[HN Gopher] Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM
___________________________________________________________________
Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM
Author : rbanffy
Score : 134 points
Date : 2025-04-08 07:30 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| FpUser wrote:
| This was some great read
| ListeningPie wrote:
| Your comment was reason enough for me to read it, 8/10
| noworld wrote:
| The successor IBM Mainframes are still alive... for the time
| being.
|
| https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248329.pdf
| froh wrote:
| oh, they'll stay around for another while.
|
| they also moved on three more CPU generations since that
| redbook, to z17.
|
| I think it's Linux on Z that makes it sexy and keeps it young,
| in addition to a number of crazy features, like a hypervisor
| that can share CPUs between tenants, and a hardware that
| support live migration of running processes between sites (via
| fibre optic interconnect) and the option to hot swap any parts
| on a running machine.
|
| It's doing a number of things in hardware and hypervisor that
| need lots of brain power to emulate on commodity hardware.
|
| _and_ it's designed for throughput, from grounds up.
|
| Depending on your workload there may be very good economical
| reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a number of rack-
| frames.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I think it's Linux on Z that makes it sexy and keeps it
| young
|
| They _feel_ fantastic when running Linux, but, if you don 't
| need all the reliability features that come with the
| platform, commodity hardware might be a better choice for the
| kind of workload that has evolved on Linux.
|
| > Depending on your workload there may be very good
| economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a
| number of rack-frames.
|
| Absolutely - it makes a lot of the administrative toil
| disappear. I know clusters are sexy, but getting the job done
| is always better.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Other than IBM's absurdly high pricing, they're cheaper to
| run in almost every way than x86 machines (including cloud).
| I haven't done the math to compare with aarch64/ARM.
|
| But most people don't want to deal with the hassle of dealing
| with IBM.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I suspect the main reason isn't just strictly economical. If
| you are Google or some such you can probably compensate by
| building smart software around commodity hardware, but most
| companies simply can't. Even if they have boatloads of money
| (banking, insurance) and can hire expensive talent, they
| simply can't successfully complete such an undertaking
| because they don't have it in their DNA, and management isn't
| incentivised to take on such a risky project.
|
| In this case they will just use a mainframe, even it isn't
| cheaper in the long run.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Thing is Google does not use commodity hardware for their
| DCs as far as I can tell. They got famous for that back in
| the early 2000s but I think they abandoned that approach a
| long time ago.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| They may design their own hardware, but their approach to
| scaling and fault tolerance is still the same: not a low
| number of fast and very expensive enterprise grade
| hardware that is unlikely to fail, but a huge fleet of
| servers that scale horizontally and that can tolerate the
| loss of a machine.
|
| Which is the Mainframe vs commodity server dichotomy.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Depending on your workload there may be very good
| economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a
| number of rack-frames._
|
| For legacy companies yes but it would be very hard for new YC
| companies or existing non-mainframe companies to create a
| spreadsheet showing how buying a new IBM Z mainframe would
| cost less than the latest commodity x86 or ARM servers in the
| cloud or on-premise.
|
| The IBM pricing for mainframes makes sense for legacy
| companies like banks and airlines with a million lines of old
| COBOL code that want to keep it all running with the latest
| chip technology. (The mainframes from a few years ago are
| coming off the lease and they need to upgrade to whatever new
| mainframe IBM is offering and sign another lease & service
| contract.) So, IBM mainframe prices are very expensive -- but
| legacy companies will pay it because migrating the code away
| from mainframes _can be even more expensive_.
|
| It's similar to expensive enterprise pricing of Oracle,
| Embarcadero Delphi, Broadcom etc that takes advantage of
| existing customers already locked into their products.
| Virtually no new tech startup with a greenfield project is
| going to pay Delphi $1599-per-seat for each of their
| developers. Only existing customers stuck with their
| investment in Delphi code are going to pay that.
| (https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-
| store/delp...)
|
| But some companies do endure the costs of migration to get
| out from IBM lock-in. There are lots of case studies of
| companies shifting their workload from mainframes to
| AWS/GCP/Azure. I can't think of a notable company that did
| the reverse. Even a mainframe hardware vendor like Fujitsu
| quit making mainframes and shifted to x86 running an
| emulation of their mainframe os.
