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Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

"Most parts of the world" use 230V with sockets capable of delivering 16A. In the UK where the standard mains connector is rated at 13A, you'd probably need to do a bit of measuring but you'd be okay. If you really needed it, you'd just have a Ceeform connector run in and a 16A breaker - quite common in garages, especially if you've got workshop equipment to run.

About the only countries that don't use 230V are the US, Canada, and Japan, which even combined only have about one third of the population of India.

Add in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand, and you'd probably find that most parts of the world can cope 240V 15A no problem at all ;-)

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The 3081 processor took 23kw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_308X

Which is like 100 amps at 230V so you would need several sockets to get that much power. Just getting the machine into the room looos like a challenge.

That sounds like a lot. I'd be surprised if it didn't just use three-phase.

Given the power requirements, heat, and noise, you'd probably want to run it in the garage anyway.

What's funny is that I never actually felt it was hot in a datacenter that hosted a mainframe, I think because they were water cooled and also not packed in that tight.

Circa 2005 I would regularly go to the data center on the 7th floor of Rhodes hall [1] and it had a mainframe (cool, but it might have been CMOS instead of bipolar) and huge amounts of rack space devoted to RS-6000, SGI, SPARC and other legacy RISC servers and just a few racks of x86 servers which felt a lot hotter both from radiant heat in the front and hot air blowing out the back because they were packed in tight -- three racks of modern servers would outpower that old CMOS mainframe although of course they do a lot more.

[1] I work on the 6th now but never go to the data center

I once worked for an ISP where our routers and servers were co-located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

So I would visit the machine room on occasion to go fix things with the SunOS 4 systems we had.

For a while, I considered requesting that my assigned desk be moved into the machine room, because our servers occupied two ordinary tables in a far corner of the place that was about as far from humanity as anyone could go. It was, of course, noisy with white noise and chilly with air conditioning to keep the machines more comfortable than the staff.

I never made my request and it never would've been granted. I imagine they couldn't even run a phone line into that place to get a hold of me.

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