As we celebrate the milestones of the Frankie III build (Read more in Dr. Franken's Frankie III build log, and see a photo collection of the build) we take a moment to remember where it all started. By the time you read this the original Frankie will likely have completed his final road trip, a pilgrimage back to meet his original maker. It's unlikely he will ever consume another KWH of electricity, spin another disk unit, or execute another line of code. He was a great machine and took a ton of abuse in our hands.

Frankie started life as a Lab machine for COMMON. After a tour of lab duty doing that he was used to Beta V5R2 and V5R3 for the certification team to learn much of the new stuff those releases provided. He then debuted as the original 'Frankie' taking a road trip in the Big Red Dodge to COMMON in Indianapolis replete with 'disk expansion' units and stuff basically hanging out. During the unloading there one of the appendages pierced a cold beer in my pocket. Bad Frankie! He survived that trip and upon his return he continued to grow from 13 drives to 45.

You can still see our photos of Frankie in his photo gallery.

During his life as Frankie he took a lot of abuse. Too much memory, cards in wrong slots, crashed IOPs, sudden power outages, and enough yellow lights to make him think he was a traffic light at times. Additional stuff was also added over the years and every single slot is crammed full of something often something IBM said not to put there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Every time we blew him up he came right back.

Last year he was replaced with Frankie II a larger and faster model 170. Frankie I took up a place in the FrankenLab under the name Lily and ran for over a year hiding under a workbench. With the arrival of Frankie III MrsFranken said something had to go...

So long Frankie. RIP.

-- DrFranken