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.

[Vermonter]

We had a similar event with a security guard. At the time, I was working second shift and it seemed like every week we had a new security guard (some drop out who wanted to carry a gun, usually) They'd wander into the raised floor and look around and we'd shoo them out when they got to chummy.

The last one I remember decided he'd leave by the emergency door. Naturally a loud alarm went off when he opened it. Not knowing any better, and seeing the little box next to the door with the big red button, he thought that would shut off the alarm....... wrong

370, all it's peripherals, 4 360's and their peripherals and 4 test sytems all came to a crashing halt.

That was that guards last day

[JoeGar]

I cut my teeth coding SPS on a 4096-character (bytes had not been invented yet) IBM 1401 with two tape drives and a printer. I can remember having to overlay two characters because my code compiled into 4098 characters.

[forsnax5]

Anybody out there remember wiring boards?

Yep. 402, 403, 407, 514, 519, 108 statistical sorter. ;)

I even had an old 602a for a while -- it had a card reader/punch unit from a really old keypunch machine. It would throw cards across the room when it jammed.

I learned to program SPS and Autocoder on a 1401-G. It had 8k of memory, and multiply-divide was an optional hardware feature (which we didn't have).

Still working in Cobol today on the AS/400...

[sinkspur]

I remember having discussions with other IBMers on whether or not we would ever see memory (core) get as low as a dollar a byte!!!!

256K of core was a monster machine when I started, in '79.

My territory included the only VS1 account in Ft. Worth, Texas Power and Light Company. They didn't convert to MVS until 1986.

[null and void]

Trichloroethylene. Banned now due to cancer risk...

[NCjim]

Given the time frame and size, may have been a 7090 or 7094. Our first 360/65 ran 7094 emulation on third shift until the older programs were converted. It required all 16 tape drives - 8 each on the A and B channels being emulated. The 790X was too powerful to have unit record input and output - all tape. The meager tasks of card-to-tape and tape-to-printer were done by a 1401.

[txhurl]

Insurance?

[JoeGar]

The AS/400, the successor of the System 3 and System/38, hasn't been around 40 years. I don't even think the IBM 360 was around 40 years ago.

[Interesting Times]

The 3033

I once talked several friends into buying a 3031, complete with a massive A/C unit. We had some notion of setting it up in one guy's basement and doing timesharing, but his wife became soggy and hard to light...

It sat in a warehouse for a year, and we finally unloaded it for scrap...

[NCjim]

Our 360/65 had 64K of core go bad. It was about a cubic foot in size and took a week to replace...

[sinkspur]

What was the printer model whose cover would periodically raise up?

[Varmint Al]

In 1965 I was going to San Jose State studying General Engineering. I worked full time (till the last semester) as a mechanical technician at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (where we WON the Cold War). The lab, in those days, had a couple of IBM 7094's, The Stretch, and an IBM 1401. Each night at mid-night, they turned off the IBM 1401. Its price tag was about $1,000,000 and it had 5 big floor mounted tape drives and could only read tape or punched cards. The output was punched cards or an impact line-printer with a metal belt and hammers that hit the correct letter as it went by. The memory was 4k of 64 bit words and it had a FORTRAN compiler on tape. To start the computer, one had to hand program the first few instructions to start reading the system tape. There was no EPROM or BIOS in those days. They allowed me to use the IBM 1401 from midnight until 6:00AM for about 6 months and I did all my engineering lab reports in FORTRAN. I lived with that machine for 6 months, in 1965. I received a BS in General Engineering in 1967.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

[NCjim]

The System/360 was introduced April 7, 1964. They were called third-generation machines - the first true multi-tasking machines.

[TC Rider]

MRs. TC was an operator back in the late 70s, swapping disk packs etc for Walter Drake and Sons in Colorado Springs. They had Honeywell mainframes. I remember going to visit her on third shift and playing 'trek' on a monitor. My first exposure to computer games.

[AgentEcho]

I'll see ypur 3033 and raise you a Sperry 1100/40 and a DEC PDP floor...

Æ

[Glenn]

What was the printer model whose cover would periodically raise up?

The Nancy One.

[sinkspur]

My first sale was replacing a 360/65 in 1980 with a 4331. Of course, we ran DOS for almost a year until they converted to VSE.

[Vermonter]

It was still a 1403, and if I recall correctly, as someone else pointed out earlier, it was a 1403N1. They made the 1403 quieter by putting it in a box that went all the way to the floor. To open the cover, they had a drive motor. The cover would raise on its own when the paper supply ran out, I suppose to save time reloading it.

[sailor4321]

Cobol was what we used to "program" for the 1401 all the stuff previously done on accounting machines. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it wasn't "common" or "ordinary" or "business oriented" (but, I admit, it was a lot more of those things than Fortran was!).

[forsnax5]

Insurance?

Occidental Life. Downtown L.A., before they were in the "new" building.

After that, banking, mortgage loans, insurance again, service bureaus, income tax, hospitals, consulting, and finally my own company.

Now I work out of my house. I've had an AS400 at home since 1986...