Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/08/ibm-system-360-mainframe-conso.html
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“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”
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That’s… a quarter of a million!
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Fun fact: this is what computer operators looked like in the 1960ies.
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When I worked at Nortel (a story for another day) they had one of the largest 360 systems in the world, occupying an entire floor. They had posters on the wall bragging that their system could do 30 million instructions a second! That’s even more power than my $6 Arduino.
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is there any computer maker left that is willing to describe one of their products as “low end”
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Whatever you say…
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It shows Kubrick’s obsessive eye for detail that the design used for HAL and the other computers in 2001 looks almost identical to the sleek modernist lines of these IBM computers with their sensible fonts and chunky buttons.
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If anyone is interested in owning an IBM mainframe, used System x3850 X5 computers are available for riduculoulsly low prices (450 euro for complete system with 40 physical cores). They are somewhere between multi-socket servers and mainframes. Typically two x3850 were installed in a single 19" rack cabinet and connected by QPI link cable, creating single machine with 80 physical cores and up to 6 terabytes of RAM.
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I wish I had a practical use for that information in my life.
Nothing with 6 terabytes of RAM is an actual mainframe. The “frame” in “mainframe” refers to the magnetic iron cores linked by wires in a rectangular frame which stored bits of information in the original IBM computers.
As much as I love it, it kind of freaks me out that the $35 Raspberry Pi has vastly more computing power and storage than any of those early mainframes.
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Well, not until you attach a card reader. Is JCL available for the Pi?
(While I learned to program on a PDP 8/s, my first real computer was a 360/70 running COBOL and PL/1.)
Early minicomputers also used core memory.
IBM seems to disagree with your definition (it probably changed over time):
Wikipedia definition is different too:
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HAL + 1 1 1 = IBM
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No, but IBM could also have called some of theirs “low rent” given that many were leased.
It’s kind of sad that no one computes in a featureless void anymore.
