7 Nov
2005
7 Nov
'05
5:40 p.m.
On 11/7/2005 at 8:08 PM William Donzelli wrote:
And with it, a return to the good old days of
completely incompatible
lines of machines (S/3 to S/32 to S/34 and on and on).
I think the little cards, while cool, are actually sort of dumb. They
should have killed the cards off at the start.
They never did make a big dent in the punched card world, did they?
Darned silly encoding too--BA8421 for the basic character set and the
completely separate C and D rows if you needed 8 bit encoding. I wondered
if the US Treasury would keep up with the times by shrinking our dollar
bill by half (I know that Hollerith's dollar was bigger). It seems that
typical governmental intelligence came into play however, and they got it
backwards--around 1980, they kept the physical size the same, but halved
its value. :)
While the S/3 instruction set bears certain similarities to the S/360, I've
wondered what IBM's logic was for making it so different from the S/360. I
doubt that it was technical--the 360/20 was far more brain-dead than the
S/3 and customers still used them, in spite of the crippled instruction
set.
Cheers,
Chuck