April 7, 2014 at 11:5550 years of mainframe
Not so long ago, on March 12, the Internet celebrated its anniversary - 25 years. Among us there are already people who do not remember the times when it was impossible to go online and check the news, send a letter to a friend by e-mail or manage your business while sitting at home in a bathrobe. But we can say that the Internet is a teenager ... compared to modern mainframes. Today he is 50 years old!
It all started on April 7, 1964. IBM held 77 press conferences in 15 countries, making, according to the head of the company Thomas Watson Jr., "the most important announcement in the history of the company." On this day, IBM announced the release of a family of mainframes called System / 360. The aim of the project was to develop a family of computers with different performance and cost that can satisfy any customer needs, and this was one of the most expensive projects in the history of computer technology.
To date, IBM’s decision to invest $ 5 billion (approximately $ 35 billion today) in System / 360 seems natural and almost inevitable, but at that time it looked very risky. IBM has at stake its existence. As a result, System / 360 ushered in a new era in computing.
Until 1965, various computing complexes were produced in the world, each of which had its own architecture, element base and, most importantly, its own software. Client programs written for one computer could not be solved on a computer of another manufacturer. Moreover, there was no complete continuity even between computer models of the same manufacturer. Each computer was developed to order for specific business purposes, so it was unique.
With the release of the System / 360 family of computers, there is more order in the computer world. The revolution of System / 360 was that all models had the same architecture and common OS / 360 operating system.
S / 360 was the first computer to use microcode to implement many machine instructions, unlike systems in which all machine instructions were implemented at the hardware level. The microcode (or firmware, as it is sometimes called) consists of stored micro-instructions, inaccessible to users, which represent the functional level between hardware and software. The advantage of using microcode is the flexibility in which any change or new function can be realized by simply changing the existing microcode, instead of replacing the computer.
Using standardized mainframe computers to handle workloads, customers could create business applications that did not require special hardware or software. Moreover, clients were free to switch to new and more powerful processors, without fear of compatibility problems with existing applications.
The first business applications were created mainly in assembly language, COBOL, FORTRAN, or PL / 1, and a significant amount of these old programs are still in use. You might think, buying your first phone, that in the future you can, for example, synchronize your contact list with a modern model? Or continue to set records in the famous "snake"? I doubt it. But on modern mainframesYou can safely run the program developed for System / 360.
The advent of a new family of mainframes helped NASA send people to the moon, airlines offer online check-in for flights, and banks prevent fraud. And on the given examples, the scope of mainframes does not stop. In fact, mainframes have always been behind the scenes, but now it’s really hard to imagine a world without such computing “monsters” with a clock speed of 5.5 GHz, 101 core and 3 TB of RAM.
Let's congratulate the mainframe on its anniversary! And tomorrow, a general celebration will be held live at 2 p.m. New York.
It all started on April 7, 1964. IBM held 77 press conferences in 15 countries, making, according to the head of the company Thomas Watson Jr., "the most important announcement in the history of the company." On this day, IBM announced the release of a family of mainframes called System / 360. The aim of the project was to develop a family of computers with different performance and cost that can satisfy any customer needs, and this was one of the most expensive projects in the history of computer technology.
To date, IBM’s decision to invest $ 5 billion (approximately $ 35 billion today) in System / 360 seems natural and almost inevitable, but at that time it looked very risky. IBM has at stake its existence. As a result, System / 360 ushered in a new era in computing.
Until 1965, various computing complexes were produced in the world, each of which had its own architecture, element base and, most importantly, its own software. Client programs written for one computer could not be solved on a computer of another manufacturer. Moreover, there was no complete continuity even between computer models of the same manufacturer. Each computer was developed to order for specific business purposes, so it was unique.
With the release of the System / 360 family of computers, there is more order in the computer world. The revolution of System / 360 was that all models had the same architecture and common OS / 360 operating system.
S / 360 was the first computer to use microcode to implement many machine instructions, unlike systems in which all machine instructions were implemented at the hardware level. The microcode (or firmware, as it is sometimes called) consists of stored micro-instructions, inaccessible to users, which represent the functional level between hardware and software. The advantage of using microcode is the flexibility in which any change or new function can be realized by simply changing the existing microcode, instead of replacing the computer.Using standardized mainframe computers to handle workloads, customers could create business applications that did not require special hardware or software. Moreover, clients were free to switch to new and more powerful processors, without fear of compatibility problems with existing applications.
The first business applications were created mainly in assembly language, COBOL, FORTRAN, or PL / 1, and a significant amount of these old programs are still in use. You might think, buying your first phone, that in the future you can, for example, synchronize your contact list with a modern model? Or continue to set records in the famous "snake"? I doubt it. But on modern mainframesYou can safely run the program developed for System / 360.
The advent of a new family of mainframes helped NASA send people to the moon, airlines offer online check-in for flights, and banks prevent fraud. And on the given examples, the scope of mainframes does not stop. In fact, mainframes have always been behind the scenes, but now it’s really hard to imagine a world without such computing “monsters” with a clock speed of 5.5 GHz, 101 core and 3 TB of RAM.
Let's congratulate the mainframe on its anniversary! And tomorrow, a general celebration will be held live at 2 p.m. New York.
