All I've been told is there was a fire at hamtramck and the 68 onward records we're gone. Is this true? What about Lynch road or St Louis? Do Chrysler have anything for us? Also heard there was some department that holds insurance records of every car ever insured will the information ever become public accessable?
What do others think?
All the best Frank

I guess I'll join you...

Same with Mr. Norm's cars, there was a "fire" there too and all the previous records were lost, prior to 1968.

...must of been a bad batch of insulated wire sold prior to 68!

There was also a big fire in St Louis in which many military records were lost, must have been the same bad wire.

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Also heard there was some department that holds insurance records of every car ever insured will the information ever become public accessable?

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You heard wrong. No such department, no such records.

What I have seen thrown around was all the records for all build plants were housed at Lynch rd. and a fire ended with the area the records were stored in was flooded .

Okay I'll add what I heard from someone at Chrysler.....those records still exist but stored in a format that would take a lot of money to recreate the equipment to retrieve it and Chrysler at this point is not going to spend the time or money to get it back.

Same data storage system that NASA used in a '60's space probe and spent big money to get that data back.


http://a12mopar.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1323967034;start=all

I posted this in that link if you can't open it:


I'll offer this, I spoke with several people in "Chrysler Archives" and Chrysler Historical back when they were getting ready to build the W. P. Chrysler Museum and was told stories from "they were thrown out", "they were water damaged and thrown out", the records were recorded on a format that the information cannot be retrieved because the retrieval equipment is obsolete and Chrysler will not spend the money to re-create this equipment" (I'll look for the thread on here where I explained this and how NASA had the same issue) and then I was told that some "general" information still exist like the amount of material like paint and vinyl is still around but nothing to tell anyone which cars were painted which color or how many had a vinyl roof or which color interior. Someone there at Chrysler told me he knew of someone in Michigan that has the "Tub File" with all of the '68-'70 car colors and could possibly tell how many cars were painted a certain color and I had the name but never was able to make a contact but I may be able to find that person's name. I know someone else that knows him and they may chime in if they read this....I hope.


Okay, here we go, where will this all go? Can we, after a few posts, move this to general with a link from here and still leave this post here?


MikeR

then this:

I still think the records are there but stored in a different format than before.......someone needs to tell me how you can still get this for '67 and earlier Chrysler vehicles and not for '68 and later? Where did they store the '68 and later PUNCH CARDS that they were the only data to get wet, lost, thrown out, stolen, given to the Guru, or whatever the folkelore story is. I think the data storage system changed in '68, right before we went to the moon the next year....

then this:

Quote from Dave Watt on 12/15/11 at 16:26:54:

I believe that someone out there (not Chrysler) has these records for the '68 and up cars. The most desireable years of Chrysler products ever built just happen to be gone.
Back then, people were allowed into areas if they knew an employee. One person in particular has even written about this in the past admitting he was given access to the records. So, it only makes sense there were others that could have helped themselves to whatever documents they wanted and no one would have known.



Dave, I believe that too.........and that being said no company that size back then didn't have some way of keeping records by automated means i.e., computer, electronic data record keeping. If they could print five to fifteen BROADCAST SHEETS from a remote location (Product Planning, Fleet Engineering offices) then have it printed electronically at or near the assembly point it had to have been recorded electronically and stored. I believe that electronic data is still around, maybe not all of the paper docs but something for that period is somewhere.........

Then this which shows what someone at Chrysler told me about data retrieval may be true


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_729

Ancient IBM drive rescues Apollo moon data
By Tom Jowitt
November 12, 2008 12:00 PM ETAdd a comment.Techworld.com - Valuable mission data gathered by NASA's Apollo missions to the moon 40 years ago looks like it may be recovered, thanks to a donation of an ancient IBM tape drive by a Sydney computer society.

The Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s gathered valuable data on moon dust for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration using 'dust detectors' that were invented by Perth physicist Brian O'Brien, according to ABC News in Australia.

This information on moon dust was apparently beamed back to earth and recorded onto 173 data tapes, stored at both NASA and Sydney University.

O'Brien published preliminary findings on the data, but after a lack of interest from the scientific community, the tapes on moon dust were placed into storage in the 1970s.

But it now seems that moon dust is a very important environmental problem indeed for NASA, especially as the U.S. agency considers building a base on the moon.

As NASA quickly discovered, moon dust is extremely abrasive, and according to astronauts whose space suits and equipment quickly became covered in it, it smelled like spent gunpowder. NASA said that the dust would often scratch lenses or corrode seals.

Unfortunately, according to O'Brien, NASA 'misplaced' its moon-dust tapes before they could be archived.

Thankfully, the tapes stored at Sydney University were still available. However, what was not readily available was a IBM 729 Mark V tape drive needed to read the data.

The IBM 729 magnetic tape drive was used by IBM from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. It used a half-inch magnetic tape that was up to 2,400 feet in length on a reel measuring up to 10.5 in. in diameter.

When O'Brien learned of the tape loss, he was contacted by an Australian data recovery firm, SpectrumData, which offered to try to get hold of the information.

SpectrumData subsequently moved the tapes into a climate-controlled room, and it even managed to locate a very rare 1960s IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum Society, which has agreed to loan the company the drive so that the data can be recovered.

Unfortunately, it seems that the tape drive, which is the size of a household fridge, is in need of some attention in order to get it working again.

"The drives are extremely rare; we don't know of any others that are still operating," Guy Holmes, CEO of SpectrumData, was reported as saying by ABC News.

"It's going to have to be a custom job to get it working again," he said. "It's certainly not simple, there's a lot of circuitry in there, it's old, it's not as clean as it should be, and there's a lot of work to do."

Holmes said he hopes to get the tape drive working by January, and he believes it will then only take a week or so to pull the data off the old tape drives.

