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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: 0.21s | 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. TheOtherHobbes ◴[09 Apr 25 00:41 UTC] No.43627847[source]▶
The most powerful 360/91 was roughly equivalent to a 20MHz 486 from the early 90s.

Mainframes had much more powerful distributed IO for multiple hard drives, tape systems and such.

But the CPUs were really not all that powerful at all.

Many people wildly underestimate just how insanely fast and power-efficient today's commodity computing is compared to high-end supercomputing from earlier decades.

A Raspberry Pi destroys any supercomputer earlier than around 1990, and gives some later models a run for their money.

An Apple S7 watch processor is maybe 25X faster than a Pi 5.

And so on.