Re: what's a mainframe, was is Vax addressing sane today

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:

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

IBM definitely cared about maximum performance in the 1950s and early

1960s.
>
Yes.  And remember, one of the goals of S/360 was to provide an
architecture that could handle both scientific (i.e. compute bound) and
business (i.e. I/O bound) workloads.

>
I don't think anyone would have forseen how quickly scientific computing
moved to mini and micro computers with fast CPUs and weak peripherals.
Perhaps once the RAM is big enough to hold all the data the I/O performance
is not a big deal.
>

they knew they had a problem. The /95 and /195 were minor upgrades of

the /91 but that was the end of their supercomputer efforts.

Don't forget the ACS.

Looking at (if that is to be believed)
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_performance.html
this seems to have been quite an amazing machine for its time,
with projected 160 MFlops and around five concurrent instructions
using OoO.

Had this been realized, it would havbe been as fast as the Cray-I.
But it never reached the market, so...

Mostly true, except for the 3090 vector facility.

>
I suppose.  A review from the USDOE said:

We had that in our IBM 3090 at the computer center.  Compared to the
Fujitsu VP machine sitting next to it, it was not impressive at
all (which can also be read in the report you youted).