Subj : Re: FidoNet Technical Standards Committe
To   : Fabio Bizzi
From : Dan Cross
Date : Thu Mar 09 2023 03:14 am

On 08 Mar 2023 at 07:00a, Fabio Bizzi pondered and said...
 
 FB> But IMHO, as I wrote to Ward, Before IBM 360 it's hard to find a "real"
 FB> mainframe, moreover the IBM AS/400 and it's predecessors System 36,
 FB> AS/38 etc. are all dipartimentals.

Prior to S/360, pretty much all computers were "mainframes".
It's kinda like how no one new they were driving a manual
transmission car until the Jones's rolled up in their new
automatic.  The term "mainframe" comes from telecommunications,
anyway.  Nowadays, of course, it's mostly synonymous with
IBM z/Arch machines and compatibles.

Some members of the VAX family were regarded as true mainframes
in terms of IO capacity and so on; the 9000 and 10000, for
example.  Certainly, the PDP-10 was a mainframe.  And if we
go back to IBM and the 7 dwarfs, we've got machines like the
GE 645 that counted.  Indeed, when the Multics project was
getting off the ground, they were looking very closely at the
360 but went with the GE machine because Gene Amdahl said virtual
memory was off the table.  The 360/67 was a skunk-works project.
Anyway, a DPS-8/M was certainly a mainframe.

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