On Sat, 07 Mar 2020 19:37:00 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> 16MB?  Luxury!  That was the theoretical maximum for the IBM 360.
> I say theoretical because nobody could afford that much in real life.
> Slightly later, into the 370 era, I recall reading in a trade rag about
> how IBM rocked the industry by slashing the price of a megabyte of
> memory from $75,000 to a mere $15,000.  Compare that to your $1/gigabyte
> thumb drives...
>
There was almost no commonality between the 2900 and the S/360 S/370
apart from the decidedly odd decision to use EDCDIC character codes.

The nearest mainstream architecture was probably the Burroughs  B6700.

The 2966 was soft as hell: a 2966 could, and did run the George 3 and VME/
B operating systems simultaneously  v. useful for migrating systems from
the 1900series (word addressed memory, 24bit words, 6 bit characters, 8
24 bit registers and no stack) to the 2900 VME/B environment (byte
addressed memory, 1 programmatically variable sized register, stack-based
architecture, 8-bit EBCDIC characters, HLL-oriented instruction set (the
COBOL statement "MOVE ALL SPACE to TABLE_A." was one machine instruction.

Oddly, though VME/B was curiously similar to IBM's OS/400, which first
appeared on the AS/400 range and is still alive and kicking on their I-
series machines. Both are Real Programmer's Operating Systems at least as
much as UNIX/Linux is, with command languages you can program in, command
names follow a system so, if you know them, you can go "There ought to be
a command called xxxxxxx which will do what I want", so you'd type it in,
hit the 'Screen prompt' key, and the screen would fill with a fill-in-the-
boxes template, so you filled it in, hit GO and it did. Of course the
commands weren't the same: in VME/B the COBOL compiler was called 'cobol'
while in OS/400 is was called CRTCBLPGM.

> My first programming job, in 1970, was on a Univac 9300 - their answer
> to the IBM 360/20.  It had 16K of memory.  Not gigabytes, or megabytes,
> but kilobytes.  No disks, no tape - just cards.  You really learned how
> to squeeze program code.  When we added disks (a pair of IBM 2311
> clones),
>
ICL 1900 for me, after learning Algol 60 at uni on an Eliott 503.

OK, that is positively my LAST on this topic except, to get back on
topic, to say that you can run George 3 on a Raspi AND all the manuals
needed to develop programs for it are available online. I haven't done
that yet, but I will Real Soon Now and I won't be at all surprised if
George runs faster on a Raspi B emulating a 1900 than it ever did on a
1903S mainframe (clock speed around 0.6 Mhz) even with its filestore on
an SD card.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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