Ken - Dad got to see the S/360 assembly line one time (Kemet was a supplier for the 360), and he told me they had a machine built to probe & verify all the wiri

Ken - Dad got to see the S/360 assembly line one time (Kemet was a supplier for the 360), and he told me they had a machine built to probe & verify all the wiring in a cabinet. Pneumatic pistons pushed the test connectors (all of them, all at once) into the cabinet, and then another computer would run a set of verification tests to ensure that each wire ran to where it was supposed to, and that it had certain electrical properties (presumably crosstalk, signal loss, etc.) While each model of 360 was standardized, customers could request certain options for their machine and IBM would accommodate them. So the testing computer would have to know what the customer's configuration was to know what the wiring was supposed to be for that particular cabinet.