The item is an MCC (multi-chip carrier) from an Amdahl V8, V7 or V6. Many were plugged into either side of a large frame which connected the MCCs to each other and to power, the console, memory, and the IO cables.

The finned gizmos are cooling towers glued to the top of the individual chips. A plastic cover directed cool air over the towers and fans exhausted it out the top of the frame.

Right, MCC. I could not find the little piece of paper that came with it that detailed the specs of the old and new mainframes. I think the new one did not use MCCs anymore.

You know, people who used to wire mainframes were ordinary citizens, not some kind of superheroes. Go for it :)

The board is circa 1980. The back wiring was done in Japan because they couldn't find enough people in the US who could do it well. I believe the chips were laser bonded on the front with the hand wiring on the back. Note that the circut boards were multi-layer and the back wiring was only used where they couldn't get enough paths from the circut boards and for engineering changes after production.

Have you worked for Amdahl? I am pretty much fascinated with all things Amdahl.

He heh. Plenum. Here's a word you don't see much, except when buying CAT5 cable. Yet years back I used to hear it almost daily : joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission.

470 series, huh. Again number 47. It's truly a special number, it seems :)

I miss the good old days. Wang, Burroughs, Amdahl, DEC/VAX. Too many others to mention.
IBM MVS/OS now considered - legacy.

I've got two of these, plus some of the newer ones, which have 10 times as many wires on the back. I worked in the Amdahl manufacturing plant for 4 years, then serviced them in the field for another 9 years.

Best company I ever worked for.

Amdahl used to give out dead hardware and out-of-date engineering samples to their sales guys made into lots of different things. I've seen coasters made out of unusable processors, an Amdahl sales binder made from a set of bad carrier boards, a couple of plaques like this one made from DOA MCC modules, pen holders made out of ribbon cable, etc.

An IBM reseller I worked at spent Amdahl's entire corporate lifetime telling them no. By the time the sales guy gave up, pretty much everyone at the company had been hit up by the guy as a possible lead, and pound for pound there was more dead Amdahl hardware repackaged as kitsch on the desks in sales than we had actually moved in Amdahl equipment.

Ah, such memories. I was in the datacentre of Canada's largest service bureau during the late 70s and early 80s, and then worked for an Amdahl competitor, National Advanced Systems, later Hitachi Data Systems. Among other things, I was in hardware support in the datacentre, and often went into the backplanes of old IBM S/370, S/303x, Amdahl V6/7/8, and of course HDS boxes.

"Dow Jones Prices Up / Buy General Motors Stock"
(the mnemonic for board labelling in IBM backplanes)

What does that mnemonic mean?

I'm struggling to remember here, and I could be getting mixed up, but way back when I worked on 3270 and 5250 IBM gear (read mainframe attached and System/36) in the mid to late 80's when engineers actually did detailed diagnosis mnemonics like this were used to help identify the location of connecting pins on a backplane. "Daughter" cards plugged into sockets on a backplane "mother" board. The "sockets" had 16 pins and DJPUBGMS referred to the specific row/column. You also had to identify the particular location of the socket on the backplane so an individual pin ended up with a alpha-numeric code which basically gave it a grid position - I wish I could remember a real example, but hopefully you get the idea.

This was important because if you were doing an engineering change in the field where you maybe had to connect 2 pins with one of those little wires like in the photo's above you had better connect the right pins! And does anyone remember the specific technique and tools you had to use to actually join the wire ends to the pins (wire-wrapping)?! :-)

That is way cool. I have a couple of strange boards with letters, pins, wires jumpers wrapped around pins in the matter that you described and strange thingies plugged into the boards directly. I wonder if this is one of the mainframe patch panels like you described.

Thank you so much for writing this up.

"... the solder points on the back don't seem to align with what's on the front;"

The reason is that the board had about 14 layers and only the so-called "via holes" went front to back; not the signal traces. The signal traces snaked as far as they could on one layer and if needed, went to another to complete it's route(99.9% s/w routed).

"... hand-wired connections on the back, in 1992? That would be something to be expected from stuff made around the 70s or earlier, wouldn't it?"

The board in the picture is easily a '70s vintage board and definitely not '90s. Those wires(twin lead) were mostly machine bonded and most were there to accomodate the .1% of paths that couldn't be routed by software because of trace availability or signal timing constraints(long paths and races).

Hello,

Could somebody please give me the specs of an amdahl 470 v6. I worked on such a machine as an operator in 1980 in germany. have forgotten everything and would like to give my daughter some comparisons to today's lap top performances.

Thank you,
Hans