|
| Yes, IBM mainframe can run other workloads besides COBOL like
| Java and C/C++ but no company that's not already using
| mainframes would buy & deploy to IBM's Z hardware for that
| purpose.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a risk issue. 5 year high risk projects aren't
| appealing to CIOs with an average tenure around 18-36
| months. Even if it works, why should the next asshole get
| the credit?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I think the point is that IBM's market is shrinking, and
| they can't acquire new customers. They will eventually
| need to stop making mainframes because there will be a
| crossover between the cost for new mainframes for
| remaining customers vs transition to commodity hardware
| cost.
| winrid wrote:
| Building a fast reliable fault tolerant system is easier on
| mainframes than the cloud you're familiar with.
|
| Imagine having transactions ACROSS services. Do you know
| how much bullshit and over engineering that gets rid of? A
| lot.
| twoodfin wrote:
| _Virtually no new tech startup with a greenfield project is
| going to pay Delphi $1599-per-seat for each of their
| developers. Only existing customers stuck with their
| investment in Delphi code are going to pay that._
|
| I agree with this, and all your other reasons why
| mainframes will remain legacy platforms.
|
| But man, how crazy is it that an industry that is 100%
| productivity driven and (until AI data centers, at least)
| labor-cost-constrained would snub its nose at paying a
| fraction of a percent of those developers' salaries to put
| good tools in their hands.
| froh wrote:
| in a nutshell a mainframe is a cloud in a box for high
| throughput workloads which need crypto and tpu
| accelerators.
|
| mainframe pricing usually is not by pound of iron but per
| cpu cycle. unless you say nah I'm buying the thing, not
| just cycles. soyou have a choice of cloud pricing or
| hardware pricing.
|
| for significant pure Linux workloads that need an own on
| premise cloud the TCO pricing is surprisingly competitive
| with any home grown solution.
|
| even if you don't _need_ an own on premise cloud, AWS and
| similar donate come for free and there may be a break even
| there, too.
|
| that said, legacy host software, Delphi, cics, Oracle,
| DB/2, cobol etc, you named it, yes that's a different
| story, with all the extra software licensing.
|
| but a pure Linux mainframe is surprisingly competitive not
| just in compute and throughput but also in pricing.
|
| plus you get quite some high availability in silicon. think
| ECC on the ALU, hot stand by spare CPU, multipath
| everything, if your business depends on uptime your system
| architecture becomes much simpler on highly dependable
| hardware.
|
| so that spreadsheet compares own people and software
| construction vs IBM tax in some columns.
|
| lol I start sounding like an IBM sales person
| https://www.ibm.com/products/integrated-facility-for-linux
|
| I just did Linux on Z for a while and I loved it, so please
| bear my enthusiasm :-D
| jasode wrote:
| _> but a pure Linux mainframe is surprisingly competitive
| not just in compute and throughput but also in pricing._
|
| It's not competitive when you consider what long-time IBM
| mainframe customers actually do. E.g. SABRE airline and
| travel reservation system was one of the first IBM
| mainframe customers in 1960 with the IBM 7090 and then
| upgraded to System 360 and then the newer Z mainframes.
| SABRE's multi-decade experience with IBM mainframes with
| mission-critical business applications means they are one
| of the world's foremost experts on its capabilities &
| costs that's not biased by any IBM marketing or sales
| pitches.
|
| Even with all that in-house experience, SABRE still chose
| to gradually migrate off of IBM mainframes to less
| expensive tech stacks. Some have touted IBM's TPF
| (Transaction Processing Facility) on the mainframe as
| compelling technology but that still didn't dissuade
| SABRE in ~2001 when they migrated the airfare pricing
| application to Tandem (Compaq/HP) NonStop servers running
| UNIX. (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1339621/has-
| mainframe-...)
|
| They then started a 10+ year effort to migrate more
| mainframe workloads to Google Cloud. E.g. from
| https://www.sabre.com/insights/a-journey-to-tackle-
| legacy-co... :
|
| _> We moved 93% of compute capacity from physical data
| centers to the public cloud, resulting in a 50% decrease
| in our compute costs.
|
| > We migrated more than 120 million bookings from a
| mainframe-based system to one using Google Cloud's
| Spanner database, without impacting customer operations.
