[Gllug] Crashes (owing to the heatwave?)

[Ian Northeast]

Chris Bell wrote:
> 
> On Fri 08 Aug, Christian Smith wrote:
> 
> >
> > IFAIK.
> >
> > S/390 (or zSeries as they are now) are neither PowerPC or POWER4.
> >
> > They have their own architecture that goes back to the origional S/360
> > from the sixties, though extended to 64bits now.
> 
>    Were IC's around then? I was struggling with valves and overheating
> germaium transistors then, and my dad was still carting core stores around
> for ICL well into the seventies.

No, I don't think so, but IBM have carried the same instruction set
(they do add new instructions from time to time - the single instruction
which does a tree sort certainly didn't exist in the '60s) forward
through many advances in hardware over the years. Virtual memory was
added some time in the late '70s too, a major advance. When I was at
college in '79-'82 our mainframe had 4MB real and didn't have virtual.
This thing had hundreds of users! A common challenge was to write
programs which would fit in 44K, as this was what each interactive user
was allocated. If you wanted to play "classic adventure" (which was
quite common, we used to go into the faculty at night to do so, it was
frowned upon during the day) you had to log in specifying the program as
what we would now call a shell, as the standard terminal monitor and the
program wouldn't both fit.

In those days my "PC" was an Acorn Atom. With a whole 12K of RAM. So the
mainframe didn't seem so bad. 

The S/360 is indeed a very long lived system, regardless of what it
happens to be called by the marketers. S/360, S/370, S/390, eSeverver z,
who cares?

Regards, Ian

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