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]

1403-N1

[sailor4321]

Did you know a mathematician named Bob Shaefer?

[NCjim]

And PL/1 was the best of both. It had remnants of each, especially in the variable declaration statements, e.g. P'999V99' for you COBOL programmers out there.

[forsnax5]

I never did Cobol on the 1401. When the 360 came out, I did RPG for about a decade, then a bit of Basic on the Wang VS. I got into Cobol late -- actually when the first PCs came out. RM-Cobol on CPM in 1981. Moved it to System/38 in 1982, been there ever since (AS400 was new hardware for the S/38 OS).

[TheOldSchool]

I worked for Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama when Boeing was the prime contractor for the Saturn V development. The Saturn V was the rocket that took man to the moon. The simulation work we did used an IBM 7094/7044 direct couple system. The 7044 handled all of the input/output (I/O) and the 7094 did the number crunching. Man, those were the days of programs that ran for days at a time.

[null and void]

I heard and saw the first Saturn V launch. From Jacksonville. 125 miles away...

[stylin19a]

Good Grief ! good memories wiring boards.(sometimes gotta leave that sequence check plug out)..I started on TAB machines...sort needles; zip strips;51 column half cards.worked my way through 1440's & 1401. Then 360's
Operators were GODS back then. GODS I TELL YA!

Took 2 years out for Uncle Sam. I come back from the service, they have a 370 and rows & rows of tape drives/diskdrives/printers. And they have CRT's.

I go from a GOD to a disk puller & a tape & paper hanger.

Now on the software side for the last 20 years. Still developing on CICS boxes. The mainframe just doesn't know it's suppose to be dead.

[El Gato]

I forget the desination of the real bruts that came right after the 370-168 line, and right before the 43x1 line. Now THAT was a great big honking, water cooled, beast.

Nice for you yung'ns, but I learned my FORTRAN on an IBM 360-65. Then I had to regress and for a semester I used an IBM something or other that my thesis adviser (to be, not then) called the CADET, because it Couldn't Add, Didn't Even Try. It used table look up for arithmetic done in BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) . It was an antique even then. It part of the line of the first transistor computers, discrete transistors you understand. It could play the fight song via a line connected to one of it's registers. It could also play 3D tic tac toe, and it did both in a UV lit room one E-week back around 1970. :)

[TalBlack]

I think they called it tri3 for short It had 3 trisomethings in it. I used to use it to clean multi track tape heads. The greenies had it banned a few years ago. Turns out it was Evil. Who knew?

[El Gato]

The something or other was the -1620, I think. Later I was an operator for a small company, first on an -1170 and later on a System 3, that was about 1971 I think. Boring job, and the hours got cut way back when they got the -3 because it's printer was so much faster and because you could do backups to a removable disk, whereas with 1170 we had to do backups to cards (needless to say, we didn't back up the whole drive, just critical running totals, tiny though it may have been by todays standards.)

[Vermonter]

Trichlorethalene. Nasty stuff.

[dc27]

We still use a AS/400 at our manufacturing facility.

[El Gato]

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.

Not positive if it was the same printer, but my wife worked as an I/O clerk in the "computer center". The operators, well one particular one anyway, would fall asleep on top the printer, and when it ran out of paper he'd end up on the floor. :) (She a PhD Department chair now).

[keithtoo]

I was a sales rep for AT&T (dont ask, we all knew our stuff - 3B2's and 3B3's etc.- SUCKED!!!)in the mid-80's. We sold against System 36's and System 38's all the time. The AS-400 came out about 1988 or so.

[dc27]

I am still in the hard drive business with Hitachi/IBM. The I-Pod mini is quite amazing with the microdrive. Plus we just released the 400Gb drive.

[dljordan]

Damn! You must be old! I've only been doing it since 75'. Mainframes still rule.

[Knute]

The AS-400 was out in 1987 or earlier. We had a company wide network based on that system at a retailer I worked with during that era. I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP-8 back in 1969. We learned a language called FOCAL in our high school. If I knew then what I know now...

[IronJack]

Carbon tetrachloride?

[txhurl]

Is she 'black'?

I do love the AS/400. Did a 2000 conversion on one of them.

[Bobibutu]

Actually - it's System 360 - I was at the announcement celebration 40 years ago in Tulsa OK.

We used them extensivly in and around Viet Nam.

360/30 was the replacement for the 1401 and 1410.

We had several 360/65s that were integrated together in NKP Thailand.

360/50s all over the place - a real workhorse housed in huge A/C buildings.

Former IBM Field Engineer
s/n 224795