He said that it was hot in the company except for the place that they kept the IBM mainframe for payroll which had air-conditioning. I think the cleanroom was also air-conditioned. He said that the cafeteria had the best stuffed peppers.

The early IBM disk drives could not be stored vertically as there was a coating on the platters that slowly sank to the lowest point and caused a bump on the surface of the disk. This caused damage to the read write heads. Even replacement disks failed if they were sitting to long. They were OK if used.

You made me think of Tech Time Traveller's rant about the evils of "The Keyboard Guys".

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

We both know eachother from brief interactions in the past but in the VC community it's overwhelmingly disliked how much hardware is now unusable because their keyboards are now missing. I've made a tangent about this before in an earlier video. I could really go on about it myself but this is not the place to be doing that. I used to have several IBM 5251 terminals which worked and had great screens, but with no keyboards they were worth more in scrap metal than gold. (and no, they were sent on to another IBM collector, not scrapped)

The wires metal wires you couldn't identify, actually go around the rolling surface of the wheel, to keep the system from rolling if you bump into it.

The hard disk in my system/32s was 13.8 megabytes on 14-inch platters.

@deepsleep7822

9 ай бұрын

13 meg was the largest capacity HDD that came on S/32’s.

Would absolutely love one of these in non working/fixable condition for the desk. Have a threadripper and 1/2 rack that would be an awesome retrofit.

Nice video, thanks for sharing, well done :)

The matrix printer is the mechanism used in the 3767 terminal for SDLC, the 4975 for the Series/1, and many other units. I suggest that you find the upgrade unit which converts the original ribbon to a cartridge ribbon and save much swearing in the future.

Very nice -- I'm green with envy!

My two systems had the belt printers! There were almost three dozen cables going from the logic gate to the printer assembly! AND holy man, did it print FAST!!!

You should just get the mirror box 3d printed, that's a dope computer

The System/32 was a small mainframe. It is a multiuser system that supports dumb terminals and large scale apps that run things like banks, collections centers, and any kind of large scale systems that serve to multiple users. I used to work in a bank/collections center where they had one. I didn't do support of it, only the PCs and network that was there for the user base (apart from the physical dumb terminals). It ran the system that controlled the collections agents. It called up the account to be collected on and then the System/32 also connected to the autodialer and dialed the client for the phone call. That was the application that they used but it could run any mainframe type of application that served to many users simultaneously.

@deepsleep7822

9 ай бұрын

@mark: after doing some googling, multiple sources state that the S/32 is a single user system. It did not support dumb terminals. It could not run any mainframe type application as the hardware architectures are different. If you have a source that says otherwise please provide it. The subsequent machines, S/36 and newer are multiuser capable. As for small mainframe, that gets into semantics, which continues to this day.

@markshade8398

9 ай бұрын

@@deepsleep7822 I will admit it has been nearly 30 years since I had that job and I could be remembering wrong. Perhaps it was a System 36.

The electrical distributor I worked for had one of these. It was used for our invoicing system.

i trained on one of these in 1976. memories.

It's kinda odd they designed the CRT like that on a single user system. I knew they had multiuser systems, I think for data entry, where they split the mirror box for each user, the users facing each other. That made more sense.

I used to train IBM System 32 data input operators.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

The documentation for the /32 on Bitsavers is pretty neat. IBM was really trying to show how being an operator did not mean you had to be a rocket scientist.

We threw away one of these in the 1990's, that some monkey had gotten a whole of and started pulling parts out of it, ostensibly to restore it. Don't do that. Remove one item at a time, and then put it back where it came, or you end up destroying it. Good luck getting it all back together. I kept one board out of it with two white and gold ceramic processors on it marked IBM 34, which is what brought me to his video, because all these years I had remembered it erroneously as a later date AS/400. At that time we were throwing away 8086's, 286's, and 386's... so yeah this thing was hopelessly obsolete then. Another minifridge sized "mainframe" style computer I actually hooked up to a terminal with it's own thick properitary terminal cable and fired up and it took a good 12 minutes to boot and sounded like an air conditioner. I had no idea what to punch in on the command line of the obscure OS on it, it too was obsolete, and got junked. Would I still want either in 2023? Probably not. These things are big and heavy and useless and power sinks. I've got an ocean of antique 8 bit's and honestly, I haven't touched or fired up a one of them since the 1990's when I saved them from the dumpster when the collector that did own them died. He had bought them all in huge lots from a nuclear plant. His wife and sons' just wanted it all gone. Like now, yesterday, or they were tossing it. So I had to move them fast. I got everything I thought was collectible from my vast knowledge of computer history, and they junked all the rest.... mostly Selectric Typewriters. An ocean of TypeWriters. If I had known at the time prisoners in prisons could use donated typewriters, I would of taken them too. But by 1990's desktop era already being well past mature with lasar printing the norm... a typewriter seemed hopelessly outdated... and it was.

lots of docs for this machine at bitsavers, including a sizeable "fe" directory containing maintenance documentation

@CelGenStudios

5 ай бұрын

I grabbed a large stack of single-sided diskettes at VCFMW for the task of writing out CE disks for this.

15:13 I believe this is is called a Geneva drive mechanism

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

I looked that up and you are indeed correct. Weird to be used here. Not long after everyone went to using direct-drive stepper motors.

