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>> We added 1MB of memory to an IBM 370/168 in the mid 70s. Price? $50000.
>
> Ouch! o_O
>
> It still somewhat blows my mind that you could do anything useful with so
> little memory.
You could do useful stuff with *far* less.
> Wow. I had no idea it persisted that long. In the mid 1980s, I had a C64
> to play with, which stored data on audio tape - for more data than any
> stack of punch cards. And I don't think the C64 was even particularly
> expensive... (I know of a few people who actually used the C64 for work
> purposes, would you believe.)
I can remember when I was younger (mid 80s) my dad writing a program to
simulate the 2D flow of cylindrical shaped objects into different shaped
channels (with graphics) - that was with 32K of RAM. Useful work (even if
it took about 10 seconds to eventually figure out where each one went!), and
I'm sure there are loads more examples of doing useful stuff with just a few
KB of RAM.
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On Mon, 17 May 2010 16:08:29 -0500, Mike Raiford wrote:
> On 5/17/2010 2:54 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>
>> Was anybody actually there? Did any of you guys see this happen? What
>> was it like? And did mainframes really come in bright orange cases with
>> inch-square glowy buttons on the front that randomly twinkle?
>>
>>
> ;) I remember as a kid in the 80's walking into an office that had a
> computer room. A real-life room-sized mainframe. One wall had a bank of
> tape machines, the CPU was a box the size of a Smart car sort of in the
> middle of the room, and there was a huge array of disks that took up the
> rest of the room.
>
> All controlled by a tiny terminal in the corner flanked by an 8" floppy
> drive, and a few other binders and such.
>
> It was quite neat to see!
My university had an IBM 4361 mainframe (IIRC), and I can remember in 6th
grade going to a class where I got to play in the server room with some
PDP mainframes (I helped with the backups one day).
My first job out of college had a fairly large AS/400 system (D40? I
think) and an IBM System/34.
The S/34 didn't have very many lights on it, but the AS/400 lit up light
a Christmas tree when we turned the lights off in the bunker that was our
computer room.
Jim
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> How about drum memory? Or the various delay lines?
>
Don't know, was before my time.
> As in, whole memory chunks on a single IC? Or just two latches per IC?
> Or...?
I don't know very much about the actual electronics. You will have to go to
google or wikipedia for that info. I remember the 3081 had what were called
TCMs. Fully encased, water cooled modules with about a thousand pins on the
back. The CEs had lots of fun replacing them without bending a pin in the
process.
> It still somewhat blows my mind that you could do anything useful with
> so little memory. Presumably for processing large datasets, most of the
> data at any one time would be in secondary storage?
Most really large files were on tape, you just read the data serially.
For highly accessed files, or files that needed random access were kept on disk.
> Heh, sounds line fun. According to the account I just read, you actually
> put one statement per punch card. Is that right? I always assumed that
> each card just held X characters of data, and you type until the card is
> full, then move to the next one. I didn't realise there was an actual
> "significance" to card bounderies. Or is that just for the benefit of
> the humans?
The file system for IBM mainframes are record oriented, not stream.
Files are created with a defined record format and record length.
There is no end of record indicator such as CR or LF as in PC files.
Since cards were 80 columns long, many source files today are also 80 byte
records. The norm was for program source files was column 1 to 72 was data
and column 73 to 80 was sequence numbers. For most COBOL programs the sequence
numbers were in cols 1 to 6.
> What sort of access speeds do you get for reading or writing punched
> card or tape?
As I recall about 60 characters per second. The tape was paper, was 8 holes
wide, and easily broken or scrunched.
> As in, discrete transistors on PCBs?
>
Again, I don't know much about the electronic packaging.
> Any ideas on typical memory capacity / clock speed? Data path widths?
On some of the older machines I worked with:
360/50 128KB
370/158 1MB
370/168 3MB
3033U 4MB
3081Q 8MB
On the latest machine:
z/9 BC S03 - 16GB
> Nice consistent naming scheme. Heh. :-/
You can always depend on IBM to be consistent.
> Now if I could figure out what a typical MIPS rating for a normal PC
> today is, I'd have something dissimilar to compare it to. :-}
It is rather difficult to compare since they have such different architectures.
I doubt that the internal processor speed is that much different than current
PCs, but the i/o bandwidth is much higher in the mainframe.
For example our two machines, which are on the small side for mainframes, are
connected to a disk storage unit containing 15TB of data. There are 4 high
speed fiber optic channels from each processor to this unit. We can easily
sustain i/o rates of over 10000 i/o operations per second, with peaks in the
20000 to 40000 range. It is very rare for any single job to saturate the cpu.
By running many jobs concurrently we make full use of the machine. If I could
port POVRAY to our mainframe, I'm sure it would be slower than most current PCs.
But cpu intensive work is not what the mainframe does best.
Isaac
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Many hundred billion years ago, there existed a bizzare world that most
> of us have only read about in books. Plastics did not yet exist, so
> small children's toys were made of wood or metal, because there was
> literally nothing cheaper.
There were no children many hundred billion years ago.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Many hundred billion years ago, there existed a bizzare world that most
>> of us have only read about in books. Plastics did not yet exist, so
>> small children's toys were made of wood or metal, because there was
>> literally nothing cheaper.
