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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

(spectrum.ieee.org)
169 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.598s | 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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1. chasil ◴[08 Apr 25 18:41 UTC] No.43625147[source]▶
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

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2. spc476 ◴[08 Apr 25 20:10 UTC] No.43625965[source]▶
The Motorola 68000, introduced in 1979, had 24 address lines. The Intel 80286, introduced in 1982, also had 24 address lines.
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3. chasil ◴[08 Apr 25 20:32 UTC] No.43626161[source]▶
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.