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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

(spectrum.ieee.org)
169 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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talkingtab ◴[08 Apr 25 15:11 UTC] No.43622725[source]▶
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.

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btilly ◴[08 Apr 25 17:23 UTC] No.43624225[source]▶
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?

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1. btilly ◴[08 Apr 25 18:01 UTC] No.43624673[source]▶
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.