| _
|
| JP Morgan Bank is another example of migrating from IBM
| mainframes to cloud. If anyone out there truly thinks
| that running a new greenfield Linux workload will be be
| cheaper or even cost-competitive on a new IBM Z
| mainframe, just pause and consider if you truly know
| something about IBM mainframes' OpEx that multi-decade
| IBM customers like SABRE and JP Morgan don't already
| know.
|
| Why would any new customers in 2025 willingly buy into
| IBM Z mainframes if they see existing customers spending
| billions trying trying to move off of them?
| speed_spread wrote:
| A mainframe is the biggest single system image you can get
| commercially. It's the easiest, most reliable way to scale a
| classical transactional workload.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > A mainframe is the biggest single system image you can
| get commercially
|
| It depends. As we have seen the other day, HPE has a
| machine with more than 1024 logical cores, and they have
| machines available to order that can grow up to 16 sockets
| and 960 cores on a single image of up to 32TB of RAM. Their
| Superdome Flex goes up to 896 cores and 48TB of RAM.
|
| I believe IBM's POWER line also has machines with more
| memory and more processing power, but, of course, that's
| not the whole story with mainframes. You count CPUs that
| run application code, but there are loads of other
| computers in there doing a lot of heavy-lifting so that the
| CPUs can keep running application code at 100% capacity
| with zero performance impact.
|
| > It's the easiest, most reliable way to scale a classical
| transactional workload.
|
| And that's where they really excel. Nobody is going to buy
| a z17 to do weather models or AI training.
| jareds wrote:
| Do you have resources that provide info on companies using
| Linux on Z and the benefits of this verses commodity
| hardware? I used to work for a Mainframe ISV but the majority
| of our software ran on z/OS. I only saw customers using Linux
| on Z to begrudgingly run software that wouldn't efficiently
| run on z/OS, mainly Java applications when customers didn't
| want to deal with the complexity of specialty engines. I
| realize because our software focused on z/OS I had limited
| visibility into the full operations at our customers.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Depending on your workload there may be very good
| economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a
| number of rack-frames.
|
| This may be true, but because there's basically no on ramp to
| running on a mainframe, there's no way anybody is going to
| try it unless they're already on a mainframe. Or maybe unless
| they _really_ need something that only a mainframe can
| provide. But most companies can live with some downtime, and
| once you can live with some downtime, you have options for
| migration between sites, and options for migrating loads so
| you can swap parts on a stopped machine. Splurging on network
| infrastructure with multi-chasis redundancy is an easier step
| to take to get to a more reliable system than building
| against a totally different system architecture.
| timewizard wrote:
| > This may be true, but because there's basically no on
| ramp to running on a mainframe
|
| You can get a partition of IBM Z to run in the cloud. The
| cost is about $5/hr for the smallest configuration.
|
| > Splurging on network infrastructure with multi-chasis
| redundancy is an easier step to take to get to a more
| reliable system than building against a totally different
| system architecture.
|
| Yes and no. If you truly need that redundancy than the
| mainframe is going to provide a much better version of it.
| SYSPLEXs and LPARs are some insanely powerful technologies.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| My partner makes a living writing z/OS assembly language, has
| been for many years now. The platform is still going strong as
| a business. The main problem they face is all the folks who
| know how to program these things are retiring (or dropping dead
| at their keypunches.) It's very hard to convince new people to
| learn how to operate these systems.
| bityard wrote:
| For your partner's sake I hope you're right but is z/OS as a
| platform actually continuing to grow, or are they just having
| a hard time filling seats because it's hard to see a long and
| profitable future working on (what some might call) "legacy"
| systems?
|
| When I was growing up (decades ago, mind), my dad kept trying
| to convince me to get into machining. Lathes, mills, tool and
| die making, etc. In his line of work, he saw lots of
| machining companies basically paying all education and
| training expenses for new hires because their experienced old
| timers were retiring faster than they could be replaced. (He
| also thought computers were a fad...) I'm sure it was a good
| opportunity at the time. But nearly all of those companies
| eventually closed up because offshore manual labor was and
| still is way cheaper. If I'd had taken his advice, I'm pretty
| sure I would have had to reboot into another career at least
| once by this point.
