System/360 history

[440bx]

Hello,

The following is a link to a youtube video about IBM's System/360.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npgvV_-Nh60

Just FYI, it's mostly pictures and narration (no fancy eye candy anywhere.)

It's not obvious today but, System/360 is in many ways the "big bang" of the modern computer era. 

It's genuinely amazing that, at one time, a fully loaded mainframe was a machine with 4MB of memory (and, back then, that was a spectacular amount of memory very few organizations could afford,)  On configurations that had quite a bit less memory, you had COBOL, FORTRAN and PL/1 compilers available.

It's genuinely amazing what programmers managed to do on such limited hardware.

Anyway, for me personally, that video brought a lot of good memories back.   I hope it will do the same for the forum old timers and provide somewhat of a picture of what computing used to be at one time to the younger generation.

Enjoy!.

[VisualLab]

It's genuinely amazing what programmers managed to do on such limited hardware.

Anyway, for me personally, that video brought a lot of good memories back.   I hope it will do the same for the forum old timers and provide somewhat of a picture of what computing used to be at one time to the younger generation.

"Squeezing the last byte" from hardware.

Now, when I sometimes read some articles about JS or Python "engineers", my skin crawls. In particular in relation to equipment such as microcontrollers, smartphones or SBCs. Technological "debauchery and hedonism" in IT. Are we currently doomed to poorly made, temporary, shoddy, makeshift solutions?

[TRon]

Thank you 440bx,

That was indeed a very nice trip down to memory lane. Without it's existence (and IBM as a whole) we wouldn't be there where we would be today.

As indicated by VisualLab it perfectly shows how the rat-race for better, faster stronger is a never ending one. Ofc any attempt to stop that is at the expense of convenience but for sure restricted hardware makes you think twice about how to approach an issue and come up with an adequate solution.

[440bx]

I'm very pleased not being the only one who enjoyed it.

There are so many significant advances in the making of System/360 that it almost feels sacrilegious to place one of them at the top of the heap but, IMO, I believe the development of an operating system, something which did not exist before System/360, is likely the most significant game changer that project produced.

It's not obvious but, the advent of O/Ss influenced CPU capabilities, instruction sets and memory management.  Many hardware features came about to support the production of more capable O/Ss.

I found it entertaining to see the development of microprocessors mirror that process.  A significant number of microprocessor features exist to support better O/Ss.  It shows that the hardware guys do "live and learn"

[MarkMLl]

I broadly agree. While IMO the "every member of the older IBM 7000 range was different" angle is overplayed, the 360 emphasised a number of points- fairly regular register set and so on- which eventually came to dominate the industry.

One quirk however is that it didn't have a hardware (return etc.) stack, which is something that almost every architecture now has and which makes implementing ALGOL-derivative languages (i.e. with recursion etc.) easier. Another was that it had limited internal protection: it was only robust if programmers could be trusted to only use precisely the facilities that IBM documented and while I believe that was progressively improved it remained a flaw into the Internet era.

I found the book at https://core.ac.uk/download/197546563.pdf useful as an historical resource (i.e. to disentangle system names etc.) and to explain the variant terminology that the IBM priesthood has always used.

There was an attempt at an FPC port some years ago, but it stalled because of friction over e.g. EBCDIC vs ASCII and the author's difficulty understanding the codebase (he was unhappy with the core developers' position that a full function cross-reference was impossible). In addition, my experience on the edge of the "historical reenactment" scene suggests that fundamental differences over file storage would have become a big thing if the target were MVS (formerly OS/360) rather than VM/CMS which is somewhat unix-like.

There is of course https://bernd-oppolzer.de/job9.htm hence https://github.com/StanfordPascal/Pascal, but I have not really explored how compatible it is with FPC etc.

MarkMLl

[toby]

i learned algol and pl1 and apl and fortran on ibm360 -> ibm370 in my early years

it was the only computer on campus that was accessible at 3AM from a secret ibm 3471 tty in the basement and boy was that paper tape fast you could only submit cards during the day

[MarkMLl]

Nice to see somebody with a bit of APL experience. It's not often remarked upon that Wirth (while at Stanford) was the academic supervisor of Larry Breed while he was doing an early implementation.

