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Happy birthday Sys360!

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They are one of the first IBM mainframes I ever worked on, along with the Sys370s. Toroidal core storage and hydraulic power for the heads on the huge 100 meg disks. Huge in data size that is!

IBM’s $5bn gamble: revolutionary computer turns 50 - Telegraph

I hated the yellow systems. Yes, you could get IBM 360s in 5 colours, but why yellow I will never know? It was a bright canary yellow and did not help a hangover one little bit! Programmes entered by JCL punch card stacks, great stuff!

Did you know about the birthday Chscag? Brings back some memories I should think??
 
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..and thus the mainframe industry was pushed forward.

My first in-depth experience with mainframes was at a company where they managed what would now be called a data warehouse. They had 4 TB of DASD spread across seven Sys370-compatible systems from IBM, Amdahl, and Hitachi.

I was the wise guy 20-something kid who was trying to integrate Sun UNIX systems into the environment. In those days IBM had just introduced something called CLIO which rode on a bus-and-tag connection between the Sun servers and the mainframe and purported to provide channel-level IO (hence the name). It worked, but it was slow.

I'm amazed to think that the storage and computing power of that room could fit on your desk now.
 

RavingMac

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Aaah, yes!

Fortran and punch card stacks on an IBM 360 . . . brings back memories of my freshman year at college.
 
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Aaah, yes!

Fortran and punch card stacks on an IBM 360 . . . brings back memories of my freshman year at college.

I think we are of the same age:Cool:
Drop a deck of punched cards and you could start all over again. I hated it ( only when it happened to me ) :Evil:

Cheers ... McBie
 

chscag

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Yes, you could get IBM 360s in 5 colours, but why yellow I will never know?

Hey, that's blasphemy! Only one color..... BLUE! ;P Actually, I've never seen a 360 - 50 in any other color but blue. In our main frame room everything was blue, the console, the pneumatic tape drives, etc, etc. And that included the techs who worked there... we were all blue because they kept that miserable room around 60 degrees F at all times. I used to feel sorry for the female operators, they would come to work wearing a Parka.
 

Slydude

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I was talking to a group of 7th/8th grade students the other day. I forget what they were initially talking about but had veered into the topic of how much computers had changed. They had a hard time believing how much computers had changed. She called me in to kinda verify the point.

Your smartphone may not run circles around mainframes but they certainly run circles around the Apple I/II and similar models.
 

RavingMac

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I was talking to a group of 7th/8th grade students the other day. I forget what they were initially talking about but had veered into the topic of how much computers had changed. They had a hard time believing how much computers had changed. She called me in to kinda verify the point.

Your smartphone may not run circles around mainframes but they certainly run circles around the Apple I/II and similar models.

Fast forward a few years, I was in grad school taking a course titled "Sintering and Diffusion in Binary Metal Oxides".
The professor came into class one day wearing a huge grin; he had discovered an error in a colleague's published paper (no love lost between them I believe). He offered to replace one of the class's four exams if we could find the error and recalculate the data table.

Finding the error was a simple collaborative effort, but the formula for the table was HUGE. Doing hand calculations would have taken hours (more like days), so I was determined to use computing devices to ease my task.

1) I started on a line-printer terminal hooked to the IBM 360 running BASIC. No longer remember the problem, but gave up after a few hours and switched to the . . .
2) WANG calculator. This was a device midway between a microwave oven and washing machine in size with vertical columns of digits that could be illuminated growing out of the top. The WANG was overwhelmed before I had keyed in a fourth of the problem so . . .
3) TI 52 to the rescue. A friend had a brand spanking new Texas Instrument programmable calculator, which had an amazing 224 program steps available. An hour later, I had keyed in half the program, but had exhausted all 224 available steps. I was at the point of throwing in the towel and resigning myself to a week of hand crunching numbers when my brother offered his new toy . . .
4) HP 33 calculator. I scoffed at first because it boasted a measly 49 program steps and 8 memory registers, but my brother assured me the reverse Polish notation used by the HP made it far more step efficient.
He was right. By using all 49 steps and 8 memory registers and doing one step by hand, I was able to run the table in about an hour.

I have been sold on RPN calculators ever since.

Long story, and not sure how relevant it is, but your comment made me think of it.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I believe the problem with the BASIC terminal was the lack of pre-defined functions. I could have done better with FORTRAN but that would have required generating a (shudder) punch card stack.
 
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pigoo3

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Your smartphone may not run circles around mainframes but they certainly run circles around the Apple I/II and similar models.

When I saw this I thought...today's smartphones have got to be pretty fast...but where the cut-off was I didn't know. I did some searching...and came across this (cpu benchmark list for Geekbench 3):

Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench Browser

If I'm understanding things correctly...the Geekbench 3 scores are comparable between Apple computers and iOS devices. So according to the scores (from a cpu only perspective)...an iPhone 5s has slightly more/same cpu processing power than a 13" Early 2010 MacBook Pro.

- iPhone 5s (multicore: 2 cores) Geekbench 3 score of 2406
- Early 2010 13" MacBook Pro (multicore: 2 cores) Geekbench 3 score of 2400

* Nick
 
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Ah! But the screen and keyboard are bigger on my early 2010 MBP :Cool::Cool::Cool:

I may need bigger pockets if I want to carry it around though ;);)
 

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