acorn_1401
Experienced Member
Does any one know of any working IBM 1401 in the UK? - or even parts of a 1401 system?
Well if you run it 24 hours a day, 24 times the kw/hour. There is a Physical Planning Manual here:What are we thinking the kw usage a day would be for this things?
It's going to take a budget and some dedicated workers to keep a 1401 going these days. Few museums have the budget for that. The old machines had what we'd consider to be a terrible MTBF these days. A system that's run for 20 years without maintenance of any sort isn't particularly unusual today, but back in the day, it was unthinkable.
Consider the work put in on CHM's 1401 to get it able to spin a tape...
1410, 1440 and 7010 systems must be even less common.
In addition to avoiding thermal shock to prolong MTBF I believe that ENIAC pioneered the idea of lowering the heater voltage.Early computers such as Colossus using many thermionic devices, whatever you choose to call them, were likely to fail often because of the MTBF of each. Tommy Flowers, the designer of Colossus, said that failures could be substantially reduced by never turning the machine off, ...
And second. Possibly third as well. Ye olde surreptitious Microsoft "update". I'm holding on Win10 (no more BSOD these days) as long as possible because I'm still wedded to MS Access and Outlook. Otherwise I'd move to some Linux flavor. October 14, 2025 (end of Win10 support) is going to be a painful moment.Things are much different today--an inexpensive widget the size of a Raspberry PI can run continuously for years, if cooling is observed. Even on desktop and laptop PCs, memory and storage failures are rare. The main reason for discarding a system today is obsolescence, not non-functionality. If a system fails to operate, the first suspicion is a software problem.