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Fascinating machine in so many ways. The founder of the company was the grandfather of William Burroughs, author of (among others) Naked Lunch. Burroughs was a
by krylon 5y ago
Fascinating machine in so many ways. The founder of the company was the grandfather of William Burroughs, author of (among others) Naked Lunch.
Burroughs was a late entry to the mainframe market, but when they went there, they did not have to worry about backwards compatibility, so they could do fancy stuff like virtual memory and a stack-oriented architecture.
You just have to love this item: "multiprocessing of independent programs, with dynamic scheduling by the operating system". These days, we call it multitasking and forget just how cool it is.
- greenyoda 5y ago> they did not have to worry about backwards compatibility, so they could do fancy stuff like virtual memory IBM did have to worry about backwards compatibility, but they delivered a virtual memory machine, the System/360 Model 67, by 1966.[1] The System/370, on which virtual memory was standard, was delivered starting in 1971.[2] Their VM/370 operating system (1972) was a hypervisor (IBM coined the term back then) that provided virtual System/370 machines.[3] You could actually run instances of VM/370 in VM/370 virtual machines. It amazes me that this technology was already being used a half-century ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)
- krylon 5y agoTo be fair, with 50+ years of hindsight, caring about backwards compatibility has paid off for IBM in a big way.