In late April of 2019 Adam Bradley and Chris Blackburn were sitting in a pub on a Monday night when Chris happened across a somewhat unusual eBay listing for an IBM 360 Model 20. This eBay listing was unusual mainly because it didn’t actually list the computer as an IBM 360, but rather as an “seltene Anlage “Puma Computer IBM 2020” which roughly translates from German into “rare plant “Puma Computer IBM 2020”.
Amazing story.
In this context, “Anlage” means system, not (power-) plant, I would think.
This reminds me of the time that I was reading a Russian page about a historical computer, and Google Translate kept using the word “car”, when in context a better word was obviously “machine”.
Mildly shocked that Thom, master of all languages, would miss that, but I’m sure it was a trivial detail and he’s busy correctly translating things people pay him to. I mean he knows at least two languages, which is 1.5 more than me. Of course this is a expert falicy, someone is better than me in something I know nothing about, so I attribute God like abilities to them.
Comedy of errors doesn’t even begin to describe all the things they had to go through and deal with to get that hardware out of the building.
The age of Computing Archaeology has arrived. OK, Its not pyramids & brushes, just forklifts and power drills.
Very interesting although I have no clue about the hardware
This is about as awesome as it gets. I am glad these people are taking the time to do this to preserve the old tech.