Werner's Story

Hello,

This is a really interesting website.
I don't have to do with such systems nowadays but in the mid 80s I owned such a beast which was in working condition and
fully complete with disk drives printer, console, terminals and complete printed documentation.

The history of the machine was also intersting.
It was bought and used by a german company called Severin (fabricating kitchen electrical articles etc. and does still exist).
In the mid 80s they seemd to have already an alternate solution and gave the whole equipment to an employee or a relative
of an employee. This person was very young and brought the whole equipment into the apartment where he lived with his parents.
Most of the parts needed to be partly disassembled to fit into the elevator to get it to the 3rd floor. To get everything into
the apartment he put several other furniture out of the apartment and attached the machine to the electrical connection of the
21kW three phase water heater.
An IBM technician helped him privately to get the machine up again.
Of course this story ended for him as his parents returned some weeks later and of course insisted on removing all parts
from the apartment.

I was lucky to hear of that and bought this device with all equipment and documentation.
Unfortunately I didn't had any available space as a student at this times, too.
So a friend of mine allowed me to store the complete set in a unused storage room he had. But in this room there was no
possibility to connect the machine electrically and after some years (3 or 4) the storage was needed for other things and I didn't
found any payable room to put the hardware in.
So I wrecked anything of it, the only part I have left now is the inner contents of the removable/fixed disk hardware (looking like
the contents of a modern fixed disk but much larger with 2 disks).
Everything else was scrapped. But as you wrote 50.000 units were produced and perhaps 20 or 30 still exist.

I can remember that the machine was loud (due to the fans and the chain printer when working) and heated the room extremely.
I interfaced the IBM 5471 ballhead typewriter to an Apple II and a TRS80 as at that time printers were very expensive and this
was a nice training work for an electronics student I was at that time.

So good working on the remaining machines.

Werner