Re: The Design of Design

"Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:

Thomas Koenig wrote:
>

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:
>

They had the insight to see that the 16 fixed sizs registers could
be in fast storage on high end machines, main memory on low end
machines, so the high end machines were fast and the low end no
slower than a memory-memory architecture which is what it in
practice was.  It was really an amazing design, no wonder it's the
only architecture of its era that still has hardware
implementations.

>
Yes, although it isn't clear how much of its success is due to
technical superiority versus marketing superiority.

To me it seems clear that the success of System/360 was largely or
mostly due to good technical decisions having been made.  IBM
salesmen were very effective in getting customers for the new
line, but a lot of the reason for that is that they had a good
product to sell.  I don't mean just the number of registers or
the size of the address space, but a commitment to a forward
looking architecture that handles all the needs of every
customer, both big and small, and would continue to do so in
the future.  In those days the vast majority of computer buyers
were businesses, at least as measured by dollars, and in the
business world that sort of pitch has enormous appeal.