5 ms·

Op, can you point out what you found interesting about the 3033?

by arnon 6y ago

Koshkin 6y ago
Not 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 ago
  Which continues to this day, most critical information is found on Red Books collection.
  - cptnapalm 6y ago
    Any 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 ago
      This link may be of some use: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/ http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/
      - cptnapalm 6y ago
        Unfortunately, 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 ago
  Sadly 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 ago
    For 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 ago
    At 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 ago
  I 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 ago
Also 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 ago
  The 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 ago
The 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 ago
    For 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

Op, can you point out what you found interesting about the 3033?

by arnon 6y ago

Op, can you point out what you found interesting about the 3033?

Not 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 ago
Which continues to this day, most critical information is found on Red Books collection.
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  Any 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 ago
    This link may be of some use: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/ http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/
    - cptnapalm 6y ago
      Unfortunately, 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 ago
Sadly 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 ago
  For 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 ago
  At 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 ago
I 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 ago

Also 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 ago
The 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 ago

The 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 ago
  For 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