Here in the UK more universities had ICL machines than IBM, although there was also a smattering of Burroughs systems presumably on account of their ALGOL foundation. ICL reputedly later borrowed some of the Burroughs concepts, and one of my lecturers was David Brailsford who later went on to be a major apologist for ALGOL-68 when most of the World was gravitating towards Pascal, C and Ada all of which have ALGOL-60 as their foundation.

There were two rows of IBM 029 cardpunches: one for engineers such as myself and the other for mathematicians using ALGOL. Plus a row of ASR-33s used by longhaired postgrads :-)

MarkMLl

[toby]

Hi MarkMLl

Larry Breed and stsc - what a fantastic apl

i still have a WORKING ibm pc with a Norand hard disk expansion chassis (before ibm at came out)
the keyboard with the stsc key stickers is still in good shape - not a one has come off or faded
the stsc manual was a real nice binder - but over the years the 'cardboard' has become very curved and warped

my first use of apl was on the ibm 360/370 but the first apl i had in my dirty little hands was tcc apl - but it was on a dead end wicat machine though

the stsc should still work on linux/wine
echo "do stst apl on linux/wine >> bucket-list.txt"

i played lunar lander for many hours on a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
<biden memory>i think it was in apl but could have been in basic</biden memory>

[Curt Carpenter]

Hi MarkMLl

Larry Breed and stsc - what a fantastic apl

i still have a WORKING ibm pc with a Norand hard disk expansion chassis (before ibm at came out)
the keyboard with the stsc key stickers is still in good shape - not a one has come off or faded
the stsc manual was a real nice binder - but over the years the 'cardboard' has become very curved and warped

my first use of apl was on the ibm 360/370 but the first apl i had in my dirty little hands was tcc apl - but it was on a dead end wicat machine though

the stsc should still work on linux/wine
echo "do stst apl on linux/wine >> bucket-list.txt"

i played lunar lander for many hours on a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
<biden memory>i think it was in apl but could have been in basic</biden memory>

Hang on to that old gear.  I sold my first CPM system on ebay a few years ago and was absolutely astonished at what I got for it.  Collecting vintage hardware has apparently become a thing.

My first computer experience was with a Burroughs system and Algol too.  Hard to grasp how much has changed in just sixty years or so.

[MarkMLl]

Wicat- haven't heard /that/ name for a while.

I wrote myself a 2741 emulator a few years ago: it works surprisingly well even for things like VM/CMS but internally it's a mess since I used the physical linkages as internal refences and once I started soing things like cut-and-paste (line code to Unicode, Unicode back to line code)...

Decent support for IBM and Sun keyboards on multiple Linux widget sets plus Solaris :-)

Code: [Select]

UK-102 (IBM) + APL
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       │ \ ││ Z ││ X ││ C ││ V ││ B ││ N ││ M ││ , ││ . ││ / │
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MarkMLl

[toby]

Hi Curt
do you think my ibm 3471 apl typeball has any great value?

Hi MarkMLl
you know wicat? i had a wicat s100 - it was a pascal os machine and had pascal (of course) and tcc apl with 8Mhz 68000 and 2 8" floppy disks (which 'clanked' when used) it had 756K ram (<<<- K) and i never ran out of memory
4 serial ports and 2 hds serial (human design apl terminals) and a dumb dec vt-100 terminal for booting and of course an epson mx-100 printer
i still have a few unopened ibm 8" floppy disk boxes in their original blue ibm boxes - i'm afraid to open them for fear of toxic vapours will come out .. or toxic dust

this is only reference to the 'system 100' i have ever found on the iinternet
http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-12/1981_12_BYTE_06-12_Computer_Games_djvu.txt

[MarkMLl]

do you think my ibm 3471 apl typeball has any great value?

Yes, but I'm pretty sure there are also people trying to collate the layouts.

you know wicat? i had a wicat s100 - it was a pascal os machine and had pascal (of course) and tcc apl with 8Mhz 68000 and 2 8" floppy disks (which 'clanked' when used) it had 756K ram (<<<- K) and i never ran out of memory

Not in person. 768K? Luxury- see my sig.

i still have a few unopened ibm 8" floppy disk boxes in their original blue ibm boxes - i'm afraid to open them for fear of toxic vapours will come out .. or toxic dust

Unlikely, but moisture would get in and affect their sales value. You /do/ appreciate that even NASA were trying to buy new-old-stock floppies until relatively recently for the Shuttle?

MarkMLl

[Thaddy]

OK,
This shouts out a keyboard simulation contest... I will do the Burroughs, also quite quirky.