| wglb wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| What sort of applications does your partner work on?
| EncomLab wrote:
| Alan Kay has promulgated many famous truths about computer
| science - one of them being that among all fields of study, it
| has the least regard for the people and discoveries that brought
| it to where it is today. Maybe it's just my own sense of history
| as I move into my 4th and likely last decade of working with
| computers, but I find this to be both true and lamentable.
|
| This was a great article - thanks for sharing!
| bluGill wrote:
| How many of the people who made the steam engine possible do we
| remember? James Watt of course, but many many people were
| making contributions in material science, needed to make them
| useful. Not to mention many advances in values. No doubt lots
| of other areas as well, but I'm no expert in the steam engine.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by this - it's not as if steam engines
| are an extensive technology today, and certainly no
| university is teaching "steam science", while nearly every
| school is teaching "computer science".
|
| Perhaps this is just the attitude that drives Mr. Kay's point
| home - do individuals who are interested in CS have little
| value for who and what has come before them?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course
| owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers.
| Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency of
| heat engines was as big a deal in its day as the WWW is in
| ours, but unlike our own era, a lot of brand-new science
| and math had to be discovered by those engineers.
|
| Steam tech is much, much more interesting than it appears
| at first.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Sure they do, it's just called fluid dynamics and
| thermodynamics. Enough to fill up about 1/3 of a mechanical
| engineering degree, if you're really into it (most aren't).
|
| Not that there's a lot of historical context to things as
| far as which people did what - most of that sort live on in
| names of techniques and methods (Rankine cycle, de Laval
| turbine, Carnot efficiency, etc.)
| wglb wrote:
| One example of this was the concept of virtual memory, which
| was invented by Burroughs, not by IBM.
|
| > as I move into my 4th and likely last decade of working with
| computers
|
| Don't despair--I am in my sixth and still program every day.
| froh wrote:
| TIL that not only the software side was chaotic (served as the
| backdrop of Fred Brook's "Mythical Man Month"), but also the
| hardware side almost failed.
|
| the article here ends around 1971 --- the mainframe would later
| save IBM again, twice, once when they replaced aluminum with
| copper in interconnects, and then when some crazy IBM Fellow had
| a team port Linux to s390. Which marked the birth of "enterprise
| Linux", i.e. Linux running the data centre, for real.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [Porting Linux to s390] marked the birth of "enterprise
| Linux", i.e. Linux running the data centre
|
| Did it though? Or was it the gradual phasing out of mainframe-
| class hardware in favour of PC-compatible servers and the death
| of commercial Unices?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Or was it the gradual phasing out of mainframe-class
| hardware in favour of PC-compatible servers
|
| Proprietary Unix is still around. Solaris, HP-UX and AIX
| still make money for their owners and there are lots of
| places running those on brand-new metal. You are right,
| however, that Linux displaced most of the proprietary Unixes,
| as well as Windows and whatever was left of the minicomputer
| business that wasn't first killed by the unixes. I'm not sure
| when exactly people started talking about "Enterprise Linux".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Redhat was doing enterprise Linux well before IBM was
| involved. It was the rational platform for non-legacy .com
| 1.0 businesses.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Back then I went with Debian, but I agree - the early
| scale-out crowd went mostly with Red Hat. Back then there
| was a lot of companies still doing scale-up with more
| exotic hardware with OSs like AIX and Solaris.
| froh wrote:
| nope.
|
| the first enterprise Linux was SuSE on s390, then came RH
| on x86 and then suse there as well. but RH marketing was
| better back then already :-D
| btilly wrote:
| I first remember the term when Oracle ported themselves to
| Linux, began submitting patches, then began pushing Oracle
| on Linux to enterprises.
|
| Oracle's big reason for doing so was because they could
| charge more for Oracle on Linux, and still get to a lower
| total cost of ownership than Oracle on Solaris.
|
| Oracle began this in 1998. By 2006 they had their own
| Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution.
| froh wrote:
| well, IBM very publicly invested 1Bn USD into supporting
| Linux on all their hardware with all their software. so db/2
| on s390 on Linux, likewise websphere, etc. it gave the
| customers the promise of one run time environment on
| anything. and SUSE and shortly later Red Hat provided truly
| source compatible environments for software vendors. "code
| once run anywhere", for real. and then IBM and Oracle and Co
| forced suse and red hat to become binary compatible at the
| kernel/libc and basic system libs level, so Oracle and all
| could provide one binary under /opt on any Linux...
