A Complete History Of Mainframe Computing

[brownlove]

Great article. Thank you. I am amazed at what humans can accomplish. I am hopeful that we will continue to do great things in technology, to help improve the lives of everyone on Earth.

 

[Guest]

A complete history of the US mainframe market. European companies like ICL and Bull were big too.

Correction: The seven drafs were in the oil indistry. Mainframe was IBM and the BUNCH. Burroughs, Univac, NCR (National Cash Register), CDC (Control Data Corp) and Honeywell.

 

[Twoboxer]

This is so typically American...

If somebody else beat you to an invention, you just ignore it so you can keep your self-centered world view.

An author form any other country would at least have given honourable mention to developments in other countries.

The British colossus was a bigger achievement in my eyes, than the ABC. Moreover, ignoring the first real computer by todays definition (Turing completeness), the Zuse Z3, is hardly understandable, except in a borderline nationalistic context.

I fully acknowledge that the development of computers in the 20th century was mostly an American thing, but history has no room for patriotism.

Geez, he already said he doesn't know why that title was chosen. People who do not read shouldn't bother posting.

Read WWII according to Montgomery and learn that Americans aren't the only ones who often have a self-centered view of the world.

And then . . . geez . . . let it GO.

 

[intelpatriot]

"The choice of computers was U.S. centric, because computers were U.S. centric. I chose only one mechanical computer, and it was made by IBM, since they were the dominant company. To add more computers would have been boring, and none of them were important technological milestones."

 

[intelpatriot]

The choice of computers was U.S. centric, because computers were U.S. centric. I chose only one mechanical computer, and it was made by IBM, since they were the dominant company. To add more computers would have been boring, and none of them were important technological milestones.

Correctamudno!

It's refreshing to read an article that presents a fair and balanced history instead of catering to the feelings of other countries like a PC special olympics.

It's simple. There are no unamerican computers featured because unamerican computers have always been either hopelessly backward antiques or outright thefts of american intellectual property. A situation which continues to this day!

 

[faarcanal]

Pathetic that citizens of the USA can not see beyond their own borders. During the 50's, 60's and a little of the 70's the UK (ICL), Germany (Siemans), France (Bull) and Italy (Olivetti) had best of breed mainframes (from time to time).

The article also reads like an IBM fanboy wrote it. What about Honeywell? Who until the 3031 had the gun mainframe hardware for TSO in the 60's.

 

[Guest]

Superdomes may be good, but wait just a couple of years (as we did here) and try to buy another one. HP said, sorry they are not made anymore. IBM ALWAYS has an upgrade path (software and hardware). IBM does not desert its customer base. IBM, over the years, defines the mainframe.

 

[jcknouse]

Nice article. Brings up memories of computers I read about as a teen and college student.

However, I have to agree with womiller. The Cray supercomputers were both American-made (Minnesota, I believe) and the X-MP series was what I slobbered over during college when I read about it.

As well, there are still mainframes that take up entire rooms. They just have 2e10^12 times the computing power now.

From what I understand, many of the US governmental research labs all still have "room-sized" mainframe computers in them to do advanced modelling and simulations.

 

[Kithzaru]

Amazing article, thank you to the author who put their time into this. Great stuff.

 

[Guest]

It's a little sad that the BUNCH machines were glossed over so quickly. As someone who has played on UNIVAC, Burroughs, and Unisys hardware since the early 1980's, it would have been nice to see a bit more attention paid to the modern Clearpath Dorado and Libra boxes currently available and not just a bit of lip service to the 1107, B5000, and 1100-series boxes of 30 years ago. That's like discussing the history of desktop computing and using the classic Mac as the only example of an Apple machine. 🙂

 

[zak_mckraken]

Great article! It killed an hour of work-time but, oh well! Maybe IBm could offer one of these beasts to Facebook's VP, Jonathan Heiliger...

 

[jimes007]

[citation][nom]intelpatriot[/nom]
"The choice of computers was U.S. centric, because computers were U.S. centric. I chose only one mechanical computer, and it was made by IBM, since they were the dominant company. To add more computers would have been boring, and none of them were important technological milestones."

Correctamudno!It's refreshing to read an article that presents a fair and balanced history instead of catering to the feelings of other countries like a PC special olympics.It's simple. There are no unamerican computers featured because unamerican computers have always been either hopelessly backward antiques or outright thefts of american intellectual property. A situation which continues to this day![/citation]

I do hope you're kidding...
Have you ever read a book on computer history? (Inside Intel is a good starting point for integrated computers)

"To add more computers would have been boring, and none of them were important technological milestones."
So he just accidentally chose only American computers... makes sense... not.

No important technological milestones?

While an army of engineers in America spend millions of dollars to create an almost fully programmable Computer, two lone construction engineers in Germany not only build a fully programmable one in their small workshop, they also developed things like the Von-Neumann-Architecture and the first programming language (Plankalkül). These are now attributed to the Americans who (presumably independently) had the same ideas years or decades later.

The only reason the Z3 was so slow was because radio tubes where too expensive for these guys. They had a design of a tube computer, long before the ENIAC ever saw the light of day.

