On 3/29/18, 4:38 PM, "IBM Mainframe Discussion List on behalf of Seymour J 
Metz" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:

> I believe that the 65 and 67 also used CROS; I'm not sure of the 85.

The 3 65s at NASA JSC had microcode loadable from tape, or at least those 3 
machines did. I have one of the ucode update tapes (it fixed bugs in some 
instructions) for those machines sitting on my bookshelf across the room right 
now. Wouldn't put it past them that those 3 machines were special though; back 
then NASA could ask for engineering changes directly from POK and usually got 
them if it was humanly possible, and they had a number of non-standard RPQ 
features that never saw any other customer. 

IBM was really proud of those machines; they were kept in a runnable state into 
the late 1980s because of reproducibility requirements in the contract. It was 
a crying shame that onsite parts depot went for metals recovery -- we could 
have rebuilt 2 of those 3 machines onsite from the floor bolts up if one had 
failed during a mission (they assumed that would buy enough time for IBM to 
manufacture the 3rd machine in POK and ship it by air). JSC Building 25 still 
had the extra bracing in the floor for the frame mountings for years after. 



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