Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
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Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#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.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#3> 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.
The IBM system/360 wasn't exactly a super computer, but a modular, scalable family of mainframes, ranging from medium business machines to scientific computers. The S/360 built on previous IBM mainframes, like the IBM 605 (first mass produced computer), the IBM 305 RAMAC (hard disk!), the IBM 7070 (solid state) and the popular IBM 1404 (about 10,000 units sold, an image of it found its way amongst the photos of the S/360 on that page). The S/360 was especially important for introducing the octet for a byte.
It may be noted that the IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959 to replace hardwired punched card appliances, especially after these were heavily challenged by the Bull Gamma 3. The lower range IBM S/360 were replacing the 1401 in turn. The S/360 family was eventually replaced by its direct successor, the IBM system/370.
That said, IBM did maintain some real super computing projects around this time, namely project X and project Y (resulting in the ACS project). Project X eventually became the top of the range S/360 Model 92, project Y (ACS-1) was especially important for its legacy in cache architecture and software optimization (optimizing compilers, etc.)
Edit: Project X was actually sold under the designations S/360 Model 91, Model 95 and Model 195. (Introduced in 1969, these were more an add-on to the family, which had been introduced in 1965 and was already approaching the end of its retail cycle.) About 3 dozen of these actual super computers were built in total[1].
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7726/d267b6fb7470066640e7bb...
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#4> 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.
The SAC air defense system for one. Also this was the age of giant industrial enterprises. These things were used for payroll, etc.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#5It’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.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#6> 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.
The greatest number of those sold and installed were for mundane business data processing. By the mid-60s every medium and large business needed a computer. The slowest 360, the model 30, would have had trouble competing with a Z80 of 20 years later. However, the 360/91 was genuinely a supercomputer, and it pioneered out-of-order execution among other performance features.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#7It’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.
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).
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#8Very cool.
I wish I was able to locate a Thinking Machines CM-5 before they were all destroyed. Even the front indicator panel would have been nice.
I’ve created my own smaller version with an Arduino and some LED panels but its not the same.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#9I'm sorry, but an article claiming to trace the history of supercomputers that doesn't even mention the CDC 6600 can't be taken seriously.
Re: Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
#10I'm sorry, but an article claiming to trace the history of supercomputers that doesn't even mention the CDC 6600 can't be taken seriously.
Also missing mention of the Cyber 205 and the Illiac IV.