the stigmata of IBM feces

[Tony Duell]

> 
> IBM is/was so big, and for a long time was so horizontally integrated
> that they made ALL their own stuff and/or had anything third-party house
> marked for them.  This goes all the way down to resistors and capacitors
> on their boards.

At least they stuck to the standard resistor colour code :-).

> 
> I think one day people will sort it all out.  There will eventually be
> people wishing we'd saved all the weird IBM stuff.

I am thinking of parallels with HP. They often had chips house-coded (the 
1820-xxxx numbers, etc). They used a lot of custom chips. But many of 
their machines _have_ been fully understood. But my experience is that 
the HP documentation did contain a lot more info than the available IBM 
docs. Even things like a bus pinout or a memory map might give the clue 
you need....

But yes, I guess one day somebody will figure out the IBM stuff too...

-tony