8 ms·

most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?

by tomgreen000 4y ago

iamhamm 4y ago
In 1964 importance
- dfox 4y ago
  Well, it is an computer that: 1) uses architecture that has at least user-space binary compatible descendands today. 2) introduced 32b wordsize with 8b byte addressable memory. 3) was designed to use ASCII. (which is somewhat ironic as all the IBM big iron things are mostly synonymous with EBCDIC, which was only meant as temporary solution because ASCII was not finalized in 1964)
  - iamhamm 4y ago
    Totally agree. The comment I was replying to asked "most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?" and I was noting that in 1964 it was. That said, it's still a great read and I can imagine how cool it was :)
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  dfox lists some important things, the two most important I'd note are how through extensive use of microcode there was a huge range of systems that could run the same software, and for the lower end ones could also emulate older systems. Going from memory and not counting the very limited 360/20, from the 8 bit internally 360/30 all the way to the 360/91 supercomputer you could run basically the same software. Which eventually solved a huge problem for IBM and the industry in general because not so much effort had been put into comparability in the early days, and IBM had two major lines of big computers, decimal ones for business and binary ones officially for science and engineering but by then often used by businesses. Although stuff at the low end which somewhat like the 360/20 remained incomparable, the business 1401 series remained, also see the scientific 1130 which a lot of people including myself got their first start at programming on. It was a very clever design that used 360 technology to make an affordable system, for quite some time they'd put effort into that niche with the 650 and the CADET, Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, a backronym from how they based it on a big block of core memory which they were very good at manufacturing by then vs. the drum as used in the 650, and and used that with tables etc. to avoid including an ALU. And leaders of the effort going all the way up to Tom Watson Jr. made a catastrophic mistake in deciding virtual memory, which they called dynamic address translation (DAT) was a bad thing, which hardened so much the first models of the System/370 which used "monolithic" circuits, ICs, didn't have it (and they didn't do right by their customers who bought those first models). The affordability of the 360 series and their ability to make so many but much less than initial demand rested on their avoiding too new at the time ICs and using automation to manufacture small boards logic boards on a ceramic substrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology This was an era in which IBM still massively benefited from its electromechanical wizardry gained in the punched card data processing days. This lost them the high end computer science community which I believe seriously harmed them in the long term, ultimately made what they now call IBM Z a niche product.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
    The CADET was in fact the IBM 1620, contemporaneous with the IBM 1401, but more for 'scientific' market. The '1620 uses these clever in-core tables and iteration to achieve arbitrary-precision addition/subtraction and different tables for multiplication/division; I implemented the algo in C and it worked great, certainly fast enough for the occasional arb-precision computation. The IBM 1401 could operate on arbitrary strings of digits in hardware ; since that was my first machine, I was disappointed when I used these silly 'binary' machines. However, a typical instruction + operand fetch/store took about 100 microseconds on the '1401; yes, that is 10 kilo-instructions per second! There were many programming tricks to minimize instruction fetch e.g.'chaining' instructions, using left-over contents of the regs in the next instr, and using parts of instr as data, the most common being: "A *-6,FOO" because "*-6" is relative address, which points to the letter 'A', which was BCD +1, etc. Equivalent to ++FOO; The pdp-11/45 I used next took about 2.5 usec per instruction with 2 memory operands -- 400 kilo instructions per second! This "40x" speedup of the 11/45 over the IBM 1401 more than compensated for the hardware arbitrary-precision addition/subtraction! (oh, and on the '1401, the HW 'Multiply/Divide Feature' was another big group of electronic cards, if you bought that) http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ibm-1401.html http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ibm-1401.html (edit: learned that \* needed to not have * gobbled by the markdown italics sentinel https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
doctor_eval 4y ago
Certainly among them. But PC and iPhone is up there too IMO.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Although "PC" is hard to localize to a single announcement. Yes, the IBM PC is a convenient hook. But, presumably, something like the IBM PC would have happened even absent IBM skunkworks in Boca given what was already on the market. I suppose you could say the same thing about the iPhone but it did clearly move things off in a different direction relative to predecessors.
- dboreham 4y ago
  I know it was a long time ago, but the announcement of the iPhone wasn't terribly significant at the time. We already had smartphones with apps. The iPhone didn't have apps. It had a large screen using a touchscreen technology that worked better than the competitors, but it had no keyboard -- something seen as a disadvantage by many. The most important thing the iPhone brought imho was low, fixed-priced data plans that were affordable by regular folks. This was a true innovation by Jobs and perhaps his single most important achievement, although obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off.
  - zitterbewegung 4y ago
    The announcement of the iPhone was big because it really defined what a smartphone is. Also with the phones we have it’s easy to think that it was a small announcement which is a testament to the influence it has. The competition focused on prioritizing phone features and then adding apps that worked on a small screen. The purpose of a screen on a phone wasn’t emphasized at all. Also having a camera with a large screen eventually made the iPhone take the most pictures of any device. But the iPhone did have its price slashed by around $200. Also it took til the iPhone 5 to have a great deal of people to adopt the iPhone. So the announcement and the iPhone itself made it influential and then a few revisions later the iPhone really became dominant.
    - 4y ago
dtagames 4y ago
It was a bet-the-company move and would have bankrupted IBM had it failed. They literally discontinued all other product lines in one swoop and consolidated the entire company's architecture around a single, compatible processor spec. That is standard today and was unheard of at the time.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  And then the invented virtualization to run the old software again haha
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    In 360 terms, virtual machines are for dividing the machine into multiple smaller ones, each able to run its own OS. At that time, there were multiple OSs for different things.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      The virtualized some of their older maschines I am pretty sure. Some people didnt want to switch. I think Honeywell started making clones of the old maschines and were successful and then IBM made that code run on 360.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  > They literally discontinued all other product lines Not quite, as I mention elsewhere they continued incompatible low end systems, most prominently the existing business 1401 series, and used 360 technology to make the affordable 1965 1130. I would assume the same for the 1969 System 3, which eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now, which internally is still by far the most sophisticated mass manufactured computer system architecture.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    > eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now I have to note that the AS/400 was so much ahead of its time it's still, in many aspects, ahead of our time.

