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Discussion (31 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
>Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary.
>Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-w...
When my Dad started in the late 60s IBM had discontinued the morning song tradition.
a webcast about the many great benefits of the novel DASD (direct access storage device) over ISAM (index sequential access)
aka disk and tape.
16mm film
Flipchart
impeccable presentation
thx for the time machine :-)
Tapes don't provide CKD interface and thus do not work with ISAM.
On Youtube there is no mention about the date.
OS/360 was announced in 1964 but it was first delivered more than a year later.
I doubt that such presentations were done about a product that no customers could use and which might still be changed until the first deliverable version.
So I believe that it is unlikely that this presentation was done earlier than 1965 and it is likely that it was not done before 1966. The first OS/360 versions were delivered in November/December 1965.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc_SAy-I80
And they're not strictly just a disk. It's more like a complex multiplexing system for an array of disks. It has interesting capabilities like "channel programs" that persist to this day which allow you to send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for in one of several access modes.
IBM still provides almost the entirety of it's OS documentation online:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-...
A very long time ago, a guy I used to work with was porting a sales and stock control database he'd written on the Commodore PET to a PC. By then he had a 286 with a 20MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM to play with - whopping stuff! - but his original program would assemble up a query routine, and transmit it to the 6502 in the PET disk drives over HPIB. Then it would chunter away discovering the records it needed to construct a reply while the host computer could continue working as normal. It was absolutely genius stuff, and it made the whole system seem really responsive even though in reality it was pretty slow.
Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
IBM was ridiculously huge, both by actual IBM hardware, but also by clones, and manufacture of S/360-compatible systems. Even many wildly different computers often had third party interfaces to hook up S/360 channel devices, or controllers for the actual devices (it was common for channel devices to be linked like this: S/360 -> channel processor -> controller -> device-specific connections -> actual device).
Even the fact that we format code usually to 72 characters is related to 80-character standard S/360 punched card, where the remaining 8 characters were used for sorting/comment code, and why professional terminals (as opposed to things like 40 column mode on home computers) had 80 column displays.
Also, had ASCII been ready earlier, S/360 would have used ASCII as default encoding - IIRC S/360 team decided they can't wait for ASCII to be finalized and they needed to start design and making of various devices that would have to be encoding-aware, thus EBCDIC was born.
I didn't realize until recently how much IBM spend on S/360. It was simply astounding to me. In his Computer History Museum's oral history [0][1] Dr. Fred Brooks[2] says:
> I think was somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million in 1964 dollars, which would be $4 billion today roughly
That checks out, from an inflation calculator perspective. That's wild. I had no idea money like that was being spent on platform development in the 60s.
[0] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S2g3VDwrlI
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
Intel 8008 did not have anything original in its architecture, it was just a monolithic PMOS re-implementation of the CPU of the embedded computer designed for the serial terminal Datapoint 2200, which had been designed with TTL integrated circuits. All the decisions about sizes, e.g. 8-bit data and 14-bit addresses, had been done by Datapoint in 1970, not by Intel. Datapoint had chosen 8-bit bytes in order to support the recently standardized ASCII 7-bit character set (and the 8-bit IBM EBCDIC character set, if necessary), i.e. the character sets used by the computers to which such a serial terminal could be connected.
At the time when the first microprocessors were designed, during the first half of the seventies, the most important architectural influence on any new computer designs were the DEC PDP-11 minicomputers.
DEC PDP-11 used 8-bit bytes, which was a significant change from the previous DEC computers, most of which used word sizes that were a multiple of 6, like 12-bit, 18-bit or 36-bit.
DEC PDP-11 had transitioned to 8-bit bytes (in 1970) mainly due to the influence of IBM System/360. The standardization of the 7-bit ASCII code for characters, which could no longer fit inside 6-bit bytes, has contributed to this decision, but the standardization of ASCII was itself possible only because many computer vendors had already transitioned or decided to transition to 8-bit bytes, so they could store the new ASCII characters in their bytes.
After 1967, when ASCII was standardized in a form close to the present form, after which it was also taken into international standards by ISO and CCITT, all new computer instruction-set architectures were designed with 8-bit bytes.
Because eight rather than six bits are used to represent a. character, up to 256 possible characters could be represented in the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) shown in Figure 7. Except for certain teleprocessing equipment, the code that makes use of characters is either EBCDIC or an eight-bit extension of a seven-bit code proposed by the International Standards Organization.
[1] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/GC2...
I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.
1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology
And since this was an internal IBM presentation for salesmen and engineers, the priority likely wouldn't've been on using a polished presenter, just making the information available.
Sometimes companies used to hire artists to finish this kind of material, but usually engineers at that time were pretty much capable of drafting this kind of presentation on paper, just with rulers, compasses, and the ocasional template rule.
White collar professions used to be way more embodied in the real physic world. Kids were trained on caligraphy and basic drafting techniques since elementary school.
Sorry, it was stronger than me \s