Re: 360/44, The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

According to Lars Poulsen  <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com>:

IBM sort of came around to that with the 360/44, which implemented a scientific
subset of the 360's instruction set and ran nearly as fast as a /65. It was
intended for process control so they added priority interrupts and some real
time I/O.

>
I think it was early 1970 that I visited Haldor Topsoe (chemical
engineering co in Denmark) which had recently installed a 360/44. I was
disappointed to learn that it was not program compatible with other 360
machines, so it had to use a tailored OS; AFAIR a modified DOS system.
And I think also it had a different floating point format.

44PS was DOS-ish, manuals at bitsavers if you care.  It was pretty simple,
compile and run Fortran and assembler programs with a simple disk structure.

It used the same floating point format as other 360s but had a knob on
the console you could turn to use fewer precision digits and run faster.

I would be surprised if anyone bought a /44 and didn't use it for realtime
or process control.




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