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posted by janrinok on Tuesday April 22 2014, @06:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-now-reduced-to-the-size-of-a-wristwatch dept.

50 years ago, IBM created a mainframe that helped send men to the Moon; a ground breaking computer that allowed new levels of compatibility between systems. The System/360 programs still run today.

While IBM had been making its 700 and 7000 Series mainframes for more than a decade, the System/360 "ushered in an era of computer compatibility for the first time, allowing machines across a product line to work with each other," IBM says. "It was the first product family that allowed business data-processing operations to grow from the smallest machine to the largest without the enormous expense of rewriting vital programs... Code written for the smallest member of the family had to be upwardly compatible with each of the family's larger processors. Peripherals such as printers, communications devices, storage, and input output devices had to be compatible across the family."

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:13PM

    by drussell (2678) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:13PM (#34528) Journal
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bucc5062 on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:40PM

      by bucc5062 (699) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:40PM (#34548)

      Hello Honey, I'm home...

      --
      The more things change, the more they look the same
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08 2014, @09:30PM

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:18PM (#34531)

    Good luck finding a working System/360 (circa 1965) to run them on.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:31PM (#34537)

      Good luck finding a working System/360 (circa 1965) to run them on.

      Or run this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_emulator [wikipedia.org]

      IBM's got interesting history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaus t [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by mendax on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:37PM

      by mendax (2840) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:37PM (#34546)

      The point is that there are programs written for System 360 mainframes that are still running unchanged and unrecompiled on IBM System Z mainframes. The only real difference is that they run MUCH, MUCH, MUCH faster. In a talk at the Computer History Museum in 2004, a VP of Engineering at IBM said that program written for the IBM 360/20 mainframe that needed to run for an entire week (and then joked that the machines then couldn't stay online that long) would require less than a second on the latest Z series machine at that time. Undoubtedly, IBM has improved things in the last ten years.

      --
      It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
      • (Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:08PM

        by egcagrac0 (2705) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:08PM (#34569)

        I'm pretty sure that the jobs still take less than a second to run on the modern hardware.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:12PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:12PM (#34570)

        Processor speeds simply haven't increased by that much of a ratio, but online memory and IO bandwidth have increased enough to make that kind of systemic thruput increase possible.

        I can think of certain sort jobs that would have worn out a magnetic tape for a week due to sheer size only taking a second once the whole dataset can be cached in memory.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:56PM

          by frojack (1554) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:56PM (#34589) Journal

          When I started my first data center job they had sort/merge jobs back in the day that used every available tape drive in the data center. Each time they added tape drives we modified the job to use more drives because as we increased the merge order the job ran quicker and quicker. Pretty soon it was under 10 hours!

          --
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        • (Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:57PM

          by mendax (2840) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:57PM (#34609)

          As I recall, the first IBM 360 model 30 only executed maybe 50k instructions per second. A single processor running a single thread on an IBM Z series machine is executing the same instructions at about a billion per second. The CPU runs 20,000 times faster. That means that, all other things being equal, that program 50 years ago which took a 7 days to crunch should now only take 30 seconds. So, one can only conclude that the rest of the speed increase come from the increased memory and I/O speeds.

          --
          It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:26PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:26PM (#34825)

            A billion IF you can keep the cache full, memory bandwidth isn't a limit, etc. Sometimes this is the case.

            Mostly, fast processors just make life hard on the designers of the rest of the system.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:20PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:20PM (#34572)

      "Good luck finding a working System/360 (circa 1965) to run them on."

      There are no working 360 out there that I know of. I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I know the CHM has a non-operational /30 and the Smithsonian and several other museums have either a full 360 or at least parts of 360 series machines, either on display or in storage.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by gallondr00nk on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:35PM

    by gallondr00nk (392) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:35PM (#34542)

    I wonder if someone has written a NetBSD port yet :P

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:06PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:06PM (#34568)

      https://www.debian.org/ports/s390/ [debian.org]

      The z/arch and the 390 are basically fat bus 360

      Yeah yeah I know little detail this and that, but its basically the same.

