Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM System/360 Principles of Operation (1964) [pdf]

bitsavers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 36 posts

Re: IBM System/360 Principles of Operation (1964) [pdf]

#3

Post by brudgers »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

Fair warning: this is not an introduction.

To me, it's a realistic introduction it's just that as computers became ubiquitous, marketing them as easy to use was the dominant strategy. It's been very successful. People will shop weeks on faith in silver bullets to avoid four hours RTFM'ing.

Re: IBM System/360 Principles of Operation (1964) [pdf]

#8

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

Fair warning: this is not an introduction.

It's a typical programmer's hardware manual for the period.

More or less until the IBM PC, it was normal for computer vendors to supply a detailed bit-level breakdown of instructions, memory operation, data formats, interrupt structure, and so on.

Re: IBM System/360 Principles of Operation (1964) [pdf]

#9

Post by jasomill »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

Fair warning: this is not an introduction.

It's certainly a gentler introduction than the current, 2,000-page z/Arch Principles!

And along similar lines, it's kind of fun, if not at all useful in any economically rational sense of the term, to write nontrivial source- and binary-compatible code that builds and runs on everything from a 40-year-old 370 to a current-model Z (speaking hypothetically, as I don't actually have access to even a reasonable facsimile of the latter; I have, however, tested as far forward as late-model OS/390 running in 64-bit z/Arch mode on emulated hardware).

Post reply on HN