|
| and that pulled all other vendors along, HP, Dell, Fujitsu,
| likewise for software...
|
| and it all started with IBM officially supporting and pushing
| the hobbyist student project Linux on the holy Grail of
| enterprise compute, (of 1999/2000): s390
| sillywalk wrote:
| > IBM very publicly invested 1Bn USD into supporting Linux
|
| I remember Avery Brooks (DS9's Captain Sisko) doing a
| commercial about IBM backing Linux in the year ~2000-ish.
| cafard wrote:
| Thomas Watson, Jr.'s _A Business and Its Beliefs_ was published
| in 1963 and makes no allusion to the S /360 work. It makes for
| curious reading today, for unrelated reasons.
| scrlk wrote:
| The IBM Centennial Film has a short interview with Fred Brooks
| about System/360: https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=84
|
| Set to some nice Philip Glass music to boot.
| herodotus wrote:
| My Master's supervisor, at Wits university in Johannesburg,
| worked on the architecture of the 360 after graduating from the
| PhD program at Harvard. I remember him telling us how they went
| about deciding whether or not 32 bits would be a sufficient size
| for "most" floating point numbers. They were very systematic
| about it, scouring journals, talking with physicists and
| mathematicians and so on.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) Maybe I'm just a little too young but my impression was
| that the 360 and it's successors were not that big in
| scientific computing, certainly there were some big academic
| installations but I saw a lot more DEC machines (PDP-8 in the
| experimental lab, PDP-10, PDP-11 and VAX elsewhere) and by the
| time I went to college circa 1990 you were likely to see
| Motorola 68k-based "workstations" that were quickly replaced by
| RISC architectures like SPARC and PA-RISC which in turn failed
| to compete with the PC.
|
| Cornell had one of very few IBM 3090s with a vector unit (to
| compete with the Cray) just before I showed up, but when I did
| IBM had donated a message-passing based supercomputer based on
| the Power PC architecture. I only saw a 3090 (no vector unit)
| at New Hampshire Insurance which I got to use as a Computer
| Explorer.
|
| (2) I was taught in grad school in the 1990s to use floats if
| at all possible to reduce the memory requirements of scientific
| codes if not actually speed up the computation. (In the 1990s
| floats were twice as fast as doubles on most architectures _but
| not_ the x86). I really enjoyed taking a course on numerics
| from Saul Teukolsky, what stood out in the class as opposed my
| reading to the _Numerical Recipes_ book which he was a co-
| author of, was the part about the numerical stability of
| discretizing and integrating partial differential equations. If
| you did it wrong, unphysical artifacts of the discretization
| would wreck your calculation. Depending on how you did things
| rounding errors can be made better or worse, Foreman Action 's
| _Numerical Methods that Work_ and later _Real Computing Made
| Real_ reveal techniques for managing these errors that let you
| accomplish a lot with floats and some would point out that
| going to doubles doesn 't win you _that_ much slack to do
| things wrong.
| wglb wrote:
| > 360 and it's successors were not that big in scientific
| computing
|
| I do believe that is true.
|
| IBM did have the Model 90 series, which was on the way to
| being a supercomputer.
|
| Bur during that time CDC with the 6400/6600 etc was likely
| bigger in scientific computing.
| hh2222 wrote:
| The 360 played a pivotal role in the Apollo program.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i have also found these to be interesting, kind of selection/
| analysis/ visualisation over memoirs of Lou Gerstner (part 2 is
| around s/360):
|
| https://juliusgamanyi.com/2018/12/28/wardley-maps-an-illustr...
|
| https://juliusgamanyi.com/2019/06/18/wardley-maps-an-illustr...
|
| https://juliusgamanyi.com/2020/06/25/wardley-maps-illustrate...
|
| Now, reading the article, this _" [rivalry].. So intense was it
| that sometimes it seemed to exceed the rivalry with external
| competitors."_ reminded me of something old about Motorola..
| where rivalry went to the need to reverse-engineering other
| depts' chips via 3rd party acquiring them..
