Wednesday Workday October 30, 2013

The workday started with trying to fix the German 1401's memory problem.
We all suspected Alzheimer's disease but it was decided it cannot be transmitted from the workers to the machine.

Bill Newman was looking into the circuitry of the IBM 1406 expanded memory and found a disconnect.
When re-connected, all 16,000 locations of memory came back to life.
Now if it was that easy for our memory.

Filled with success, Bill tryed to find out why the A register on the same machine would not latch.

Bill said "It is this card right here". Let's replace it and see if the problem goes away.

This is, in fact, the bad SMS circuit card Bill identified.
George Ahearn replaced the bad transistor and all is well with the world.

While people were marking floor tiles to be cut and fixing broken machines, Ed Thelen was cleaning old labels off the tape drives and taking pictures of the others.

Dave Lion, Ed Thelen and Stan Paddock were looking for the connector in the main power line for the Connecticut 1401 system.
After lifting several floor tiles, we found it.

Dave Lion suggested that if we had a floor tile numbering schema, we could document where the connector is in case we need to do something with it.
Dave started with the tile in the North East corner of the room as A-1. The tiles going East to West are A,B,C,....
The tiles going from North to South are 1,2,3,4,5,6...

Frank King and Ron Williams lifted p a corner of the Connecticut 1401 in order to feed in the connection to first IBM 729 tape drive.

The first tape drive of the German system  did not respond to a rewind command from the 1401.
We have had this problem with this drive on and off for the last year.
Maybe this is the time we can find it and fix it.

The first tape drive of the Connecticut machine appears to work OK.

Stan Paddock