6 ms·

IBM Confidential: System/360 File Organization [video]

67 points by DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago

froh 4mo ago
(1964) a webcast about the many great benefits of the novel DASD (direct access storage device) over ISAM (index sequential access) aka disk and tape. 16mm film Flipchart impeccable presentation thx for the time machine :-)
- themafia 4mo ago
  DASDs supported ISAM. And they're not strictly just a disk. It's more like a complex multiplexing system for an array of disks. It has interesting capabilities like "channel programs" that persist to this day which allow you to send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for in one of several access modes. IBM still provides almost the entirety of it's OS documentation online: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-are-access-methods https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-...
  - ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
    > send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for A very long time ago, a guy I used to work with was porting a sales and stock control database he'd written on the Commodore PET to a PC. By then he had a 286 with a 20MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM to play with - whopping stuff! - but his original program would assemble up a query routine, and transmit it to the 6502 in the PET disk drives over HPIB. Then it would chunter away discovering the records it needed to construct a reply while the host computer could continue working as normal. It was absolutely genius stuff, and it made the whole system seem really responsive even though in reality it was pretty slow.
- Pinus 4mo ago
  The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
- p_l 4mo ago
  ISAM in all important variants pretty much required DASDs, CKDs (Count Key Data) in fact as opposed to FBAs (Fixed Block Access - which act like normal drives people are familiar with) Tapes don't provide CKD interface and thus do not work with ISAM.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  Why do you think that the presentation was done in 1964? On Youtube there is no mention about the date. OS/360 was announced in 1964 but it was first delivered more than a year later. I doubt that such presentations were done about a product that no customers could use and which might still be changed until the first deliverable version. So I believe that it is unlikely that this presentation was done earlier than 1965 and it is likely that it was not done before 1966. The first OS/360 versions were delivered in November/December 1965.
  - haunter 4mo ago
    The earlier video from the series, GG46955 IBM SYSTEM/360 READ ONLY STORAGE, is dated to 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc_SAy-I80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc_SAy-I80
    - adrian_b 4mo ago
      If the videos are indeed so old, then probably they were not intended for customers but for the internal training of IBM employees, which would match the "CONFIDENTIAL" label.
      - haunter 4mo ago
        Indeed, he actually adresses that in the first video >This presentation is one of a series which is intended to present you the systems engineer and salesman some of the advantages of Systems/360
cocodill 4mo ago
Hairstyles used to be better than they are today.
bitwize 4mo ago
Great video for the month of "Mayframe"!
haeseong 4mo ago
The channel program concept described here, where I/O operations are offloaded to a dedicated controller with its own instruction sequence, was a structural ancestor of modern asynchronous I/O and DMA architectures. The System/360 also codified the byte as exactly eight bits, a decision so foundational that it became the silent assumption underlying every computing architecture that followed.
- tgv 4mo ago
  I don't think IBM's influence was that large. IBM was a world on its own. The rest had hardware from many manufacturers. If there's a single point in time where the byte got its definitive shape, I'd say it was Intel's 4004, or the 8008.
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    The calculator chip 4004 never had any relevance for computers, and it did not have "bytes". Intel 8008 did not have anything original in its architecture, it was just a monolithic PMOS re-implementation of the CPU of the embedded computer designed for the serial terminal Datapoint 2200, which had been designed with TTL integrated circuits. All the decisions about sizes, e.g. 8-bit data and 14-bit addresses, had been done by Datapoint in 1970, not by Intel. Datapoint had chosen 8-bit bytes in order to support the recently standardized ASCII 7-bit character set (and the 8-bit IBM EBCDIC character set, if necessary), i.e. the character sets used by the computers to which such a serial terminal could be connected. At the time when the first microprocessors were designed, during the first half of the seventies, the most important architectural influence on any new computer designs were the DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. DEC PDP-11 used 8-bit bytes, which was a significant change from the previous DEC computers, most of which used word sizes that were a multiple of 6, like 12-bit, 18-bit or 36-bit. DEC PDP-11 had transitioned to 8-bit bytes (in 1970) mainly due to the influence of IBM System/360. The standardization of the 7-bit ASCII code for characters, which could no longer fit inside 6-bit bytes, has contributed to this decision, but the standardization of ASCII was itself possible only because many computer vendors had already transitioned or decided to transition to 8-bit bytes, so they could store the new ASCII characters in their bytes. After 1967, when ASCII was standardized in a form close to the present form, after which it was also taken into international standards by ISO and CCITT, all new computer instruction-set architectures were designed with 8-bit bytes.
haunter 4mo ago
Passed away in 2012 so he saw the modern internet age >Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary. >Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-wood-5058323 https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-w...
russellbeattie 4mo ago
Amazingly, IBM is still making videos like this. You can find great videos online from them explaining the technical details of LLMs, ML, and the like [1]. The guy in this IBM clip is a progenitor of what they still do today. I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies. 1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology
ToddWBurgess 4mo ago
Before watching that video all the IBM employees would have had to get together and sing songs. It was a long standing tradition at IBM that all employees at the start of the day had to get together and sing songs praising IBM and Thomas Watson. You can still find copies of the IBM song book floating around the Internet. When my Dad started in the late 60s IBM had discontinued the morning song tradition.
- Cyph0n 4mo ago
  Interesting. So that explains where the inspiration for the cult-like elements in Severance came from. The parallels between Lumon and IBM were fairly clear to me, save for this part.
morpheos137 4mo ago
I'm interested in the program he would have used to typeset his presentation in the 1960s. Also not at all an attack but he seems to be either nervous public speaker or to have a well mananged speech impediment. Just an observation not a critique. It is fascinating IBM woukd have chosen such 'shy' person to make the presentation.
- elzbardico 4mo ago
  It is not mechanically printed, those materials where hand drafted. I got some very old teachers in college during the 90s, and their hand-drawn flipcharts looked exactly like this. Sometimes companies used to hire artists to finish this kind of material, but usually engineers at that time were pretty much capable of drafting this kind of presentation on paper, just with rulers, compasses, and the ocasional template rule. White collar professions used to be way more embodied in the real physic world. Kids were trained on caligraphy and basic drafting techniques since elementary school.
- alt219 4mo ago
  I'm not a graphic arts expert, but the lettering and charts in this presentation appear to be done by hand. And since this was an internal IBM presentation for salesmen and engineers, the priority likely wouldn't've been on using a polished presenter, just making the information available.
youboll 4mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zokKqP0plrM&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zokKqP0plrM&t=176s Sorry, it was stronger than me \s