|
| www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/September-2014/What-Happened-
| to-Motorola/
| kwanbix wrote:
| As an ex-IBMer, I miss the IBM of old. So much innovation. Now
| they are just a consulting company. So sad to see it go that way.
| winrid wrote:
| Indeed. Their current goal as communicated to shareholders is
| literally to move all engineering offshore.
| talkingtab wrote:
| This whole thing is very cool and worth reading.
|
| BUT. I worked at a place that used IBM 360s. We ran stuff for
| engineers, a lot of Fortran along with assembly code. We had so
| much stuff going on we could not code up and run things fast
| enough. The engineer/scientist got frustrated.
|
| Then one day an engineer brought in an Apple II from home and ran
| the programs on that.
|
| The earth shook. The very ground beneath us moved. Tectonic
| plates shifted. The world was never the same again! I think it
| was Visicalc.
|
| Later there were other things. Soul Of A New Machine. The Mac.
|
| I wonder how the compute power of a current high end smart phone
| compares with and IBM 360? I know the graphics chip is better.
| winrid wrote:
| A $50 smartphone is many orders of magnitude faster.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If I had to compare computers based on one number it would be
| the amount of RAM. The 360 had a 24 bit address space which
| could fit 16MB of RAM although only the largest installations,
| like the one at NASA, were that big. iPhone 16s have 8GB of RAM
| so you're talking 512 times the memory capacity, never mind
| that my desktop PCs are all loaded with 4-8x times that of the
| phone and you can definitely get a big server with a few TB.
|
| An IBM 360/20 on the small side, however, ranged from 4kB to
| 32kB which was similar to home computers circa 1980, before it
| is routine to have a complete 64kB address space.
|
| Where the 360 crushed home computers was in mass storage,
| 9-track tapes could store 80MB contrasted to floppy disks that
| stored less than 200kB. Large storage compared to memory meant
| a lot of focus on external memory algorithms, also there was
| already a culture of data processing on punched cards that
| translated to the 360 (e.g. terminals have 80 columns because
| punched cards had 80 columns)
| kjs3 wrote:
| _Where the 360 crushed home computers was in mass storage_
|
| Well...sure, you could put bigger storage on a mainframe.
| It's just money, after all. But you could put a tape drive on
| a home computer. And bigger disks. And a card reader, for
| that matter. Where the 360 _really_ crushed the home computer
| was in aggregate bandwidth, via the Channel architecture. An
| Apple 2 could just about keep up with a floppy and a display.
| A 360 could keep up with dozens to hundreds of tapes, disks,
| card readers, terminals, printers and other things all at the
| same time.
|
| _Large storage compared to memory meant a lot of focus on
| external memory algorithms_
|
| I would agree with that. I would just argue the real
| mainframe advantage is a whole-system one and not point to a
| single factor (memory size).
| kjs3 wrote:
| >BUT. I worked at a place that used IBM 360s...Then one day an
| engineer brought in an Apple II from home and ran the programs
| on that.
|
| The 360 was introduced in 1964. The 370 was introduced in 1970.
| The 3033 was introduced in 1977. The Apple 2 was introduced in
| 1977. So, yeah, if you were still using 360s contemporary with
| an Apple 2, no wonder the engineers were frustrated.
| btilly wrote:
| _I wonder how the compute power of a current high end smart
| phone compares with and IBM 360? I know the graphics chip is
| better._
|
| A current high end smartphone has around 10 billion
| transistors.
|
| From https://gunkies.org/wiki/IBM_System/360, IBM made 11-12
| million SLT modules per year in the late 1960s, with less
| before that. Each individual SLT module contained a handful of
| transistors. Therefore, in transistor count alone, a single
| smartphone has more transistors than IBM produced through the
| 1960s. And this is before we consider the fact that clock
| speeds today are much higher than they were in the 1960s.
|
| Your smartphone literally has enough hardware to outcompute the
| entire world circa 1970.
|
| Isn't it amazing what over 50 years of Moore's Law can do?
| btilly wrote:
| Huh. The article claims at least an order of magnitude more
| SLT modules than the reference I found. I think it is still
| quite a bit less than the smartphone, but that makes global
| compute at least closer.
