IBM's 'dinosaur' turns 40

San Francisco Chronicle | April 5, 2004 | Benjamin Pimentel

[NCjim]

Known as drab-looking machines that sit in huge air-conditioned rooms, the IBM mainframe computer has been called the dinosaur of the technology world.

About a decade ago, pundits predicted it would soon become extinct.

But the machine, which companies all over the world have used to manage payroll and monitor expense accounts, and which enabled scientists to send the first men to the moon, is celebrating its 40th birthday this week.

[NCjim]

Peering through the glass windows...

Some still refer to the raised floor area as the "glass house". However the blinking lights are pretty much a thing of the past. I did read of a guy who bought the front panel of a 360/75 and hooked it up to some electronics to make the lights flash in random patterns.

And speaking of looking through the windows, I always found it interesting that in movies and other video clips, the "computer" they showed was always 2401 tape drives at work!

[Ichneumon]

I came into computers not too long after punch cards were on their way out, but I heard a lot of stories about near-nervous breakdowns happening from simple little mistakes.

Anyone who feels nostalgic for those days can recreate the experience by uninstalling the compilers and debuggers from your own computer, and then whenever you make a program change, email your source code to a co-worker who will then compile and run it (whenever he gets around to it), and email you the results (or compiler errors)... Rinse, repeat, until you finally get a good run.

*shudder*

I'm not sure how to best simulate dropping your card deck, though...

[SeraphimApprentice]

In the interest of accurate reporting, said house had only 100 amps of power (@240 volts); the 3031 CPU alone required 200 amps. Power to the A/C and power hungry disk/tape drives would require another 200 amps. So unless said house had a 500 amp "heavy up" there was no way it could have been set up as functional computer facility. Ironically, that year a little 1 foot cubed computer came out, that had similar computing power (4 megabytes ~8MHz): the Mac Plus. ~~