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by justin66 61 days ago
> IBM System 23

Not to discount the awesomeness of the others, but that's a real prize. Talk about a strange artifact of its time and place!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster

2 comments

My uncles dairy had a datamaster in a back office that they used for the books, etc. I wonder what happened that that, it's no doubt stuffed into some haybarn loft.
8 inch floppies! wow.
My uncle had a business with an IBM minicomputer: a System/36. It was the size of a large freezer. It also used 8" floppies! It took a "magazine" of 10x 8" floppies and could swap between them. It looked like the system in the top photo here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/36
Yeah, that's extremely cool. The wiki page had me at:

The Datamaster was IBM's only 8-bit microcomputer and one of the few to use the EBCDIC encoding.

The machine came with a few new boxes of 8" still in the cellophane.