most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?

iamhamm 4y ago

In 1964 importance

dfox 4y ago
Well, it is an computer that: 1) uses architecture that has at least user-space binary compatible descendands today. 2) introduced 32b wordsize with 8b byte addressable memory. 3) was designed to use ASCII. (which is somewhat ironic as all the IBM big iron things are mostly synonymous with EBCDIC, which was only meant as temporary solution because ASCII was not finalized in 1964)
- iamhamm 4y ago
  Totally agree. The comment I was replying to asked "most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?" and I was noting that in 1964 it was. That said, it's still a great read and I can imagine how cool it was :)
Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
dfox lists some important things, the two most important I'd note are how through extensive use of microcode there was a huge range of systems that could run the same software, and for the lower end ones could also emulate older systems. Going from memory and not counting the very limited 360/20, from the 8 bit internally 360/30 all the way to the 360/91 supercomputer you could run basically the same software. Which eventually solved a huge problem for IBM and the industry in general because not so much effort had been put into comparability in the early days, and IBM had two major lines of big computers, decimal ones for business and binary ones officially for science and engineering but by then often used by businesses. Although stuff at the low end which somewhat like the 360/20 remained incomparable, the business 1401 series remained, also see the scientific 1130 which a lot of people including myself got their first start at programming on. It was a very clever design that used 360 technology to make an affordable system, for quite some time they'd put effort into that niche with the 650 and the CADET, Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, a backronym from how they based it on a big block of core memory which they were very good at manufacturing by then vs. the drum as used in the 650, and and used that with tables etc. to avoid including an ALU. And leaders of the effort going all the way up to Tom Watson Jr. made a catastrophic mistake in deciding virtual memory, which they called dynamic address translation (DAT) was a bad thing, which hardened so much the first models of the System/370 which used "monolithic" circuits, ICs, didn't have it (and they didn't do right by their customers who bought those first models). The affordability of the 360 series and their ability to make so many but much less than initial demand rested on their avoiding too new at the time ICs and using automation to manufacture small boards logic boards on a ceramic substrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology This was an era in which IBM still massively benefited from its electromechanical wizardry gained in the punched card data processing days. This lost them the high end computer science community which I believe seriously harmed them in the long term, ultimately made what they now call IBM Z a niche product.
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  The CADET was in fact the IBM 1620, contemporaneous with the IBM 1401, but more for 'scientific' market. The '1620 uses these clever in-core tables and iteration to achieve arbitrary-precision addition/subtraction and different tables for multiplication/division; I implemented the algo in C and it worked great, certainly fast enough for the occasional arb-precision computation. The IBM 1401 could operate on arbitrary strings of digits in hardware ; since that was my first machine, I was disappointed when I used these silly 'binary' machines. However, a typical instruction + operand fetch/store took about 100 microseconds on the '1401; yes, that is 10 kilo-instructions per second! There were many programming tricks to minimize instruction fetch e.g.'chaining' instructions, using left-over contents of the regs in the next instr, and using parts of instr as data, the most common being: "A *-6,FOO" because "*-6" is relative address, which points to the letter 'A', which was BCD +1, etc. Equivalent to ++FOO; The pdp-11/45 I used next took about 2.5 usec per instruction with 2 memory operands -- 400 kilo instructions per second! This "40x" speedup of the 11/45 over the IBM 1401 more than compensated for the hardware arbitrary-precision addition/subtraction! (oh, and on the '1401, the HW 'Multiply/Divide Feature' was another big group of electronic cards, if you bought that) http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ibm-1401.html http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ibm-1401.html (edit: learned that \* needed to not have * gobbled by the markdown italics sentinel https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