67 points by DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago

froh 4mo ago

(1964) a webcast about the many great benefits of the novel DASD (direct access storage device) over ISAM (index sequential access) aka disk and tape. 16mm film Flipchart impeccable presentation thx for the time machine :-)

themafia 4mo ago
DASDs supported ISAM. And they're not strictly just a disk. It's more like a complex multiplexing system for an array of disks. It has interesting capabilities like "channel programs" that persist to this day which allow you to send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for in one of several access modes. IBM still provides almost the entirety of it's OS documentation online: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-are-access-methods https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-...
- ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
  > send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for A very long time ago, a guy I used to work with was porting a sales and stock control database he'd written on the Commodore PET to a PC. By then he had a 286 with a 20MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM to play with - whopping stuff! - but his original program would assemble up a query routine, and transmit it to the 6502 in the PET disk drives over HPIB. Then it would chunter away discovering the records it needed to construct a reply while the host computer could continue working as normal. It was absolutely genius stuff, and it made the whole system seem really responsive even though in reality it was pretty slow.
Pinus 4mo ago
The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
p_l 4mo ago
ISAM in all important variants pretty much required DASDs, CKDs (Count Key Data) in fact as opposed to FBAs (Fixed Block Access - which act like normal drives people are familiar with) Tapes don't provide CKD interface and thus do not work with ISAM.
adrian_b 4mo ago
Why do you think that the presentation was done in 1964? On Youtube there is no mention about the date. OS/360 was announced in 1964 but it was first delivered more than a year later. I doubt that such presentations were done about a product that no customers could use and which might still be changed until the first deliverable version. So I believe that it is unlikely that this presentation was done earlier than 1965 and it is likely that it was not done before 1966. The first OS/360 versions were delivered in November/December 1965.
- haunter 4mo ago
  The earlier video from the series, GG46955 IBM SYSTEM/360 READ ONLY STORAGE, is dated to 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc_SAy-I80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc_SAy-I80
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    If the videos are indeed so old, then probably they were not intended for customers but for the internal training of IBM employees, which would match the "CONFIDENTIAL" label.
    - haunter 4mo ago
      Indeed, he actually adresses that in the first video >This presentation is one of a series which is intended to present you the systems engineer and salesman some of the advantages of Systems/360

cocodill 4mo ago

Hairstyles used to be better than they are today.

