Recently, I received an email from Lawrence Wilkinson who discovered my blog. He has a similar project, building a replica 360/30 mainframe which is contemporaneous to the 1130 system and shares the technology and many design elements. View his project website for more on his effort.
We have made very parallel choices in design and approach for our two projects, almost eerie as I can easily imagine perfectly reasonable alternate selections that could have been made. He and I are currently wrestling with the console typewriters, a modified version of the Selectric typewriter, which is another unlikely coincidence.
His talk at the April OSHUG meeting ( Lawrence Wilkinson's talk ) shared the background and demonstrated the state of the machine. He is mainly working now on building out peripherals, such as the console typewriter and a disk drive emulation, with the aim of successfully IPLing (booting up) the DOS/360 operating system by April of 2014, although he is also slowly building a physical console to replace the VGA screen that serves the purpose today.
I expect we will be sharing ideas and designs on our respective projects and on related matters. With these older computing systems becoming historical artifacts, the real examples disappearing from the planet due to age, projects such as ours will be helpful both as examples of what the machines were like and as advisory resources to those restoring real machines in museums around the world.
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