doctor_eval 4y ago

Certainly among them. But PC and iPhone is up there too IMO.

ghaff 4y ago
Although "PC" is hard to localize to a single announcement. Yes, the IBM PC is a convenient hook. But, presumably, something like the IBM PC would have happened even absent IBM skunkworks in Boca given what was already on the market. I suppose you could say the same thing about the iPhone but it did clearly move things off in a different direction relative to predecessors.
dboreham 4y ago
I know it was a long time ago, but the announcement of the iPhone wasn't terribly significant at the time. We already had smartphones with apps. The iPhone didn't have apps. It had a large screen using a touchscreen technology that worked better than the competitors, but it had no keyboard -- something seen as a disadvantage by many. The most important thing the iPhone brought imho was low, fixed-priced data plans that were affordable by regular folks. This was a true innovation by Jobs and perhaps his single most important achievement, although obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  The announcement of the iPhone was big because it really defined what a smartphone is. Also with the phones we have it’s easy to think that it was a small announcement which is a testament to the influence it has. The competition focused on prioritizing phone features and then adding apps that worked on a small screen. The purpose of a screen on a phone wasn’t emphasized at all. Also having a camera with a large screen eventually made the iPhone take the most pictures of any device. But the iPhone did have its price slashed by around $200. Also it took til the iPhone 5 to have a great deal of people to adopt the iPhone. So the announcement and the iPhone itself made it influential and then a few revisions later the iPhone really became dominant.
  - 4y ago

dtagames 4y ago

It was a bet-the-company move and would have bankrupted IBM had it failed. They literally discontinued all other product lines in one swoop and consolidated the entire company's architecture around a single, compatible processor spec. That is standard today and was unheard of at the time.

panick21_ 4y ago
And then the invented virtualization to run the old software again haha
- rbanffy 4y ago
  In 360 terms, virtual machines are for dividing the machine into multiple smaller ones, each able to run its own OS. At that time, there were multiple OSs for different things.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    The virtualized some of their older maschines I am pretty sure. Some people didnt want to switch. I think Honeywell started making clones of the old maschines and were successful and then IBM made that code run on 360.
Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
> They literally discontinued all other product lines Not quite, as I mention elsewhere they continued incompatible low end systems, most prominently the existing business 1401 series, and used 360 technology to make the affordable 1965 1130. I would assume the same for the 1969 System 3, which eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now, which internally is still by far the most sophisticated mass manufactured computer system architecture.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now I have to note that the AS/400 was so much ahead of its time it's still, in many aspects, ahead of our time.