About the picture in comp1.JPG:
About the picture in comp1.JPG:
It's an IBM-360 installation. The picture is kind of grainy but, according to my eyes, here's what equipment the picture consists of:
The CPU (rear, center of picture) appears to be an IBM 360 model 40 (IBM-2040). Just to the right of the chair is the IBM-1050 console, which was nothing more than an IBM Selectric typewriter that was adapted for this purpose.
There are tape drives on both sides of the CPU but I don't know what their model numbers are because the 360 environment I worked with had Potter tape drives instead of IBM (although we did have an IBM-2415 tape unit before we upgraded to the Potter tape drives). You can only see a portion of what I think would have been the (IBM-2803?) tape unit controller next to the left most tape drive.
There are two boxes behind the tape drives on either side of the CPU. I'm going to guess one is the IBM-2821 control unit (for the IBM-2540 card reader/punch and IBM-1403 printer) and the other is the 2841 DASD control unit (for the IBM-2311's).
In the left foreground are two IBM-2311 disk drives. These used mountable disk packs that had a capacity of 7.5MB. Assuming these were the only two disk storage devices attached to the CPU, I would say the applications run this particular installation were magnetic tape oriented.
Behind and to the left of the IBM-2311 units is an IBM-2540 card reader/punch. You can see the Hollerith cards in the feed hopper of the punch side of the machine. The punch speed was up to 300 cpm. The reader side read cards up to 1,000 cpm and was equipped with a file feed (the shiny rectangular thing sticking up from the far side of the IBM-2540 that's partially blocking the view of the second tape drive from the left). What you can't see on the IBM 2540 are the five card stackers in the center of the machine. Two were accessable only from the punch side and two were accessable only from the reader side. The third could be accessed from either side which made it possible to merge cards from both the punch and reader. However, it took some special skills to program this because of the speed difference (300 vs 1,000 cpm) of the two devices.
There's no printer shown in the picture but judging from all the equipment being used in this installation, I would have to say it was an IBM-1403.