Ahead of the mass market for 20-30 years

Having read an interesting article on VM / 370 on Habré, I’ll add that the IBM / 370 architecture and the VM / 370 operating system in particular gave many people the opportunity to join modern technologies and OS and hardware architectures on 10/20/30 years depending on the age of the programmer) before these technologies became available to all of us on ordinary PCs.

For example, back in 1972, IBM / 370 machines running VM / 370 had:

• 32-bit architecture and multitask 32-bit OS . On the PC, this became available only after 20 years , in 1992 for OS / 2 users, and for the mass user - after 23 years in general, in Windows 95.
• Supports paged virtual memory (MMU) and paging. On the PC, such capabilities appeared 20 years later in OS / 2. Hardware support for paged memory appeared on a PC in 1986 (14 years after IBM / 370), but operating systems did not know how to use it for a very long time.
• 16 general purpose registers. On the PC, this was not until 31 years later , in 2003. A large number of registers greatly simplifies the generation and increases the efficiency of the code.
• 128-bit floating point arithmetic and BCD arithmetic. On the PC, they are not there now. :)

• A downloadable microcode that allows you to correct errors in it without changing the processor. It appeared on the PC after 24 years , in the Pentium MMX.
• I / O architecture with direct memory access and command queues. On a PC, this became available to mass users 26 years later as an ATA-4 interface (with UltraDMA).
• Full hardware support for virtual machines. On the PC, it became available 33 years later in the form of Intel VT-x technology. I / O virtualization (VT-d) was added even later.

These examples clearly show that many technologies can be mastered (or even participate in their development :)) 20-30 years before they become popular and accessible to the mass user.