Geeks Successfully Transport a 50-Year-Old IBM Mainframe to Former UK Top Secret Mi6 Base

In April Slashdot reader Adam Bradley won an eBay auction for an IBM 360 mainframe computer. Then he began blogging “the saga that unfurled” in transporting it from an abandoned building in Germany to the U.K. (where Adam volunteers at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.) “The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible,” he writes today. “We definitely got Slashdotted. I was up until the early hours migrating servers!” Yet he’s daring to send us another update. “We have now successfully got it back to the UK and to it’s new home at a former Top Secret Mi6 base! ” Their blog post credits the discounted service they received from a “bespoke IT infrastructure solutions” company called Sunspeed: They confirmed that they’d be able to help, and because they recognized the importance of the project and how much they liked it, they were kindly willing to do it at a significant discount which was covered completely by the crowd funding donations… “Upon reading about the issues being experienced trying to find a large enough vehicle with a tail-lift capable of handling the weight, I knew we could help. We’re really pleased we could help out and be a part of this amazing story to recover such a rare piece of IT history… I think we’ll now have to change our marketing to: Whether you need to move a single server, an entire Data Centre or recover an extremely rare and sensitive IBM 360 Machine from Germany before Brexit, then Sunspeed is here to help….!” They had tons of bubble wrap and pallet wrap, along with these fantastic cardboard corner pieces for the machines. They also had this fantastic plastic sheeting to go down on the difficult and uneven surfaces which made life a lot easier. Their plan was to wrap every machine in bubble wrap, and then wrap it in pallet wrap to keep everything safe before strapping it into the truck. This was much more than we were expecting so we were thoroughly impressed! It’s a tale of machine cables, loose panels, and a pallet of punch cards, with lots of fun photos from the move, as well as video of the vintage mainframe’s triumphant arrival and unwrapping at its new home. “At that point, we were pretty tired and so we called it a day. We’ll be heading back soon to start cleaning and cataloguing the machines to determine exactly what the specifications and state of them are. Needless to say, we’re all terribly excited to get our teeth stuck into the project!” “We can’t thank everybody enough for all their help on this project.”