Re: Debian Support for IBM xSeries 360
On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 08:41:57AM -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote:
> Carl Fink wrote:
>
> >Quick poll: how many people here are old enough to read that subject line
> >and think of the IBM Series/360, the mainframe?
> >
> >
> Count me in! My first programming was on an IBM 360 in an "Introduction
> to Computing" class, back in 1976. I was also taking a 'Musical
> Computer' class which ran FOCAL on a DEC PDP 11/15.
Yeah. IBM360/65 in about 1966.
But that was my *third* machine.
Before that, an IBM 1620 -- the one that stored its addition tables and
multiplication tables in RAM and did its arithmetic by table lookup.
You could do some neat things by replacing the tables with sumething
else. I got the machine to process boolean vectors of lengh 10000 with
a single instruction.
And before that, a machine where the main memory wasn't anything like
the RAM we all know nowadays. Main memory was a magnetic drum. Each
instruction got to specify *when* in terms of drum rotation it was to be
executed, and *when* the next instruction was to be fetched. Timing was
everything.
-- hendrik
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