My Site

Hardware That Was Not Immediately IBM

During the time of the 360 and 370 I only saw one piece of hardware that you did not look at and immediately now it was IBM.

They made two communications boxes, I don’t remember the numbers. If you wanted to have phone lines attached to your computer you had one of these. This plugged into the CPU with normal bus and tag cables. It had a normal address. The big one looked like a piece of IBM gear.

The little one was shaped like a washing machine. It was a different height from all the other equipment. Taller than the disk drives and shorter than the controllers. There were other pieces of hardware that were an odd size so the size alone did not immediately mark it.

It had a nice flat surface to put stuff on. Not entirely unique as there were a few pieces of equipment that had flat areas you could put stuff on.

No, it was the buttons. Every other button was the same. Disk drive, tape drive, card reader, CPU, they all had the same buttons and those buttons were immediately recognizable. Some industrial designer had designed the button and used it to tie all the hardware, except this piece, together. This thing had a smooth panel sticking up that had the buttons printed on.

True story. Our IBM CE, guy who took care of our hardware, was in and I told him the box was acting up and would he take a look at it. He told me he only worked on IBM stuff.

Yeah. This piece of hardware stuck out like a sore thumb. I have no idea how it slipped through the IBM design team.