There are many computer achievements by Europeans that where ignored in this article, but the Z3 is by far the worst.
To ignore the Z3 because it uses relays instead of tubes is the same as ignoring the invention of the electric cable because somebody made a cable out of gold a couple of years later.

 

[Guest]

Fun to read, a nice walk down memory lane. And yet no mention of the last OS that IBM built from soup to nuts that can easily handle 225,000 con-current real-time users accessing tables with billions of rows with sub-second response times. The OS IBM spent over 12 years to replace the square peg through a round hole of CICS over MVS. MVS and OS-360 before it were batch processing systems. In order to accommodate the advent of terminals CICS was developed which was an OS in itself and very inefficient especially when you add the third layer which was the database OS called IMS. To resolve this IBM developed OS400. Which to this day has an advantage that none of the PC operating systems have and very few true mainframe operating systems have, namely, that programs are compiled to an intermediate instruction set that allows for processor upgrades and complete changes in instructions sets at the processor level such that programs don't need to be recompiled to take full advantage of a new processor. Unlike the PC world where there is a lag of a year or 2 before programs get recompiled to take advantage of new processors. IBM in OS400 fully integrated true database functionality with communications in the OS and decoupled the hardware from the OS and software. Three huge layers in the mainframes of the 80's were reduced to one integrated OS. The database software that was developed for OS400 is DB2 and was ported from OS400 to other IBM OS's. Even though they call it DB2 on other IBM platforms most shops using OS400 don't have any DBA's for DB2. I've always said if your DB software needs DBA's then maybe you need to step up to OS400. OS400 is one the best transactional OS's ever built by IBM and large companies like Wal-Mart live and die by OS400.

 

[amagriva]

[citation][nom]ta152h[/nom] The choice of computers was U.S. centric, because computers were U.S. centric.

Sure...Olivetti Elea 9003 a piece of junk with a "US centric wiew"
First commercial diode-transistor logic mainframe (all transistors, first in the world) And a stylish piece of junk too! (you know the italians...)
So useless that General Electric and CIA killed Mr. Adriano Olivetti and Mr. Mario Tchou (the brain behind Elea 9003) a byproduct of "US centric wiew...

 

[Guest]

Not to mention Conrad Zuse is obvoiusly a fail!

This whole article is so IBM-centric... Granted, IBM was the major player here but i really miss the PDP-11 and the Sun E10k in this article.

 

[Guest]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_memory

"The earliest work on core memory was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists, An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, who created the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949. The name referred to the way that the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control the switching of current in electro-mechanical systems. Wang and Woo were working at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory at the time, but unlike MIT, Harvard was not interested in promoting inventions created in their labs. Instead Wang was able to patent the system on his own while Woo took ill."

 

[usafang67]

Consequently, Forrester, who was always looking for better technology, started work on what would later be called "core memory." He passed his work on to a graduate student also working on the project, called Bill Papian, who had a prototype ready by 1951 and a working product that replaced the electrostatic memory in 1953.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_memory
History

The earliest work on core memory was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists, An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, who created the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949. The name referred to the way that the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control the switching of current in electro-mechanical systems. Wang and Woo were working at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory at the time, but unlike MIT, Harvard was not interested in promoting inventions created in their labs. Instead Wang was able to patent the system on his own while Woo took ill.

 

[Guest]

You mentioned the Burroughs B5000 as being the first "virtual memory" system. I was a field engineer with Burroughs in 1976, trained to work on B3500s at USAF bases. The 3500 was the first virtual memory machine. It also had the first head-per-track disk drives -- 3 foot diameter platters with an aluminum frame that held flying heads. The heads were on a manifold that had pressurized air that "flew" them a few microns from the surface of the platter. The drives were 5 megabytes each. The system I worked on had 5 of them for a whopping 25 megabytes of disk storage.

Another couple of systems you might have mentioned were the IBM 1170 and the IBM System 3. The 1170 used removeable disk platters -- I don't remember how much storage they provided, but they were similar to the disk drives used by the PDP-11. The System 3 was distinguished by its use of 96 hole punch cards, about 40% of the size of the standard 80 column punch card.

It's pretty amazing how far we've come in the last 40 years. The netbook I have (an Acer Aspire One) cost $400 when I bought it last year, and has an amazingly larger processing capacity than the zillion-dollar 360-75 I programmed in PL/1 back in '74.

Makes me think of my grandmother, in whose lifetime we went from horse-and-buggy to landing on the moon.

 

[intelpatriot]

Of course I was kidding.

 

[Guest]

"complete history of mainframe computing" my foot. There is no mention of European, Soviet, Japanese systems. But even as a US history, its still missing stuff. E.g. no mention of Amdahl (except to say that he was wrong about something), no mention of IBMs surprise at the success of its early systems. This is not history, this is just hearsay.

**vp

 

[Guest]

Over here in the UK there were two primary mainframe companies, and hence employers ... IBM and ICL. Not a single mention of ICL means that twenty years of my employment life must have been a dream 😱(

 

[quadibloc]

I regret to say there is one mistake. The page on the B 5000 from Burroughs is illustrated by a photograph of a one-of-a-kind computer system, the BRLESC, instead.