Details about IBM's early 'scientific' computers

ben bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca
Tue Nov 14 21:10:58 CST 2017


> I think the 360 marked the change from hardware-driven development to
> software-driven. The 'arcane' architectures would have maximised
> performance for a given amount of hardware, and programmers were
> relatively cheap. But the 360 reversed that, hardware was now cheap
> and didn't need to work at 100% efficiency, but software development
> was expensive so writing and re-writing needed to be minimised.

Computer Science seems to be mostly developed in the 1968 - 1973 time 
frame by average people with access with a (personal) computer with 
about 32K of memory. All the new software development was Time Sharing 
of some kind, or a revised BETTER our NEW programming language, that
wants faster and larger core memory and the deluxe Binary-Trinary-Decary
virtual ALU*.
That why I suspect the state of computers is so dismal today.
Ben.
* Implemented by a patented serial computron.
PS: Strange how Unix runs millions of users, and Multics never
really made it out of the lab.






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