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Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

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Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#21

Post by skissane »

rbanffy wrote: post #18
skissane wrote: post #13

> The first mainframe was created by the well-known IBM in 1964 Were the IBM 700/7000 series (1953-1964) not mainframes? I would say they were. And what about other vendors pre-1964 machines, e.g. UNIVACs. Were they not mainframes too? > you need to determine what the super-computer differs from the mainframe and which is faster I'm not convinced that "mainframe" and "supercomputer" are necessarily mutually exclusive…

A good way to distinguish a mainframe from a supercomputer would be served with... a car analogy. A race car is often uncomfortable and hard to drive. You need to be physically fit to drive it. Supercomputers are the race cars of computers. You need to do crazy tricks to extract their maximum theoretical performance. Mainframes, however, are more suitable to run common tasks, are easier to drive and generally more re…

The problem with the "car analogy" is that some supercomputers are also mainframes.

For example, look at the 1st Top 500 List, from June 1993. In position 36, was the Hitachi S-3800/480 at the University of Tokyo [1][2]. The S-3800/480 was an S/370-compatible machine with vector processing extensions. It supported two operating systems, OSF/1 Unix and also VOS3, which is a fork of IBM MVS [3]. Arguably, if a machine is S/370-compatible and runs a derivative of IBM MVS, it is an IBM-compatible mainframe. Yet, also, it was a supercomputer. It could run the same business and scientific software as any other IBM-compatible mainframe. But scientific code can take advantage of the special vector processing instructions (either through assembly or through the Fortran compiler.)

This was probably the very tail end of this category of machines, IBM(-compatible) mainframe supercomputers. But if you go back to the 1980s and earlier, it was actually a quite common category, with instances being supplied by IBM, Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi. (Unfortunately, the Top500 list only goes back to 1993, so it omits most of this history.)

[1] https://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/?page=1

[2] https://www.top500.org/system/168780

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#Closely_related_operating_...

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#22

Post by masswerk »

slededit wrote: post #15
digi_owl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of that has with miniaturization. Those massive tapes had downright abysmal storage capacities by today's standards. And binkenlights vanished when ICs could switch so fast that the human eye would just see a steady light (much like we can't see a fluorescent lamp blinking).

Those lights were directly connected to the main bus which ran at several hundred khz to the low mhz. You never looked at them while the machine was running except as a way to confirm "something" was happening. You would not see individual pulses but rather they would appear dim or bright depending on activity. Instead the machines had a single step mode where you could force the computer to execute one instruction a…

I'd agree, with the availability of glass monitors for diagnostic purpose and the end of switches for toggling in initial loaders blinkenlights became obsolete.

The transition is probably well illustrated by the Datapoint 2200 smart terminal (which famously provided the blueprint for the Intel 8008): An early illustration shows the machine with a DEC mini style row of console switches [1], but when it was announced in 1970, the toggle switches were gone. Ironically, the early 8-bit micros which sprang off from the DP 2200 were probably amongst the last machines to come with toggle switches and console lights (again, because of the lack of built-in diagnostic facilities).

[1] Concept illustration of the Datapoint 2200 (John Frassanito, 1969) – arguably, console switches were just what you expected from a "self-respecting" computer at the time, but, by the time the design had progressed from concept to actual hardware, these just didn't make any sense anymore: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2urGdLzMYf8/VnY76lBDUlI/AAAAAAAANS...

(From http://bugbookmuseum.blogspot.co.at/2016/01/datapoint-2200-8... – Mind that Datapoint is then still CTC and the terminal is marked "Veripoint 2200" in the concept illustration.)

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#23

Post by iamcamiel »

jgelsey wrote: post #19

Disappointing it does not mention Convex Computer, which: -produced the world's first commercially available gallium arsenide supercomputer, the Convex C3 -owned the minisupercomputer market from ~1986 through its end in 1995 -built the first commercially successful flat address space, cache coherent massively parallel processor the SPP1000 series in '94

I agree wholeheartedly :-) Incidentally, I have 9 Convexes at home: https://vaxbarn.com/index.php/43-project/641-the-convex-comp...

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#24

Post by rbanffy »

skissane wrote: post #21
rbanffy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to distinguish a mainframe from a supercomputer would be served with... a car analogy. A race car is often uncomfortable and hard to drive. You need to be physically fit to drive it. Supercomputers are the race cars of computers. You need to do crazy tricks to extract their maximum theoretical performance. Mainframes, however, are more suitable to run common tasks, are easier to drive and generally more re…

The problem with the "car analogy" is that some supercomputers are also mainframes. For example, look at the 1st Top 500 List, from June 1993. In position 36, was the Hitachi S-3800/480 at the University of Tokyo [1][2]. The S-3800/480 was an S/370-compatible machine with vector processing extensions. It supported two operating systems, OSF/1 Unix and also VOS3, which is a fork of IBM MVS [3]. Arguably, if a machine…

> The S-3800/480 was an S/370-compatible machine with vector processing extensions.

IBM also had the Vector Facility for its 3090 series. I'd still say these are the M-series (or the post-Audi Lamborghinis) of computers - fast, but they don't require you to sacrifice comfort for speed.

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#25

Post by walshemj »

DrScump wrote: post #20
madengr wrote: post #5

It’s evident, scrolling through that, how drab computers have become. The 360 had a giant control panel with blinken lights, and cool looking tape drives. The Cray looks cool, despite the lack of control panel. Everything else is just a drab rack.

I just missed the 360 era when I became an operator, but the 370 console was similar in sci-fi-ish feel. There was a hexadecimal rotary dial via which you'd set the boot device address, and an actual mechanical switch to boot it up. In contrast, the 3033 operator console was just sort of a glorified terminal. I thought the Quiesce feature was so cool -- you could freeze all programs and OS activity in place, then dis…

The PDP 8 and 11 and cool front panels.

I recall on our PDP 11/40 if the separate module that handled the boot failed, you had to toggle the boot loader in by hand using OCD (octal coded decimal) which was a pain.

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#26

Post by krylon »

analog31 wrote: post #14
ordu wrote: post #2

> During the first month of IBM, orders were received for more than a thousand copies of such machines, and in the 6 years of the family’s existence, more than 33,000 such machines were sold. What for? I can imagine some tasks for such a machine in the middle of XX century, but not for thousands of them.

As I recall, it was widely believed that there was an economy of scale for mainframe computers, so you were better off serving all of your users with a single timesharing machine if possible. If most of your programs ran in batch mode, then you might need 64k, but only for a couple seconds a day, so you shared those 64k with 1000 other people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosch%27s_law

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#27

Post by adrianmonk »

jgelsey wrote: post #19

Disappointing it does not mention Convex Computer, which: -produced the world's first commercially available gallium arsenide supercomputer, the Convex C3 -owned the minisupercomputer market from ~1986 through its end in 1995 -built the first commercially successful flat address space, cache coherent massively parallel processor the SPP1000 series in '94

-shipped an auto-vectorizing C compiler instead of emphasizing just Fortran

-hired Tom Christiansen and shipped with Perl pre-installed

-employed Robert Morris (a co-founder of Y Combinator) as a summer intern

Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today

#28

Post by ASalazarMX »

madengr wrote: post #5

It’s evident, scrolling through that, how drab computers have become. The 360 had a giant control panel with blinken lights, and cool looking tape drives. The Cray looks cool, despite the lack of control panel. Everything else is just a drab rack.

The Crays look futuristic even by today's standards. Having a supercomputer that could kill you with poisonous gas is the epitome of futuristic.
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