      As a gut feeling there's probably more difference between a 8086 and a 80286 than between a 360 and a 390

      for a good time google "Hercules emulator" and / or "MVS turn key system" or MVS turnkey cdrom or whatever.

      For some time I had a emulated 360 and connected from linux using c3270 and fooled around with original ancient COBOL and FORTRAN.

  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by citizenr on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:40PM

    by citizenr (2737) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:40PM (#34550)

    IBM created system that helped send Jews to the gas chamgers.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bucc5062 on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:54PM

    by bucc5062 (699) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:54PM (#34562)

    Maybe slightly related (but this story does take some of us lawn keepers back). An early job I had with a manufacturing company was writing/maintaining COBOL code on an HP 3000. Other than the IT staff was under marketing for some reason, it was not a bad gig. One day my boss pulls me in and says "You've had experience with IBM equipment right?". "Yeah I say" not wanting to go into detail of the limiting nature of the knowledge. "Got a job for ya then, have fun".

    The job was traveling 2 hours to a remote plant where they had an IBM system (series 3 I think) that ran on punch cards. I was blown away first time I saw this set up (was around mid 20's at the time). Their local "IT" guy had left and the company wanted all the programs transferred over to the HP3000 and working. For the next few months I "commuted" to Doylestown PA and learned how to load card programs such that they could be written to a tape file that was readable by the HP. Next copy the program over then alter it so it would work with the HP and the new database system. One time I even dropped a program thus understanding why card numbering was SO important. Also one of the earliest times of doing real time connections to a remote system (logging back onto the home HP3000).

    I thought I was done with IBM mainframes after that till ten years later I am back working on a 370, again in COBOL but for an Expert System. Ah JCL, how I loath you still. One thing I'll say, complex as they were, it was pretty cool working with those systems. Somehow that *defined* being an IT specialist more then today's shiny little boxes. (sniff) Let me just enjoy my lawn a little more

    --
    The more things change, the more they look the same
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:28PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 22 2014, @08:28PM (#34577)

    The most important thing that came out of the 360 program wasn't hardware or even a moon landing, it was Fred Brooks book about software development management, as he analyzed the software side of the 360 project. Most of which has been ignored and brutally painfully relearned over and over, multiple times, in the history of IT. Its a thin volume well worth reading.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Tuesday April 22 2014, @10:40PM

      by mendax (2840) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @10:40PM (#34621)

      You ought to give the name the book. It is The Mythical Man-Month. I read it many years ago. Don't remember much about it anymore except that it was good. Since I don't work in management it really doesn't apply to me.

      --
      It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:34PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:34PM (#34829)

        "Since I don't work in management it really doesn't apply to me."

        Oh, it applies to you if you work in IT especially software dev, or even just follow the field. His theories for fixing the problems (the management part) are semi-questionable and you can't implement them without being in management, but his observations of how software dev really works were incredibly insightful, and unfortunately I've seen the same anti-patterns for my entire career.

        • (Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:17PM

          by mendax (2840) on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:17PM (#35058)

          Well, as I said, it has been a long time since I read it. Perhaps I forgot that part of it. :-)

          --
          It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:23PM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:23PM (#34598) Homepage Journal

    While System/360 is just a footnote, VAX systems still currently used by the US military in critical command and control roles:

    They got their task by being the first reasonably portable (refrigerator-sized) systems. And after more than 2 decades, are still filling absolutely critical roles:

    http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/20th/ [hp.com]

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 1) by den Os on Wednesday April 23 2014, @10:33AM

      by den Os (2340) on Wednesday April 23 2014, @10:33AM (#34787) Homepage

      Unfortunally VMS has been abandoned long time ago by its successive owners. VMS clustering is still much better then anything else. But that is probably the only strength left...

  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:52PM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday April 22 2014, @09:52PM (#34607) Homepage Journal

    I hate EBCDIC!

     

     

    Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
    Filter error: PLEASE DON'T USE SO MANY CAPS. USING CAPS IS LIKE YELLING!

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.