[rescue] looking for IBM System/36 software

[Jerry Kemp]

I did my S/34 & S/36 work at a luxury (lake) boat manufacturer in the central 
part of the country, aka BFE Kansas.  We had been on a S/34 for a few years 
before we ordered the brand-spankin'-new S/36.

We had a special room for it with its own cooling and power.  FYI, this is very 
early 1980's, I had no idea what a data center looked like, or if those even 
existed in 1981.  This room was certainly not a raised floor data center.

Anyway, we got it in, and it seemed that we blew up parts and boards every day. 
  IBM FE were on site every day replacing components and fixing things.  At some 
point, someone got the idea we needed to look at the power feeding into the 
S/36, this was pre UPS, at least for this company.  The power was great during 
the day, but at night, it (power) was doing all kinds of funky things and 
killing S/36 parts.  Once the S/36 was getting fed clean power, all the problems 
disappeared and it was smooth sailing from there on out.

Jerry

On 03/28/15 06:25 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:

>
>    I had to crack one of the passwords to get into it, which is a
> nontrivial procedure.  I was working on it with a local friend about
> three years ago.  Right at the end of the procedure, the +12V supply
> dropped out and the machine went dead.  That was depressing.  I dug into
> it again a couple of weeks ago with another local friend, Matt Patoray;
> we spent quite a lot of time on it, cleaning it up and looking at the
> power supply.  Eventually we found a smoked tantalum capacitor on the
> CSP storage board that was shorting the +12V supply.  I replaced that,
> then another one went up.  After fixing that, the machine is rock solid
> and running great.
>

>
>                -Dave