When I started at IBM back in the 80s in NZ, there were plenty of 1403 printers still in operation, though no 1401 CPUs.<p>Since they were old even then, and NZ was something of a computing backwater (on a training course I met a guy who's territory of 3 or 4 floors of the world trade center had more machines than my territory of half of the North Island) there were no formal training courses on them, and I was on my own with the manuals and the insights of the gray beards in the company lunch room.<p>It wasn't until I found Ken Shirrif's magnificent animated explainer <a href="https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html" rel="nofollow">https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html</a> many decades later that I really understood how the machines I had been fixing worked.
Related topic - some of you may appreciate this great album! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401,_A_User%27s_Manual" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401,_A_User%27s_Manual</a>
Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of easily-accessible information about the current or expected future state of TX-0 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-0" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-0</a> , a computer of great importance and previously the crown jewel of the Boston Computer Museum, where TX-0 was restored and turned back on in 1983 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDkEjjDumUY&t=229s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDkEjjDumUY&t=229s</a> <a href="https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TCMR-V08.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TCMR-V08.pdf</a> . Now parts of it are in the CHM museum catalogue <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/search-catalog/search/keyword:tx-0--collection:physical-objects/page/4/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/search-c...</a> , and ???
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