Trivia
In early development, the prototype 729 had two status lights labeled Select and Idle. One day a vice president visited the lab and noticing this told the Engineers "That is not acceptable! IBM machines are NEVER idle!" The labels on the lights were quickly changed to Select and Ready.
In 2008, an IBM 729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum Society was being pressed into service to read 173 data tapes from the Project Apollo lunar missions, once thought lost, that were recently found.
As of 2009, the Computer History Museum has working IBM 729 tape drives attached to their working IBM 1401 system (and is interested in reading 7-track tapes from the public).
Read more about this topic: IBM 729
Famous quotes containing the word trivia:
“Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)