|
| Still, 55 years of doubling transistors at a given cost every
| 2 years is about a 190 million fold transistor difference for
| a given cost. Clock speeds have improved by a factor of 1000
| on top of that. Even with performance tradeoffs for battery
| life in a smartphone, there is no surprise that the phone
| should have more compute power than the world did in 1970.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Indeed. I find it interesting to look at the generational
| outliers on that curve: The Cray-1 wasn't eclipsed in raw FP
| compute by a consumer system until the Pentium more than 15
| years later.
|
| http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P.
| ..
| btilly wrote:
| Most of the outliers look like, "Someone was willing to
| spend large amounts of money."
|
| Another outlier was Deep Blue. Estimated cost of about $10
| million. Its estimated strength was matched by top end PCs
| about 9 years later. Your phone today is better than those
| PCs.
|
| Progress is relentless.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My home NAS in the other room could hold about 350 million
| C64 floppies. I've sometimes wondered how that compares to
| the world's floppy disk manufacturing capacity in 1982.
|
| I also appreciate that my Internet connection is about 33
| million times faster than my first modem. It'd take me over a
| year to download what I can slurp in about 1 second now, even
| if I could afford the 7 thousand floppies it'd take to store
| it.
|
| Progress, yo.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| How many years old was the s/260 at this point? If it was
| really long in tooth then I wouldn't be surprised.
| chasil wrote:
| The 360 had 24-bit addressing, for a maximum of 16 megabytes.
|
| The 6502 in the Apple could address 64k of RAM. Any class of
| problem requiring more memory would need a real machine.
|
| As far as a personal machine with comparable capability, RISC
| brought that to the market with the first MIPS R2000 in 1985.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture
| spc476 wrote:
| The Motorola 68000, introduced in 1979, had 24 address lines.
| The Intel 80286, introduced in 1982, also had 24 address
| lines.
| chasil wrote:
| Well, the VAX was there before any of these, but I wouldn't
| call that a "personal machine."
|
| I suppose the argument could be made that the 68000 was
| first, as both it and MIPS ended up in gaming consoles
| (Sega Genesis vs. Sony PS2 and Nintendo 64).
|
| However, MIPS eventually scaled to 64-bit, was well-known
| and heavily exploited in supercomputing applications, and
| was used to produce the film _Jurassic Park_. The 68000 had
| a far dimmer future.
|
| Yes, the x86 line did supplant them all, but only with
| AMD's help. Had Itanium been Intel's final answer, MIPS
| might be much stronger today.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| My sister worked at IBM and one of my favorite stories is when
| Lotus tried to pressure IBM to spend millions on licensing, a few
| engineers went off and built their own spreadsheet application
| and IBM told Lotus to piss off.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| And this is all before integrated circuits, so the circuits are
| still very large, consisting of many circuits on boards mounted
| on a backplane.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360#Basic_hardware_...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The reason the tape drives are in those tall enclosures are the
| vertical channels below the tape reels. That was for slack in the
| tape, there was a loop of tape hanging in each of the channels,
| so that tape reads and writes could be stopped and started faster
| than the heavy tape reels could stop and start.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| This is super interesting to me, thanks for that. Are there any
| other hidden but well-known things like that?
| shrubble wrote:
| To add to this: they had $750 million in 1963 dollars, in parts
| and no shipping computers; inventory control was so bad that they
| had to have guys with clipboards to physically go into the
| warehouse and count parts.
|
| They announced it and started getting a huge number of orders;
| IBM hired 1000 people a month and kept up that pace of hiring for
| 5 years.
| RazorDev wrote:
| Fascinating look at the challenges and risks IBM took on with the
| System/360. Betting the company on a compatible mainframe family
| was visionary but nearly disastrous. It's a testament to the
| importance of strong technical leadership, teamwork and
| perseverance to bring revolutionary products to market.
| skmurphy wrote:
| It was a business decision driven by Tom Watson Jr. after
| listening to a lot of customer feedback. See "Father, Son, and
| Co." https://www.amazon.com/Father-Son-Co-Life-
| Beyond/dp/05533808... his autobiography of his years at IBM,
| and beyond. The 360 project figures prominently.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The well known book "The Mythical Man Month" is in large part
| based on the author's experience as one of the top people on the
| System 360 project, and what went wrong during the effort.
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