>
> There were no children many hundred billion years ago.
I was waiting for that one... *sigh*
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>> How about drum memory? Or the various delay lines?
>
> Don't know, was before my time.
OK. So care is newer than either of those.
> I don't know very much about the actual electronics.
OK.
> Most really large files were on tape, you just read the data serially.
> For highly accessed files, or files that needed random access were kept on disk.
So the concept of a filesystem storing named files already existed at
this time?
> The file system for IBM mainframes are record oriented, not stream.
> Files are created with a defined record format and record length.
Interesting. So the system actually "knows" where each field of a record
is then?
>> What sort of access speeds do you get for reading or writing punched
>> card or tape?
>
> As I recall about 60 characters per second. The tape was paper, was 8 holes
> wide, and easily broken or scrunched.
Mmm, that's fairly fast for an optical system.
> On some of the older machines I worked with:
> 360/50 128KB
> 370/158 1MB
> 370/168 3MB
> 3033U 4MB
> 3081Q 8MB
> On the latest machine:
> z/9 BC S03 - 16GB
I should probably go plot that on a graph against date or something... ;-)
>> Nice consistent naming scheme. Heh. :-/
>
> You can always depend on IBM to be consistent.
Consistently inconsisten. ;-)
Still, some things never change:
nVidia GeForce 8xxx
nVidia GeForce 9xxx
nVidia GeForce 2xx <- WTH?
>> Now if I could figure out what a typical MIPS rating for a normal PC
>> today is, I'd have something dissimilar to compare it to. :-}
>
> It is rather difficult to compare since they have such different architectures.
Yes, that's what I meant by "dissimilar comparison". It all rather
depends on how many registers you have, how wide the various data busses
are, what operations you can perform in hardware (e.g., is
multiplication a hardware or software operation?), and so forth.
> I doubt that the internal processor speed is that much different than current
> PCs, but the i/o bandwidth is much higher in the mainframe.
Really? I didn't think anybody had mainframes any more... just big
server farms.
> For example our two machines, which are on the small side for mainframes, are
> connected to a disk storage unit containing 15TB of data. There are 4 high
> speed fiber optic channels from each processor to this unit. We can easily
> sustain i/o rates of over 10000 i/o operations per second, with peaks in the
> 20000 to 40000 range.
Sounds expensive.
> It is very rare for any single job to saturate the cpu.
> By running many jobs concurrently we make full use of the machine.
The *original* purpose of multitasking operating systems. ;-)
> If I could
> port POVRAY to our mainframe, I'm sure it would be slower than most current PCs.
> But cpu intensive work is not what the mainframe does best.
Out of curiosity, what *do* you use it for?
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> So the concept of a filesystem storing named files already existed at
> this time?
Yes, its been around long before I got into this business.
>
> Sounds expensive.
>
Its not cheap. But for the volume of data we process, its not that much more
expensive than a server farm
>
> Out of curiosity, what *do* you use it for?
All company information is kept on mainframe disks and maintained by mainframe
programs. All customer information, product information, personnel information,
sales information etc. This company started in the early 1900s selling its
merchandise from a store. Then expanding sales to mail order catalog, then via
telemarketing, and now by internet. The web front-end is handled by a small
server farm, but all back-end work is done on our mainframe.
Isaac
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Invisible wrote:
> Does anybody know approximately when this time was?
1970's. By about 1980 most of those machines were likely retired.
> For that matter, does anybody have a broad timeline of when various
> technologies were in use? What are the dates for things like core
> memory, drum memory, punch cards, magnetic tape, relays, vacuum tubes,
> transistors, ICs, etc?
Yes. Google.
> Was there ever a time when programs were entered into memory via
> switches rather than some other medium?
Yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel
The first personal computers worked that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
> Was there ever a "punched tape" medium similar to punch cards?
Yes. That's why DEL is up at 127. Think about it.
> Similarly, you hear people talk about the VAX, the PDP, the varouis IBM
> mainframes and Cray supercomputers. Does anybody know the timeline for
> these, the technologies used and the basic design and performance details?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_history
> (Sure, you can look up individual questions on Wikipedia, but the
> articles tend to contain huge amounts of minute detail about specific
> things. I'm trying to get a general overview of an entire era.)
So you want someone else to read the 10 pages and summarize it into 10 lines
for you? You need a job in management.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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scott wrote:
>>> We added 1MB of memory to an IBM 370/168 in the mid 70s. Price? $50000.
>>
>> Ouch! o_O
>>
>> It still somewhat blows my mind that you could do anything useful with
>> so little memory.
>
> You could do useful stuff with *far* less.
We ran an entire school district on 32K of RAM and 16M of online disk.
Core memory, so cycle time close to a milisecond, let alone nanosecond.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> Many hundred billion years ago, there existed a bizzare world that most
> >> of us have only read about in books. Plastics did not yet exist, so
> >> small children's toys were made of wood or metal, because there was
> >> literally nothing cheaper.
> >
> > There were no children many hundred billion years ago.
> I was waiting for that one... *sigh*
It's a so-called mathematician's answer.
--
- Warp
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