[HN Gopher] System/360 - CHM Revolution
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System/360 - CHM Revolution
Author : rbanffy
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-04-06 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.computerhistory.org)
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| For those of you interested in these ancient machines, the CHM
| has an IBM 1401 and a PDP/1 that they actually will run as demos
| from time to time. The 1401 runs twice a week, and the PDP/1 runs
| twice a month.
|
| https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/
| anyfoo wrote:
| Do note though that they are both very different from s/360.
|
| Complexity-wise, 1401 and PDP/1 are a bit closer to home
| computers of the 80s, in that they usually just execute code in
| a single thread and context and without any protection. They
| represent an earlier and simpler era of computing.
|
| The s/360 lineage, on the other hand, is an ancestor of our
| modern computing environment with virtual memory, privilege
| separation, virtual machines, dynamic linking, and so on.
|
| It's really quite striking how much of our "modern" computing
| concepts IBM already did at the time with the s/360 and
| successors, up to the still alive IBM z.
|
| That does not diminish from the awesomeness of the 1401 and
| PDP-1 exhibits at all, I highly recommend them!
| dboreham wrote:
| The only working "big iron" I'm aware of in a museum is the
| LCM's PDP-10. The museum is still closed, unfortunately.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I think of it more as a continuum. At MIT under Jack Dennis,
| a pdp-1 was converted to timesharing.
| https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/timesharing/
|
| John McCarthy discusses his memories of early timesharing
| systems, mentioning the pdp-1 https://www-
| formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/time...
|
| https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/protection/Stat.
| .. discusses protection hardware -- and how the 360 actually
| mostly used it on main memory, not on IO channels (even
| though there was protection available to IO channels).
|
| I'm mainly saying that there were many 'experiments' tried in
| the olden days, and those plus "the market" give us what we
| have today. Recall, in the days of the IBM 1401 and DEC
| pdp-1, the notion of 'byte' as an 8-bit quantity did not
| exist. ASCII did not exist. The IBM 1401 was a Decimal /
| Character machine, and could add/sub/mul/div numbers of
| arbitrary length, in hardware (!). The pdp-1 used one's
| complement arithmetic. On and On...
| reidacdc wrote:
| Lovely. "The Mythical Man Month" was a recommended supplementary
| text when I was in undergrad computer science, and it was well
| worth the read, especially for me -- I have a tendency to get
| hung up on the cool tools and fun methods in programming, which
| is OK in hobby environments, but if the purpose of the software
| is to solve a problem, you need to keep an eye on the problem.
| The book extends this insight to managerial methods, famously,
| and to me feels akin to Goodhart's law, about how once a metric
| becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric.
|
| There's a great interview with Frederick Brooks on Youtube, not
| specifically about the System/360, but the guy was amazingly
| self-aware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul0dbgs8Mdk
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It should be compulsory reading not only for CS students but
| for devs and managers. People should read it and apply it over
| and over.
| shrubble wrote:
| The Hercules emulator allows you to run various OS/360 and later
| systems in emulation under Windows, Mac, Linux and most other
| Unixes also, in case you wanted to try it out yourself.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can try your hand with one of my Docker images.
|
| docker run -it -p 3270:3270 rbanffy/vm370
|
| Then connect your 3270 client(s) to port 3270 on localhost and
| play like it's the 1970's.
|
| Disclaimer: that image has a 370, the successor of the 360.
|
| For this image, user CMSUSER has password CMSUSER, user MAINT
| (has more privileges) has password CPCMS. I now forgot the
| password for OPERATOR. I'll post it here when I remember what
| it was. This image is built on the Sixpack distribution of
| VM/370. Google for it and you'll find lots of information.
| fghorow wrote:
| A blast from the past. UCLA had an S/360 model 91 that was "the
| campus computer" when I learned to program on it in 1975.
|
| I still have a JCL book from that era somewhere in a box...
|
| //GO.SYSIN DD *
|
| DOO DAH
|
| DOO DAH
|
| (Edited: formatting)
| williamDafoe wrote:
| TLDR; System/360 was the first true family of architectures that
| spanned 1000x performance speedup, the smallest models were
| modest and heavily microcoded.
|
| The Amdahl System/470 was dependent on IBM-compatible disk drives
| and IBM lost an anti-trust lawsuit in the late 1960s when they
| tried to deny cpu support contracts to customers using 3rd party
| disk drives.
|
| Apple today is doing something quite similar by trying to deny
| repairs by 3rd party companies. IBM broke the law explicitly
| (tying) through verbal contracts whereas Apple is breaking the
| law implicitly using needless hardware crypto contracts ...
|
| Thats why Steve Cook should lose the anti trust battle. Just
| watch.
| dessimus wrote:
| > Steve Cook
|
| I thought his name was Tim Apple!?
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