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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: 0.199s | 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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kjs3 ◴[08 Apr 25 17:04 UTC] No.43623991[source]▶
>BUT. I worked at a place that used IBM 360s...Then one day an engineer brought in an Apple II from home and ran the programs on that.

The 360 was introduced in 1964. The 370 was introduced in 1970. The 3033 was introduced in 1977. The Apple 2 was introduced in 1977. So, yeah, if you were still using 360s contemporary with an Apple 2, no wonder the engineers were frustrated.

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1. elzbardico ◴[09 Apr 25 02:03 UTC] No.43628262[source]▶
Lots of organizations run those computers for very long times. It was not unusual for a medium-sized company, a factory or some local government to be running 10 to 15 years hardware.