Re: Thoughts on IBM 360

On 4/3/25 4:43 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 3 Apr 2025 12:29:36 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

"The 1967 IBM System/360 Model 91 could execute up to 16.6 million
instructions per second."
>
[Wiki]
>
A Raspberry PI PICO could outperform that.

 This was IBM’s attempt at the time to compete with the CDC 6000-series
machines. These were designed by the legendary Seymour Cray, who came up
with processors that were an order of magnitude faster than anything else
around -- basically, they were the first “supercomputers”. IBM mounted a
mighty FUD campaign to try to dissuade its customers from buying CDC
machines, promising that its upcoming “360 Model 90” would be way ahead.
 When it finally shipped, about two years late, as the Model 91, it fell a
bit short of what was promised.

   Well, sell it high - and then find reasons why
   the actual spec aren't as bad as they seem  :-)
   The first i386 IBM-PC we bought went to the boss.
   Told him it'd do *one* MIP and, wow, he felt like
   he had a super-computer ! Thing is he never did
   anything but word processing and some small sheets
   but he FELT important. Keep the boss happy and
   everyone ELSE gets to be happy  :-)
   Oh, and Cray-brand mainframes were the coolest-LOOKING
   things ever made.
   Apparently they WERE a step-above FAST too ... kinda
   first to make real-time ray-tracing and nuke physics
   sims practical.
   Was never quite sure why CDC broke up ... probably
   "management" issues because its hardware was always
   pretty well respected. Management idiocy kills more
   corps than bad sales ......