The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
thomas.kel...@commercebank.com (Kelman, Tom) writes: > That is interesting. I would like to visit the museum some day. Here's > descriptions from a couple of the pictures. > > "IBM's System/360 of the mid 1960s came in five different speed and size > ranges, starting at 4K of memory and eight 16-bit registers. The > architecture dominated business markets and computer science for three > decades." > > Can you imagine that we once worked with computers with only 4K of > memory. Oh, and they successors of these are still very important in > the business world. Bill Gates just won't admit it. > > "The PDP-8 from DEC was the first mass-produced minicomputer. By 1973 it > was the best-selling computer in the world, and over 25 years, DEC > produced more than a dozen variations of the PDP-8 architecture." > > When I was in college I worked with a professor who was studying brain > waves. He had placed probes from a PDP-8 into the brains of mice (I > know - poor little mice), and I did the programming to produce analysis > reports. univ. got a 64kbyte, 360/30 as part of planned transition from 709/1401 setup to tss/360 running on 360/67. i got a undergrad student job programming 360/30 in assembler. the univ. was accustomed to shutting down the datacenter from 8am sat until 8am mon ... i would then have the whole place to myself for 48hrs. in that sense, my first personal computer was that 64kbyte 360/30 (upgraded to 768k 360/67). there were lots of problems with tss/360 ... so when the univ. got 360/67 (and discontinued the 709), it mostly ran os/360 starting with pcp. my undergrad responsibilities expanded to supporting os/360 .. including system generations starting with release 9.5. along the way, the univ played with (virtual machine) cp67 ... and I got opportunity to rewrite large portions of the code. this is post from yesterday referencing adding tty/ascii terminal support to cp67: http://www.garlic.com/2008s.html#48 New machine code part of that exercise was trying to get the 2702 terminal controller to do something ... it turned out it couldn't do. this as at least part of the motivation for the univ. to build a clone replacement ... using an interdata/3, reverse engineering the channel interface ... and building a channel interface board for the interdata/3, programming the interdata/3 to emulate 2702. this was picked up and sold by interdata as standard product ... and later when perkin/elmer bought interdata ... sold under the perkin/elmer logo. the implementation went thru a number of evoluations ... an early upgrade was a "cluster" ... with interdata/4 handling the channel interface, and multiple interdata/3 processors dedicated to linescanner interfaces. this got written up blaming us for (at least parts) clone controller business ... misc. past posts referencing 360 plug-compatible controller market: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