THIS TO ME SAYS IT ALL ABOUT WHERE THAT DATA MAY BE!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305


The IBM 305 RAMAC, publicly announced on September 13, 1956,[1][2] was the first commercial computer that used a moving head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control". Its design was motivated by the need for real-time accounting in business.[3] The first RAMAC to be used in the US auto industry was installed at Chrysler's MOPAR Division in 1957. It replaced a huge tub file which was part of MOPAR's parts inventory control and order processing system. The 305 was one of the last vacuum tube computers that IBM built. The IBM 350 disk system stored 5 million 8-bit (7 data bits plus 1 parity bit) characters. It had fifty 24-inch-diameter (610 mm) disks. Two independent access arms moved up and down to select a disk, and in and out to select a recording track, all under servo control. Average time to locate a single record was 600 milliseconds. Several improved models were added in the 1950s. The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month in 1957 dollars, equivalent to a purchase price of about $160,000. More than 1,000 systems were built. Production ended in 1961; the RAMAC computer became obsolete in 1962 when the IBM 1405 Disk Storage Unit for the IBM 1401 was introduced, and the 305 was withdrawn in 1969.


MikeR

(and then this when someone challenged that there was no way that Chrysler had a computer system large enough to store data like that and that it was all on paper that was burned or ruined by a flood )

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Quote from autoholic on 12/15/11 at 17:57:22:

Did you guys ever see the IBM computers in those days? They were the size of a small room. The only ones that could afford them were large corporations. They did not reprint the IBM card, it was the master (and a few more printed for various reasons) that was fed into the computer that created the info for things like the BS and FT.

Remember, we are talking about a profit driven company that only keep those records around for warranty purposes and them later maybe for insurance company/law enforcement for thieft recovery.

These records were likely stored in basements and who knows at what point the a particular area was full and a new location was fount to continue with the storage needs as the years went by.

If you think GG had access to aquiring these do you think he would not take the ones for the Max Wedges, A990s, and 67 RO and WO cars too?

I really doubt they still exist in any forum as the actual IBM cards were discarded after they were put on micro phish and if they had a new format for storing the info you can bet that they discarded these IBM cards as well. What would be the sence in transfering the info if they were not trying to free up room and make it easier to access?

I think GGs "access" was limited to written corrospondance and what was available for production numbers that he has spoken about in the very books created from the info given. If he has had them all these years we would know about it. Too hard to keep a secret like that for this long especially when making your living the way he does.

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Huh???? Darryl do you really think that time in the '60's was the stone age? Do you think they managed an assembly plant of this size by people alone and not one computer? Do you really think that with an office building of this size attached to an assembly plant the size of Lynch Road that they didn't have room for computers? How did they keep track of JIT orders and inventory and car orders and broadcast sheets and supplies and..... read the post above where Chrysler in 1957 was the first auto manufacture to use a certain TYPE of computer not just a COMPUTER for inventory control. IT WASN'T THE STONE AGE BACK THEN!

MikeR

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Quote from autoholic on 12/15/11 at 19:09:23:

Remember, computers back then were not the price of a $500. laptop that has more capacity today than that room full of computers.

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Yes Darryl but the IBM RAMAC 305 system was the unit that was phased out in the late '60's and the new smaller or should I say "not as LARGE" system was introduced and that's when I think they lost the ability or equipment to retrieve the stored data.

Just like right now there are no more computers being built with a Floppy Disc and no car audio systems with a Cassette Player and when was the last time you saw a Beta tape player or a Lazer Disc player or 8 mm film or a 35 mm camera. I had to borrow a Floppy Disc add on drive to download the Calvin Smith A12 Bee photos I took back in 2000, (only 12 years ago for Pete's sake) on a Sony Mavica, so do you really think when the late '70's and early '80's rolled around and Chrysler was going in the toilet and the '60 early '70's muscle car hobby was starting to grow that Chrysler really cared about how many cars came with a certain engine, transmission, interior, color combination? I'm sure there were people that did get what they could and there were lots of things thrown out but I still think (well hope) that the electronic data is still somewhere and maybe, just maybe someone in Chrysler Archives will tell us the real story?

$3200 a month to do the work of a hundred or hundreds of people is not a lot of money when you divide that by well let's just use one 1969 Chrysler model, 84,000 road runners with about the same average retail price of $3200. Even if it only cost Chrysler half that retail price to produce them that was a cost of two cars a month to pay for computer use.....a deal in my books.


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The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month in 1957 dollars,



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The original 305 RAMAC computer system could be housed in a room of about 9 m (30 ft) by 15 m (50 ft); the 350 disk storage unit measured around 1.5 square metres (16 sq ft). The first hard disk unit was shipped September 13, 1956.[4] The additional components of the computer were a card punch, a central processing unit, a power supply unit, an operator's console/card reader unit, and a printer. There was also a manual inquiry station that allowed direct access to stored records. IBM touted the system as being able to store the equivalent of 64,000 punched cards.[3]

Programming the 305 involved not only writing machine language instructions to be stored on the drum memory, but also almost every unit in the system (including the computer itself) could be programmed by inserting wire jumpers into a plugboard control panel.

During the 1960 Olympic Winter Games in Squaw Valley (USA), IBM provided the first electronic data processing systems for the Games. The system featured an IBM RAMAC 305 computer, punched card data collection, and a central printing facility.




MikeR

I do know for a fact that when Chrysler thought they were going under in the late 70's they housed thousands of parts in the old Studebaker warehouses near South Bend, IN and they hired dozens of contractors to destroy those parts. I had a freind who worked there and he was disgusted that they were smashing NOS quarter panels, guages, and the like and he ended up taking some home. He was found out and fired, but what he saw made him sick. They probably threw out all the records then too.