At 15:00 -0600 on 01/12/2011, Tom Marchant wrote about Re:
speculation: z/OS "enhancments":
One of the things that maide the IBM 360 a sucess was abandonment of the
idea of specialized instruction sets for example geared to Business or
Scientific data processing, NOT BOTH.
The Floating-point feature was included for scientific processing.
The Decimal feature was included for business processing? Both
instruction sets were included so that IBM could market a single
architecture suitable for either kind of processing. One factor may
have been that they didn't want to have to write and maintain two
operating systems on two different architectures. It was not
expected that the business users would use floating-point instructions
or that scientific users would use packed decimal.
I may be mis-remembering but I seem to have the impression that one
of the features (I think scientific) was optional on the lowest level
model (the 360/30). This did not affect the Operating System but only
what you could run on that version of the machine if you did not have
the feature.
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