8 ms·
A Guide to the IBM 3033 Processor Complex (1979) [pdf]
- arnon 6y agoOp, can you point out what you found interesting about the 3033?
- Koshkin 6y agoNot the OP but I have always been amazed by the quality and completeness of IBM’s documentation on their systems and peripheral devices. You can read it just for pleasure.
- pjmlp 6y agoWhich continues to this day, most critical information is found on Red Books collection.
- cptnapalm 6y agoAny idea how one would find hardware documentation? I have an old "small" mainframe and I'm curious about some of the hardware (backplanes, connector pin outs, etc) but after dozens of hours spent searching, I only found an SSA pinout by a curious hardware engineer.
- Koshkin 6y agoThis link may be of some use: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/ http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/
- cptnapalm 6y agoUnfortunately, I have a S/390 and bitsavers only has a few things. However, those things relate to a different system which uses the same chassis, so I'll take a look. Thanks.
- non-entity 6y agoSadly I have some later mainframe peripherals for which the documentation seems lost to time. Outside of maintenance manuals that came with the pieces.
- cptnapalm 6y agoFor mine, I never had any and can't find any hardware documentation. One critical piece of my system, I was only able to find a single photograph on the internet, much less anything more informative.
- epc 6y agoAt some point in the past twenty years IBM downsized its technical writing teams. When I started as an intern in 1990 there were ~250 people in the “Information Development” group in Poughkeepsie responsible for MVS, RACF, RMF and a variety of other mainframe products (plus hardware documentation). Today, there’s now maybe 20–25 people left in Poughkeepsie covering twice the workload as other products consolidated there (Endicott closed, Kingston closed, etc).
- C1sc0cat 6y agoI remember having to quickly learn PL/1G in the 80's and using a IBM manual from the 60's that my Dad had
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAlso not the OP. But my dad brought home Datamation magazines from work when I was a kid, and I remember seeing a fair amount about the 3033. It was the new hotness once upon a time.
- rbanffy 6y agoThe first big iron I touched was a 4341, a direct descendant of the 3033. I never saw JCL or the OS - my login threw me into an IDE, the Mantis 4GL environment, which felt a lot like Ruby on Rails (a parallel I'd see over and over in the following years).
- rbanffy 6y agoThe thing I find the most fascinating about mainframes is they they evolved from a completely different branch of computing. There are no files (they call it datasets), the terminal doesn't scroll (it pages, but you need to ask), the full screen editor will have a region at the left where you can enter a command for each line before submitting the whole screen back...
- minipci1321 6y ago... and the CPU has no direct support of in memory stack needed when calling a subroutine. Rumor had it, the guy responsible for this decision (to not include it), was later mutated to the IBM's internal equivalent of Siberia
- Someone 6y agoFor many programming languages of the day, you didn’t need a stack when calling a subroutine. Languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL didn’t allow recursive calls, and multi-processing wasn’t in the picture, so stack frames could just be given fixed addresses, for example just before the called function’s entry point. Around 1960, Lisp and ALGOL changed that.
- skissane 6y ago> Around 1960, Lisp and ALGOL changed that. It was later than 1960 on many platforms, including IBM mainframes, where Lisp and ALGOL were always fringe languages, primarily limited to the computing research community, while the vast majority of mainframes were instead being used for business and government data processing, and numerically-oriented scientific computing. On IBM mainframes, it really started when PL/I decided to borrow a lot of concepts from ALGOL, but PL/I wasn't generally available until at least 1966. A number of later developments increased the demand for reentrancy/recursion: transaction monitors such as CICS; the advent of C and C++ on mainframe platforms (which didn't happen until the 1980s); the decision to add ALGOL-style features to COBOL and FORTRAN.
- skissane 6y ago
- mytailorisrich 6y ago"The 3033 features a machine cycle time of 58 ns. It has a cache size of 64 KB. Main storage may be 4, 6, or 8 MB. ... At announcement the monthly lease price for a minimally configured 3033 processor (without peripherals) was $70,400" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_303X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_303X
- jandrese 6y agoIt sounds puny today, but compare against the famous Commodore 64 released 3 yeas later: IBM: 17.2 Mhz C64: 1.023Mhz IBM: 4/6/8MB RAM C64: 64kB RAM IBM: 64kB Cache C64: What cache? The IBM is a beast relative to what ordinary people could afford at the time.
- jhallenworld 6y agoVAX-11/780 maybe a closer comparison, from the same era: 5 MHz cycle time (1 MIPS) 2 MB - 64 MB RAM 8 KB cache Price $120 K I much rather use VMS or Ultrix than any IBM OS :-) http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/780/EK-11780-UG-001_780hwUG.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/780/EK-11780-UG-001_780hwUG... http://www.vaxhaven.com/images/0/00/EK-11780-PG-001.pdf http://www.vaxhaven.com/images/0/00/EK-11780-PG-001.pdf
- rjsw 6y agoI don't think many VAX-11/780s were shipped with 64MB RAM, the ones I used had 2 or 4.
- rbanffy 6y agoWhile I do find VMS much more understandable than MVS (it's a completely different branch of the Tree of Computing, as similar to modern PCs as the extremophiles that live next to volcanic chimneys in the bottom of the ocean are to us), I have to say the VAX competed with the much lower end machines in the 370 family. Also, you don't measure a mainframe's capacity in MIPS - The CPU is a small part of the of overall system and a lot of hardware goes to the multiple IO subsystems that offload the main CPUs so that they can keep running your applications while the rest of the system focus on pushing bits in and out of the system. It was considered a "minicomputer", in contrast to a proper computer such as the System/370.
- lowtech 6y agoAs a kid i craved those types of documents. I read and reread many times articles from old encyclopedias searching for computers and radio mentions. Computers where too pricey until 2005~. This pdf would be a gold mine back then.
- reaperducer 6y agoWe used to pull stuff like this out of the dumpsters at various computer facilities in Poughkeepsie, New Paltz, and other places. Fascinating reading. Everything I know about PR1MEOS I learned from trashing.
- m463 6y ago(this isn't really a .pdf link, it's a pdf viewer link)