50 years of mainframe
Not so long ago, on March 12, the Internet celebrated its anniversary - 25 years. There are already people among us who do not remember the times when it was impossible to go online and check the news, send a letter to a friend in an e-mail box or manage their business while sitting at home in a bathrobe. But it can be said that the Internet is a teenager ... compared to modern mainframes. Today they are 50 years old!
It all started on April 7, 1964. IBM held 77 press conferences in 15 countries around the world, making, according to the head of the company, Thomas Watson Jr., "the most important announcement in the entire history of the company." On this day, IBM announced the release of a family of large computers called System / 360. The aim of the project was to develop a family of computers that are different in performance and cost, which will be able to satisfy any customer requests, and this was one of the most expensive projects in the history of computing technology.
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Today, IBM’s decision to invest $ 5 billion (approximately $ 35 billion today) in System / 360 seems natural and almost inevitable, but at the time it looked very risky. IBM has staked its existence. As a result, System / 360 marked the beginning of a new era in computing.
Until 1965, various computational complexes were produced in the world, each of which had its own architecture, element base and, which is extremely important, its own software. Client programs written for one computer could not be solved on a computer of another manufacturer. Moreover, there was no complete continuity even between the models of computers of the same manufacturer. Each computer was designed to order for specific business purposes, so it was unique.
With the release of a family of computers System / 360 order in the computer world has become more. The System / 360’s revolutionism was that all models had the same architecture and OS / 360 common operating system.
S / 360 was the first computer to use microcode to implement many machine instructions, as opposed to systems in which all machine instructions were implemented at the hardware level. A microcode (or firmware, as it is sometimes called) consists of stored microinstructions that are inaccessible to users, who represent the functional level between hardware and software. The advantage of using microcode is the flexibility in which any change or new function can be realized by simply changing an existing microcode, instead of replacing a computer.
Using standardized mainframe computers to handle workloads, customers could create business applications that did not require special hardware or software. Moreover, customers were free to switch to newer and more powerful processors without fear of compatibility issues with existing applications.
The first business applications were created mainly in assembler, COBOL, FORTRAN or PL / 1, and a significant number of these old programs are still in use. You might think, when buying your first phone, that in the future you will be able, for example, to synchronize your contact list with a modern model? Or continue to set records in the famous "snake"? I doubt it. But on modern mainframes you quietly run a program designed for System / 360.
The emergence of a new family of mainframes helped NASA send a man to the moon, airlines to offer online check-in, and banks to prevent fraud. And the examples of the scope of the mainframe does not stop. In fact, mainframes have always been behind the scenes, but now it’s really hard to imagine a world without such computational “monsters” with a clock frequency of 5.5 GHz, 101 core and 3 TB of RAM.
Let's congratulate the mainframe on its anniversary! Tomorrow there will be a general celebration in live broadcast at 2 pm in New York.
It all started on April 7, 1964. IBM held 77 press conferences in 15 countries around the world, making, according to the head of the company, Thomas Watson Jr., "the most important announcement in the entire history of the company." On this day, IBM announced the release of a family of large computers called System / 360. The aim of the project was to develop a family of computers that are different in performance and cost, which will be able to satisfy any customer requests, and this was one of the most expensive projects in the history of computing technology.
')
Today, IBM’s decision to invest $ 5 billion (approximately $ 35 billion today) in System / 360 seems natural and almost inevitable, but at the time it looked very risky. IBM has staked its existence. As a result, System / 360 marked the beginning of a new era in computing.
Until 1965, various computational complexes were produced in the world, each of which had its own architecture, element base and, which is extremely important, its own software. Client programs written for one computer could not be solved on a computer of another manufacturer. Moreover, there was no complete continuity even between the models of computers of the same manufacturer. Each computer was designed to order for specific business purposes, so it was unique.
With the release of a family of computers System / 360 order in the computer world has become more. The System / 360’s revolutionism was that all models had the same architecture and OS / 360 common operating system.
S / 360 was the first computer to use microcode to implement many machine instructions, as opposed to systems in which all machine instructions were implemented at the hardware level. A microcode (or firmware, as it is sometimes called) consists of stored microinstructions that are inaccessible to users, who represent the functional level between hardware and software. The advantage of using microcode is the flexibility in which any change or new function can be realized by simply changing an existing microcode, instead of replacing a computer.
Using standardized mainframe computers to handle workloads, customers could create business applications that did not require special hardware or software. Moreover, customers were free to switch to newer and more powerful processors without fear of compatibility issues with existing applications.
The first business applications were created mainly in assembler, COBOL, FORTRAN or PL / 1, and a significant number of these old programs are still in use. You might think, when buying your first phone, that in the future you will be able, for example, to synchronize your contact list with a modern model? Or continue to set records in the famous "snake"? I doubt it. But on modern mainframes you quietly run a program designed for System / 360.
The emergence of a new family of mainframes helped NASA send a man to the moon, airlines to offer online check-in, and banks to prevent fraud. And the examples of the scope of the mainframe does not stop. In fact, mainframes have always been behind the scenes, but now it’s really hard to imagine a world without such computational “monsters” with a clock frequency of 5.5 GHz, 101 core and 3 TB of RAM.
Let's congratulate the mainframe on its anniversary! Tomorrow there will be a general celebration in live broadcast at 2 pm in New York.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/218501/
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