1968 onward lost build records?

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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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What do others think?
All the best Frank

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I think it's a complete lie.

This subject has come up a few times over the years on Moparts and I have spewed this out before:

1. The great fire itself: No newspaper article reporting it, no record of fire response by local FD, just absolutely no record of it at all. Is there any employees at the time who recall this event? Nope. Chrysler's insurance company should have a record, right? Where is it? Something as simple as a trash-can fire would be documented somewhere no matter what the case.

2. Speaking of insurance companies and other regulatory bodies, there should be more than one copy of a build record per car anyway. Why? Cars involved in crimes would need to be tracked down somehow, insurance claim purposes, gov safety records, recalls, you get the picture. Proof of this exists that some folks have found more than one build sheet for their car.

A company as large as Chrysler Corp would have duplicate or even triplicate copies of everything for the unlikely event of fire, flood, or theft: Workers names, timesheets, incident reports, the product built, recall data, supplier tracking, accounting, you name it, in more than one location. So if a fire really did happen, then duplicate build records have to exist in another building somewhere.

3. That must have been some fire: it was selective enough to go after all the coolest cars and left all the family cars, station wagons, and taxis alone. Thank goodness.

4. Fire, my aunt fanny. Ask the oldest Chrysler employee about any such event and you are likely to get the response: "What fire?"

Until someone of Chrysler Corp authority comes forward and shows written, documented proof on the date, location, and follow-up assessment of damages related to this specific incident I will go on believing that no such "fire" ever happened.

You asked!

(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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Wayne what you said above TOTALY as you can see from the dozens of posts I've made

No, fire, no floods, no giving it all to the guru, and not just in paper form if at all? Just where the #e77 did they put that data (storage), it has to be somewhere

As I said, technology moved on just like 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, FLOPPY DISCS, photo film, bias ply tires, point distributors. There's a room full of boxes with IBM reels and reels of data storage just waiting to be shipped down under and retrieved Oz call your boys and let em know

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They probably threw out all the records then too.

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The info I was given came in the late '90's as they were doing a lot of archive research for the planned Walter P. Chrysler Museum and at that time they knew the data still existed and they were a little frustated too. I firmly believe there still is information available in a storage form that they are not willing to invest anything into retrieving. Shoot I borrowed a floppy disc player to retrieve photos of Calvin Smith's A12 Bee I took in 2000....I'm even too cheap to invest in old data retrieval equipment, just wish the boys down under would loan the equipment to Chrysler Archives/Museum...

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I remember talking to Thomas at Chrysler historical and he said there was a mountain of paperwork to get through and even though most of it is irrelevant to build records you never know what we will find. Is he still around because he said he also worked at the Australian assembly plant and still had relatives here (I'm in oz) .
I also remember talking to the late and great Daniel Banker who had a friend in some department which had access to vin records for automotive insurance fraud cases.Daniel said the guy looked up the vin of his cars and they were on file (illegally) as they should only be accessed if directly relating to a case.
I told this to Thomas at the time and said surely Chrysler historical could call back vin info from this database and he said it would release private names of who ownedthe cars and then its intruding the privacy act .
All the best Frank

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I've also spoken with Bruce many times but he was not the person that confirmed that the data still existed in the irretrievable format and the financial dilemma that keeps the vault sealed.

But if you can access the link to the A12 Registry maybe we can help to open this vault or at the least find more information than ever before. Read the entire thread on the A12 Reg....please

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I also remember talking to the late and great Daniel Banker who had a friend in some department which had access to vin records for automotive insurance fraud cases.Daniel said the guy looked up the vin of his cars and they were on file (illegally) as they should only be accessed if directly relating to a case.

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Researching old history/records cost $$$,no profit,no logical reason from a manufacturers standpoint to do it.It would have to be cost effective and would they ever recover their investment ? I seriously doubt it,don't hold your breath!

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Yes and no. We actually haven't had any word that anything exists. If the records do exist in either punchcard or microfiche then the costs would be the same as the 67 and earlier cars which they do provide a service for now. If however they said we do have the information but it's stored in a format that requires too much money to make it viable to retrieve then thats a different scenario. This question has been around for many years with no answer but no one gets an answer without asking a question. Thats why I asked.
All the best Frank

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Frank, how about if you contact these people and and see if they would give Chrysler a "discounted price" to retrieve the data.....they already spent the money to figure out how to retrieve the so called NASA moon data and were probably paid more than enough to cover any costs so now they would be making money retrieving other non-NASA data. If they say they are willing then we can have someone who knows Brandt to start to see if the rumor of the tape data is really true

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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.

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Just for the computer historians out there, a few questions to try to get a grasp of the POSSIBLITY of them on tape.
How much data was stored on each tape?
How much data is on each punchcard (IE, how much data per vehicle)?
What were the production numbers per year?
This would give an idea of the scope of the data to be retrieved.
MARTI gets from 17 to 220 per report.
http://www.martiauto.com/secure/report_chart.cfm
I'd imagine that there is a market for this type of thing for Mopars!

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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]

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Definitely will be making some calls and emails. What is the best way to contact Chrysler historical?
More questions- what format did Ford and GM use?
would they have had a similar computer system?
Can anyone post a Ford or GM buildsheet or punchcard?
All the best Frank

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I'm not sure if this is on just one 24" tape roll or all of them.....

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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]

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1968-72 TOTAL
6,316,660
That's a LOT of punch cards!

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So roughly one hundred tapes OR one hundred sets of tapes! By the sound of the description, the SYSTEM could store that much, so a wild guess is one hundred sets of tapes!