11 Oct
2010
11 Oct
'10
6:16 p.m.
From: Russ Bartlett
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 5:02 PM
--- On Mon, 10/11/10, Rich Alderson <RichA at
vulcan.com> wrote:
> From: Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com>
> Date: Monday, October 11, 2010, 2:51 PM
> From: William Donzelli
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 11:36 AM
>>> Just curious about the architecture: at
the programmer's level did it
>>> look like a primarily 8-bit machine, or a 16-bit machine which always
>>> processed 2 bytes in sequence, or it would best be described as mixed
>>> 8/16?
>> S/3s worked with strings of bytes in memory,
basically. Very
>> non-traditional.
> Not for IBM. The 1401 was very much a
character-oriented machine.
> The S/3 was not, in general, programmed by user
programmers in anything
> other than RPG III, which went on to be the programming model for the
> System/3x and AS 400 families; IIRC the original RPG was a 1401 program
> product.
Correction The System/3 was the first RPG II machine
and the System/34
also used RPG II whereas the System/38 introduced RPG III, The problem
with the logic cycle was that it didn't fit well into the interactive
model environment. Interestingly Honeywell (Italy I think) introduced a
RPG III compiler for their DPS System 4000 IDBS4 was their attempt at a
relational database as found on System/38. THe IBM 360/20 was the
predecessor to the System/3 and unlike the other 360's was a 16 bit
machine with a reduced instruction set.
Thanks for the correction on RPG II vs. III; I thought RPG II was a 360
product, but then, I never used any version of RPG. I did my sentence as a
financial systems programmer in COBOL and PL/I on a 370/168 and Amdahl 470.
There is one more connection between the S/3 (and possibly its successors?)
and the 1401: The character encoding on the cute little 96-column card was
the same as the internal BCD representation of those characters on the
1401. I learned that in 1972-73 from a System/3 that I worked around but
not with, when I still had the 1401 character set representation in my head
and in my documentation collection.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/