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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

(spectrum.ieee.org)
169 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.429s | 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. slashdave ◴[08 Apr 25 23:12 UTC] No.43627382[source]▶
> I know the graphics chip is better.

Graphics? We used these machines with 9600 baud serial terminals.

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2. ryao ◴[09 Apr 25 07:32 UTC] No.43629725[source]▶
I am not sure about the 360’s terminals, but some terminals could display graphics via sixels. Konsole and xterm are capable of showing them in the present day if you run a terminal copy of word perfect.