In a quick search I see Mike Ross has several very short videos of a System/32 booting, etc.

@DandyDon1

9 ай бұрын

But then you knew that. Too bad you cannot flip the Yoke around and to use the good side. But then there are re-alignment problems to address as well. Granted I've used many old keyboards on many OLD systems. I can't see myself taking out an old keyboard to use in a current day PC, let alone hanging it on a wall.... Is it possible the printer was also used for remote office printing in connection with a 3270 terminal? I remember those were all over TRW in the 1980s. Displaywriters I have seen always had IBM's version of the Daisy Wheel printer. Property of IBM, I've seen a few of those. Both of my IBM Memory Typewriters were originally leased equipment, which escaped the "crusher".

Can't wait to see this think running Crysis! :P

I fully understand people making offers on the keyboard, considering just the keycaps alone are worth several thousand dollars. But it's nice to see that you want to keep the entire system together.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

When I was just getting into computers it was a machine I really wanted. In a time when 386's and 486's were now flooding the landfill I saw this thing and loved just how absurd it was. When one unexpectedly became available within a day's travel sure it was going to be an investment but I wasn't going to let that slip by!

@DeathracerXD

5 ай бұрын

Why is the keyboard worth so much wtf

The Corestore is here and it gets that joke entirely!

Procrastination? I don't think I have done laundry in months. You know what the Macintosh said at the shareholders' meeting where it was first revealed? It said that after meeting an IBM mainframe that it thought 'Never trust a computer you can't lift!'.

OMG! I was trained on that in 1978. Never saw one taken apart that far. Are you going to run benchmarks? I never saw the word benchmark on any IBM documentation.

@CelGenStudios

7 ай бұрын

I don't think there's really a way to run benchmarks. This is in no way like how a modern computer operates or in how the software runs. I guess you would compare the speed at which it can process a job made out of a known static workload, like refactoring an accounting sheet.

It's like a small 3742. My mother always had one at home to continue working.

I love it. ;)

For the missing system information mirror top, are there measurements available? Could 3D print a scaffold instead of using cardboard and tape. Thank you for the showcase of the ancient rust hard drive and floppy drive. Incredible.

@deepsleep7822

9 ай бұрын

Could easily be 3D printed.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Very easily. I just need to ask around for measurements. I know a few people who can help. @@deepsleep7822

I like the AMC Eagle! :)

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Thanks!

❤

Could you send me the link to the scans of my original service manuals that Mike posted?

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Check in the video description for a link to the System/32 directory on Bitsavers. The diskette images are hanging out in the /bits directory.

Can't you get the 220V going by using a step-up transformer? That would also limit the inrush current to a more manageable level.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Part of the reason for the crazy inrush and the large motor is it needs to spin the disk up really fast to get the heads flying. The rest of the machine has its components powered up in sequence.

@Stoney3K

9 ай бұрын

@@CelGenStudiosThat's why a transformer may not be such a bad idea. It would act as a choke and limit the inrush current, which would mean the motor takes longer to come up to speed, but it takes less current.

people have no idea what a step up something as primitive as this was at the time.

I like a nice keyboard, but I would never molest such an awesome piece of equipment by taking the keyboard and leaving the rest of this machine to rot. That being said, I mostly only use modern mechanical keyboards, so I'm not sure I would have as much of a hard-on for something so old. The issue is that while the switches and other features of it might be nice, it's lacking way too many keys to be useful, in my opinion on a modern system.

@deepsleep7822

9 ай бұрын

For S/32 collectors, the keyboard may be the fragile piece worth keeping. I’d think the HDD would be valuable as well as that substructure was fragile as well. As long as the heads were locked down for transport. I worked on larger mainframe stuff. We were going to move some disk drives to another location in the computer room. The IBM CE wouldn’t even consider moving them even the short distance without first locking the R/W heads down first. Not a difficult task, just time consuming.

The stepper is connected to a Geneva wheel gear

За одни только страдания лайк ставлю

That foam is HO model train railbed foam

The hooks are to lock the wheels

Usagi, Curiousmarc are already sharpening their rip-off teeth while awaiting for another big computer enthusiast prey... 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Usagi's still buried in the Centurion project and Marc's got YEARS left in the Apollo back-end. Gives me time to root around in storage and see what other cool things I can talk about.

Where is the possums joke from?

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Corestore received a machine many years ago that had two dead opossums inside. The owner of that machine further down in the comments has actually commented a bit on this.

geneva drive is interesting

IBM was scamming people! The disk drive was 10 megabytes but sold with 5 megabytes disconnected. Maybe it was the other side of the platter. If a customer wanted the upgrade the Customer Engineer went in and followed the instructions to do a little wire wrapping and ran a diagnostic. I did that a bunch of times. There you go. Now you can access the other 5 megabytes that you already had. 😎

Ooh, it's probly a Model F keyboard mechanism, so greedy folks want to make some boutique fancy keyboard and charge $5k on Etsy .. screw the rest .. wrong answer 😢

Did it smell of cigarette smoke?

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

Incredibly clean in that regard.

640 pounds ought to be enough for anybody ha ha ha

Please use the Metric System. Except Liberia and the United States on a few occasions, all the world uses it. The rest of the world has used the metric system for a long time. Try to use it so the rest of the world will understand you.

@CelGenStudios

9 ай бұрын

I have a bad habit of using both.