4 ms·
What was system/3 used for?
by TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
What was system/3 used for?
- somat 4y agoI had to look it up, it is the ancestor to the as/400 family of computers.
- comrad 4y agowhich is the ancestor of the system i series. I learned COBOL (a adapted heavily scripted version of that) on a AS/400 used to control automotive operations in a factory.
- icedchai 4y agoWe had a System/36 at a family business, which was the ancestor of the AS/400. It was a large box, roughly the size of a refrigerator on its side. It had 256K of memory, a whopping 100 megabyte disk, something like 8 terminals, and a couple of line printers. I think it cost almost $200,000 USD in 80's money. In the mid-90's, they replaced it with PCs.
- omnibrain 4y agoIt was a "minicomputer". Nowadays they are called "midrange" computers and nearly extinct. They were general purpose computers, used for all kinds of of operations/calculations. Most minicomputers landed in companies/departments too small to afford a mainframe and where used for inventory, POS, bookkeeping, payroll, etc.
- degrees57 4y agoMy school district got one; I assume they did accounting on it. RPG would be a good fit for accounting. But also, they taught programming to us students. I learned FORTRAN on one of these in 1979. 4K RAM and punched cards.
- epc 4y agoMy mom used one in the 70s and 80s for accounting and billing in our local village. As I recall although they had multiple terminals to access it these were shared, you didn’t have a terminal on the desk. You’d pick the application you were going to use from a text menu, enter your identifier (no password), and make your entries. Actual billing runs or other accounting runs were done in batch overnight. When they upgraded to AS/400s everyone had PCs on their desks and used 5250 terminal emulators to access the system over SNA/APPC.