3 ms·

Yes, the IBM System/360 was designed to support the full 360° circle of applications (scientific and business), which was a rather revolutionary idea at the tim

• kragen 5y ago
  Exactly! But in terms of design, there were earlier machines that spanned the gap like the astounding Burroughs B5000, which was marketed almost entirely to businesses (because that was the Burroughs customer base), but with a 48-bit word length and floating-point-only arithmetic, and including both "numerical" and "character" instruction set operating modes. The first delivery was, I think, to NASA. Also, as Robert points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30900280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30900280, the earlier IBM 1620 was similarly ambiguously positioned.
  • Taniwha 5y ago
    To be fair the B5/6/7 Burroughs machines also had integers ... it's just that they'd chosen a floating point format such that mantissa-sized integers and a 0 exponent always worked and didn't get renormalised unless you overflowed
    • kragen 5y ago
      Interesting! That does agree with Organick's explanation, but he described it as them not having integers.