Tom Lyon ✅Happy Mainframe Day!
OTD 1964: IBM announces the System/360 family. 8-bit bytes ftw!
Shown: Operator at console of Princeton's IBM/360 Model 91.
Joseph Elfelt@aka_pugs The high school I went to had several terminals connected to an IBM 360 at the University of Minnesota. I started to learn how to code using those terminals. This was in the late '60s.
mike805@mappingsupport @aka_pugs What sort of terminals? Teletypes? And they had leased lines to the university?
360/91 was the high end mainframe at the time, that thing could have megabytes of RAM made by people manually stringing cores on wires.
@mike805 @mappingsupport Princeton's 360 was purely batch - no terminals other than the operator console (IBM 3215?). But there was a 370 in the same room running time-sharing. IBM's native terminals were the 3277 (weird-ass CRT) and the 2741 (printer/keyboard based on the Selectric typewriter). But as time went on, ASCII CRTs were dominant.
And the model 91 had a whopping 2 (two!) megabytes of core.
@aka_pugs @mappingsupport So you could use ASCII character terminals with a mainframe?
I know the 3270s were more like a browser where you got a whole screenful at a time, and the response was only sent back when you pressed enter or a function key.
I ran into one of those IBM block terminals at a university library once, and it's still one of the fastest interactive query systems I've ever seen. They had that optimized.
Garrett Wollman@mike805 @aka_pugs @mappingsupport Many large libraries used NOTIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTIS which ran exclusively on System/360 and successor architectures. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some still running it on a zSeries mainframe today.