IBM Series/1

[Jon Elson]

On 08/02/2019 09:32 PM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
> I have a pair, plus parts.
>
> The hardware is excellent. They have fairly fast processors, and the
> I/O capacity is great. Reliability is typical IBM.
>
> The OS sucks balls. All the balls.
>
> Commercially, they were not a success, despite being IBM's first
> "open" system, in that they invited third party developers. It seems
> like every S/1 I have ever seen has some CDC DNA in it, for some
> reason. They ended up successful within IBM, once they found out they
> were better comms boxes than the real mainframe boxes (3725, for
> example). Some S/1s were built specifically for comms use on
> mainframes (7171).
>
>
Yes, we used some Series/1 machines at Washington University 
for async dialup and local terminal use.  They had a channel 
interface, and this worked WAY better than even the Memorex 
1270, which still hit the system with a huge amount of 
interrupts.

We also got a disk development lab donated from IBM that was 
all run by S/1 systems.  They scrapped those and a bunch of 
the SLT/MST interface gear, and replaced it with modern stuff.

Jon