Re: The Design of Design

According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

I do want to note that another factor in S/360's success was the
quality of the paper peripherals, expecially the 1401 printer, which
was a true marvel in its time.  IBM got that advantage from their long
experience with punch card business systems.

I presume you mean the 1403 which was indeed a great printer.  I printed a
lot of term papers on them.

All the others, which were word or maybe decimal digit

addressed, died. ...

The Univac 1110 (circa 1972), (about a devcade before XA) had banking,
which allowed an instruction to address anywhere within a 262K
(approximately 1 MB) "window" into what could be an "address space" of
about 4 GB.  It was a little awkward in that, while you could have 4 of
such "windows" available at any time, changing windows required
executing an, (unprivlidged) instruction.

There were a lot of segmented address schemes and as far as I can tell
nobody liked them except maybe the Burroughs machines where the
compilers made it largely invisible. The most famous was the 8086 and
286 but the PDP-10 extended addressing was sort of like that and even
the PDP-8 had a bit to say whether an address was to page 0 or the
current one.

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