3 ms·
Chips 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 a
by simonh 5y ago
Chips 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.