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I used to work in the room next to the machine room at the University of Illinois at Chicago where we had an 80s vintage IBM mainframe. Because everything in th
by dhosek 5y ago
I used to work in the room next to the machine room at the University of Illinois at Chicago where we had an 80s vintage IBM mainframe. Because everything in the machine room was pretty big (the units holding the disk drives were about the size of a washing machine), it still kind of breaks my brain to think that there were microchips inside them. I like to imagine that the CPUs were the size of paperbacks, and to see stories like this just kind of messes with my brain.
(At a previous employer, we got a tour of the data center where, along with racks and racks of commodity Linux servers, there was also an IBM mainframe. It was a sleek black piece of hardware about the size of a refrigerator, as I recall. Much prettier than those 80s machines, although is it really a mainframe without at least one 9-track tape drive?)
- simonh 5y agoChips yes, but microprocessors no. If it was a 3rd gen design the CPUs in that IBM mainframe would have been a large circuit board with a whole bunch of chips and TTLs, or racks of circuit boards. Third gen mainframes we’re still being built in the 90s and a single processing unit could contain thousands of chips. The 10-way IBM ES9000 9X2 contained over 5,000. Bear in mind mainframes aren’t about fast execution so much, they’re about massive parallelisation and I/O bandwidth.
- dhosek 5y agoFair enough. We routinely had several thousand interactive users at a time on UICVM back in the 80s. We had dedicated machines (effectively their own minicomputers) that managed terminal sessions so we could use commodity ASCII terminals or PCs running Kermit instead of IBM 3270 terminals. It still blows me away how small everything is in the twenty-first century.
- Anarch157a 5y agoDave Jones disassembled a mainframe CPU from a 90s vintage machine. It was the size of a paperback. Check his chanell on Youtube or Odysee.