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Ambient Sound of Mainframe Computer Center

I

interalia

Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2009
Messages
45
Hi

Odd request this but does anyone know of a source of the background sounds of a typical 60/70/80's mainframe computer room. I was after something ambient I could have playing whilst running the simulated operator consoles of the couple of mainframe emulators I use (IBM 370 and ICL 1900). My first stop was Youtube videos such as the ones of the IBM 1401 that the Computer History Museum at Mountain View have, but there is always the poster talking over it. I could fabricate something (random air con units etc) but someone 'real' would be nice.

Regards

Neil
 
interalia said:
Hi

Odd request this but does anyone know of a source of the background sounds of a typical 60/70/80's mainframe computer room.
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100's of 5" Rotron fans.
I have a notch in my hearing to prove it.

there may be something you can use in the 7090 computer room in "Dr. Strangelove"
 
In a large CDC installation, it was the tape drives (vacuum pumps) that were the big irritants, unless someone opened the hood on one of the line printers. The tape drive noise could be classified as "white noise' but with 16 or 24 of the things, the result was high 80s dB levels, so after a few hours it ate into your nerves. After complaints, management made a big box of those yellow foam earplugs available, which helped tremendously. The CPUs themselves were pretty much noiseless, aside from a faint 400Hz whine (cooling was chilled water into a heat exchanger).
 
Yes, the overwhelming source of sound is all of the fans, both in equipment and in the air handlers. Then there were the randomly occurring alarm signals (beeps usually) that no one had noticed or bothered to track down because that piece of equipment hadn't yet failed.
 
The other thing of more interest, noise wise, was the robotic tape libraries doing their work. At one point at NCAR we had five StorageTek tape silos all running at the same time, with tapes being grabbed by the arms, swinging around to deposit them in the tape drives or pass-through ports to another silo. Then you got whirring and clunks.
 
cruff said:
Yes, the overwhelming source of sound is all of the fans, both in equipment and in the air handlers. Then there were the randomly occurring alarm signals (beeps usually) that no one had noticed or bothered to track down because that piece of equipment hadn't yet failed.
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Data centers now have much more higher frequency noise from all of the 3" and smaller fans, The tiny high-volume ones in 1U boxes are especially annoying.
 
Don't forget the punch cards (mostly readers, but sometimes punches). While not continuous noise, it was arguable the most distinctive and recognizable. And (true) line printers still made plenty of noise with the cover fully on - just not the gun-range noises they made with it off/up. I know a state University that was still using their IBM 4341 - with primary/initial input on punch cards - into the 90's.
 
Yeah, the CDC 405 card reader sound was certainly distinctive, sort of a flapa-flapa machine-gun sound as the cards hit the bumper on the stacker side. The 415 card punch sounded more like a hive of angry wasps, but wasn't run that much. The 501 drum printers (I'm really dating myself now) again were more like machine gun sounds, but not as loud as the 512 train printers that would SCREAM at you if you left the top open.

That's not the agonized scream of the hapless programmer or operator who left a box of cards on top of an IBM 1403 line printer when it ran out of paper... :)
 
Too loud to hear that. On the other hand, the shouted imprecation of the hapless I/O clerk pushing a cart loaded with trays of cards hitting a loose/raised separator strip in said floor was memorable. :)

The sound I remember best was--silence--when we had the occasional power failure. Darned eerie, it was.
 
In our DP room, it used to be the Rosy printers on every error. So much so that you could tell if you had got a connection back by the distinctive clatter.

The printer room would really liven up on a reactor trip.

But all these sounds have gone with the replacement of mechanicals with solid state stuff.
 
Add in the harmony of a band printer lighting of and spewing out a 100 pages before you could blink.
 
Back in the 1604 days, some smart guys rigged up the line printers, tape drives and the speaker (there was a speaker attached to the high-order bits via a DAC of the accumulator) to play "Anchors Aweigh" for visiting Navy brass. The printers would furnish the percussion, while the tape drives sounded the bass line.
 
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For a while, we had a DecTalk device wired into the computer room speaker system that was programmed to "helpfully" let the operators know when one of the nodes went down on the home grown HyperChannel cross-bar network. I don't think that lasted more than a month or two. It was an audio alert equivalent to red boxes on the network status monitor displayed on some color terminals in the operations area and the system programmer's hallway.
 
whartung said:
Add in the harmony of a band printer lighting of and spewing out a 100 pages before you could blink.
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Oh yes, we had 8 600 line per minute band printers in the print room. Totally reliable, as long as you were looking at them, they would only ever jam when you weren't looking.
 
vwestlife said:
Don't forget the sound of the raised floor tiles creaking as people walk on them.
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I worked in a place where each stanchion had a rubber pad on top, so that each corner of the tile was supported. They worked great at first, but after a few years of people being lazy replacing tiles and just dropping an edge in a sliding them, they always ended up bunched up under the tiles, and then the would rock and creak more than without them installed at all.

The only thing worse than that was a place I worked that had white tiles with a black border or frame around them, that would eventually break off, and then get stuck under tiles if you didn't notice it causing the same problem.

I guess both of those issues are caused by people not taking enough care, but sometimes after working all day and all night, some people are going to rush.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I have found a posting on YouTube that someone made wandering around the Living Computers Museum (entitled Old Mainframe Computers at Living Computers Museum ) that has no commentary. I plan to use some of this soundtrack as a background perhaps grafting on some smaller samples of card readers and line printers to 'spice it up'.

Cheers
 
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