I’ve talked about working with IBM Mainframes before.  I saw this picture over at Alfred Thompson’s blog, and it brought back some memories.

• Westpac Bank losing a whole data centre floor of these 3380 DASDs in the late 1980’s when the water-based fire sprinklers went off.
• That ASIO, instead of trading in their old 3380’s, had the disks ground up.  Information security was the reason given.
• A computer operator, during a mainframe shutdown procedure, thinking that because the 3380 was taking too long to power off, flicked the emergency power off switch.
  Resetting the switch required a visit from an IBM Customer Service Engineer.
• Disks shattering at (high rotational) speed, and exploding out the side of the cabinet.  Urban myth, or not?  Heard it happening from a number of mainframe operators over the years.  So there might be a grain of truth there.
• Vacant data centre floors caused by the 3380 & 3390’s being replaced by the much smaller IBM 9394 RAMAC units.