Month: May 2019

Yesterday Afternoon (21st of May 2019) I received a WhatsApp message from our German Auction house contact (come Photographer extraordinaire), Günter Hiller. It was a series of photographs, firstly of the roof of the machine room. It would seem over the weekend that the roof had leaked significantly right onto where the punched cards and the processor had been stored! It looks like we removed everything just in the absolute nick of time! Included in the photos were bits of IBM equipment, along with some engineering manuals. These had apparently been found in the room behind the room the computer was in, buried under a load of Porsche parts! This came as a surprise to everyone as they had previously been informed these rooms were…

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So, after our last visit we were all ready to get going on the big move. We had already recovered all of the documentation back to the UK on the last visit and we had the ramp constructed which would enable reasonably smooth removal of the machine from the building. Chris and I departed for London Stansted in the late afternoon of the Wednesday (15th of May) with cabin bags containing our clothes and 2x 20kg suitcases full of things we thought we might need (e.g. ratchet straps, cloths, lights, tools etc.). We got settled into our flight and soon enough we had touched down at Nuremberg. We briefly debated taking the U-Bahn and a tram to our AirBNB but soon decided against it as…

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Following our last visit we had realised a number of things: We needed to remove the front door We needed to construct a ramp capable of taking the weight of the machine and peripherals We needed to secure the building again We needed to un-cable the machine and eventually recover the cables from under the floor We decided the best way to tackle this was to fill a van with tools in the UK and drive to Nuremberg, stopping at our favourite shop (Bauhaus) on the way to acquire the wood which we would use to construct the ramp and secure the building. As such, we set about trying to find a van to hire. On a bank holiday weekend. As a 24 year old.…

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So, if you’ve read the acquisition story then you already know how we came to own (at this point) an IBM 360 and a bunch of peripherals. If you haven’t read that already, I throughly suggest you go and check that out first! You can read that story here. So, the auction was won. The auction house (Auktionshaus Weidler) was contacted, flights, hotels, car rental and a truck with a tail lift were booked. Storage was organised. A few days later Adam was on a plane out of Stansted to Nuremberg ready to go and review the machines location, pick up a truck the next day, collect Chris and John (Chris’s dad) from Nuremberg airport and make the big move. Let’s just say it didn’t…

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