The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
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The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
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Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#2My uncle had one if these in his hanger, amongst helicopter parts. This was the early 80's and he probably picked it up for scrap value from a military surplus sale. As a kid, would always pester him about getting it running. It had large 5 MB disk packs you'd insert into a washing machine sized drive.
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#3This was roughly the same time the ANSI committee was trying to standardize ASCII. IBM was a proponent of ASCII, but they had shipping deadlines, and kept with their own character set rather than delay while they created ASCII peripherals. The 360 became popular and a lot of code was written for it which assumed the EBCDIC character set (or was it still BCDIC?) was being used, so future mainframes stayed EBCDIC to grandfather in all the code.
That shipping deadline and the insane fallout from it has done more to keep me employed in my career than anything else.
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#4My uncle had one if these in his hanger, amongst helicopter parts. This was the early 80's and he probably picked it up for scrap value from a military surplus sale. As a kid, would always pester him about getting it running. It had large 5 MB disk packs you'd insert into a washing machine sized drive.
Not sure if it was the IBM drives or similar designs from other companies, but apparently if you abused the drive just right (it could be controlled completely by software) you could make it walk across the floor. Some university IT labs held late night HDD races...
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#5I'd love to see the original authoritative source that the IBM 360 project cost 5 billion in 1960 dollars. Something about that seems way overstated. I am wondering if it's just one of those facts that has been repeated so long that it's just taken for granted as being correct. 5 Billion appears to well exceed the cost to develop the Boeing 747 which was a massive bet the company undertaking.
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#6I'd love to see the original authoritative source that the IBM 360 project cost 5 billion in 1960 dollars. Something about that seems way overstated. I am wondering if it's just one of those facts that has been repeated so long that it's just taken for granted as being correct. 5 Billion appears to well exceed the cost to develop the Boeing 747 which was a massive bet the company undertaking.
That's probably inflation-adjusted. It was about $1 billion at the time. [1]
[1] http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/wp-content/upload...
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#7My uncle had one if these in his hanger, amongst helicopter parts. This was the early 80's and he probably picked it up for scrap value from a military surplus sale. As a kid, would always pester him about getting it running. It had large 5 MB disk packs you'd insert into a washing machine sized drive.
Not sure if it was the IBM drives or similar designs from other companies, but apparently if you abused the drive just right (it could be controlled completely by software) you could make it walk across the floor. Some university IT labs held late night HDD races...
Lots of tape drives from that era could do that. You've got big heavy motors and spindles, which means lots of inertia. Tell a drive to spin up to full speed, then abruptly stop, and you got lots of angular momentum that still needs to be dissipated. As the spindle assembly is anchored to the chassis, this ends up getting dissipated through the chassis as a quick movement. Spool up the spindles in the opposite directiion and then abruptly stop, and you've just made it step forward. Repeat many times and you've got a walking disk drive.
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#8I'd love to see the original authoritative source that the IBM 360 project cost 5 billion in 1960 dollars. Something about that seems way overstated. I am wondering if it's just one of those facts that has been repeated so long that it's just taken for granted as being correct. 5 Billion appears to well exceed the cost to develop the Boeing 747 which was a massive bet the company undertaking.
Author of the post here, thanks for reading! Here's a source citing the $5B figure: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/system3...
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#9I'd love to see the original authoritative source that the IBM 360 project cost 5 billion in 1960 dollars. Something about that seems way overstated. I am wondering if it's just one of those facts that has been repeated so long that it's just taken for granted as being correct. 5 Billion appears to well exceed the cost to develop the Boeing 747 which was a massive bet the company undertaking.
https://books.google.com/books?id=oaBOuo4mId8C&pg=PA189&dq=I... says:
> Estimates of the total cost of System/360 range from $4 to $5 billion. Of this amount, $500 million to $1 billion was development cost, while the rest was used to expand manufacturing capacity and to produce rental machines.
The references are Wise (1966b), Evans (1983 p.44), and IBM Annual Reports for 1965 and 1966.
Wise (1966b) is a Fortune article titled "IBM's $5,000,000,000 gamble".
I can't find the annual reports readily online.
It looks like you want Appendix C of "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" at https://books.google.com/books?id=MFGj_PT_clIC&pg=PA619&dq=I... , with financial an employee data for IBM from 1950 to 1977.
In the early 1960s IBM had revenue of over $1.5 billion/year. Even then, 360 was a big gamble.
Re: The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer
#10I'd love to see the original authoritative source that the IBM 360 project cost 5 billion in 1960 dollars. Something about that seems way overstated. I am wondering if it's just one of those facts that has been repeated so long that it's just taken for granted as being correct. 5 Billion appears to well exceed the cost to develop the Boeing 747 which was a massive bet the company undertaking.
That's probably inflation-adjusted. It was about $1 billion at the time. [1] [1] http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/wp-content/upload...
That was the original development cost, in early 1960 dollars. The remaining $4 billion was manufacturing costs.