SSM HAS A 360-20 SYSTEM THAT THEY BUILT A NEW GALLERY AROUND
This is a complete system, with the model 20 CPU, a 2203 printer, 2560 MFCM card reader/punch, a 2501 card reader, two 2311 disk drives and four 2415 tape drives. It will be restored and operated but as a UK built machine for the European market it requires three phase 380V at 50Hz, not currently available in the building.
They had an excellent event for the public at the opening of the gallery, with food, drinks and good conversations among all the visitors. In addition to the S/360, the gallery has the IBM 1130 and other IBM systems such as a Series 1 and System 36 - all of those restored and operating.
INSTALLED NEW IMPROVED MEMORY LOADER ON THE IBM 1130
I brought up my new version of the memory loader, which exploits the cycle steal (DMA) feature of the 1130 to store much faster than the previous version. Writing all zeros to 8K words of core takes a touch over two seconds, for example. Typical programs are loaded in minutes.
HELPING WITH THEIR NEW CDC 160 SYSTEM
The museum acquired a CDC 160 system, designed by Seymour Cray, from the auction of Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum collection. The card reader would blow a fuse immediately and one of the display digits wasn't working properly. Bob Rosenbloom and I took on both of these in some spare time this morning.
The card reader had a bit of damage from mice chewing insulation, easily repaired, and the motor was frozen due to solidified lubricants. The motor was the cause of the fuse blowing. We used Nye oil and quickly the motor was spinning well again. The reader now spins up and the control functions operate - all that can be done without it hooked to the mainframe.
The display problem ended up being tracked to a bad armature on a relay used to decode three binary bits into one of 8 incandescent lamps that produced the decimal digit on the display. New ones are easy to acquire so this issue will be put to bed as soon as the replacement relay is plugged into the rack.
360 model 20?!? That was not a "real" 360! Its instruction set wasn't the same, and I don't recall it was sold with tapes either. -- Oops, per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_20) I'm write about the crippled ISA but wrong about tapes, it could be configured with an MTU.
ReplyDeleteActually the Wiki article has an interesting comment about its design being the result of a disagreement between John Haanstra and Fred Brooks.
Haanstra had attempted to continue the 14xx series but was forced to stop and go along with the mantra that all machines were 360 models. I imagine that the lower price point and performance that the 14xx group from Endicott was serving was not fulfilled by the model 30, original low end of the 369 series.
ReplyDeleteI have the same prejudice about model 20. No operating system, not fully 360 compatible. The claim for 360 was to have one line of computers, able to support all types of workloads, that was compatible. The model 20 violated that principle.
IBM also announced and shipped the 1800 and 1130, both of which are not compatible with S/360. Never let facts get in the way of a good marketing story.