bitwize 4mo ago

Great video for the month of "Mayframe"!

haeseong 4mo ago

The channel program concept described here, where I/O operations are offloaded to a dedicated controller with its own instruction sequence, was a structural ancestor of modern asynchronous I/O and DMA architectures. The System/360 also codified the byte as exactly eight bits, a decision so foundational that it became the silent assumption underlying every computing architecture that followed.

tgv 4mo ago
I don't think IBM's influence was that large. IBM was a world on its own. The rest had hardware from many manufacturers. If there's a single point in time where the byte got its definitive shape, I'd say it was Intel's 4004, or the 8008.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  The calculator chip 4004 never had any relevance for computers, and it did not have "bytes". Intel 8008 did not have anything original in its architecture, it was just a monolithic PMOS re-implementation of the CPU of the embedded computer designed for the serial terminal Datapoint 2200, which had been designed with TTL integrated circuits. All the decisions about sizes, e.g. 8-bit data and 14-bit addresses, had been done by Datapoint in 1970, not by Intel. Datapoint had chosen 8-bit bytes in order to support the recently standardized ASCII 7-bit character set (and the 8-bit IBM EBCDIC character set, if necessary), i.e. the character sets used by the computers to which such a serial terminal could be connected. At the time when the first microprocessors were designed, during the first half of the seventies, the most important architectural influence on any new computer designs were the DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. DEC PDP-11 used 8-bit bytes, which was a significant change from the previous DEC computers, most of which used word sizes that were a multiple of 6, like 12-bit, 18-bit or 36-bit. DEC PDP-11 had transitioned to 8-bit bytes (in 1970) mainly due to the influence of IBM System/360. The standardization of the 7-bit ASCII code for characters, which could no longer fit inside 6-bit bytes, has contributed to this decision, but the standardization of ASCII was itself possible only because many computer vendors had already transitioned or decided to transition to 8-bit bytes, so they could store the new ASCII characters in their bytes. After 1967, when ASCII was standardized in a form close to the present form, after which it was also taken into international standards by ISO and CCITT, all new computer instruction-set architectures were designed with 8-bit bytes.

haunter 4mo ago

Passed away in 2012 so he saw the modern internet age >Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary. >Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-wood-5058323 https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-w...

russellbeattie 4mo ago

Amazingly, IBM is still making videos like this. You can find great videos online from them explaining the technical details of LLMs, ML, and the like [1]. The guy in this IBM clip is a progenitor of what they still do today. I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies. 1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology

ToddWBurgess 4mo ago

Before watching that video all the IBM employees would have had to get together and sing songs. It was a long standing tradition at IBM that all employees at the start of the day had to get together and sing songs praising IBM and Thomas Watson. You can still find copies of the IBM song book floating around the Internet. When my Dad started in the late 60s IBM had discontinued the morning song tradition.

Cyph0n 4mo ago
Interesting. So that explains where the inspiration for the cult-like elements in Severance came from. The parallels between Lumon and IBM were fairly clear to me, save for this part.

morpheos137 4mo ago

I'm interested in the program he would have used to typeset his presentation in the 1960s. Also not at all an attack but he seems to be either nervous public speaker or to have a well mananged speech impediment. Just an observation not a critique. It is fascinating IBM woukd have chosen such 'shy' person to make the presentation.

elzbardico 4mo ago
It is not mechanically printed, those materials where hand drafted. I got some very old teachers in college during the 90s, and their hand-drawn flipcharts looked exactly like this. Sometimes companies used to hire artists to finish this kind of material, but usually engineers at that time were pretty much capable of drafting this kind of presentation on paper, just with rulers, compasses, and the ocasional template rule. White collar professions used to be way more embodied in the real physic world. Kids were trained on caligraphy and basic drafting techniques since elementary school.
alt219 4mo ago
I'm not a graphic arts expert, but the lettering and charts in this presentation appear to be done by hand. And since this was an internal IBM presentation for salesmen and engineers, the priority likely wouldn't've been on using a polished presenter, just making the information available.

youboll 4mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zokKqP0plrM&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zokKqP0plrM&t=176s Sorry, it was stronger than me \s