A whole generation of analyst programmers cut their teeth on the IBM 360. It all started April 7, 1964. Anyone with IBM mainframe experience had their choice of jobs.
I never was lucky enough to get IBM experience. I worked on a Honeywell H-6000 running GCOS 3. Then later a Vax 780 cluster running VMS. I always wanted IBM experience (not a 360, that was obsolete when I started). My paycheck would have been a lot better.
50 years in the modern computing age. IBM guys, did the 360 support Time sharing and terminals? Or was the 360 all card reader batch processing?
Cool, my first assembly language. Those were the good old days. The primary I/O device was a hole in the wall. You stuck a deck of cards and some tapes through the whole and you’d get back more cards, tapes and a stack of fanfold greenbar the next day.
My first, second and third job out of college were huge software development projects based on the IBM 370 platform. MVS/TSO/CICS/DB2/JCL/FileAid/COBOL…
Yes, the 360 supported terminals. I supported a metric shit-ton of 3270 terminals (and emulators running on the PCs I supported) when I worked for the bank.
You know what’s fun? showing someone who’s only ever had a 3270 terminal how to play solitaire while their job is running in the emulator after they’ve been upgraded to a PC. That’s fun.
Also, showing them what real email can do when all they’ve ever had was OfficeVision.
Indeed it did. - The 360/67 model anyway.
The MIT systems programming class used a 360, and we wrote in assembler. We had a special class on JCL.
When I was at Illinois our compiler class used the school 360. The best moment of my first year was when I discovered a system that let you submit files more or less on-line. I read my two boxes of cards into the file, and never had to worry about dropping them again.
The great advance of the 360 was that it offered a range of capability with the same instruction set, revolutionary at the time. The lower end versions were microprogrammed, the higher end ones hard wired. Microprogramming allowed them to offer emulators for older workhorse IBM computers, so that companies buying a 360 did not have to rewrite all their assembly language programs.
I encountered a bit of IBM mainframe usage in college. From the user perspective, it was not necessarily a pleasant experience. It was a very controlled environment, starting from the JCL (Job Control Language) that went at the start of your deck (there were volumes of documentation just describing how to tell the computer how to run your job) to the room where you waited for people to emerge from the bowels of the computer center carrying your print out. Learn how to use an IBM 360 and your future career involved a lot of white shirts, suits, and unexciting neckties.
There was a notion back that would astonish current computer users – you had to pay for your computer time. And it was amazingly expensive. Now, because we were in class, it was all “funny” money, but you’d get an allowance of say, $50.00 worth of CPU time, and that was it. And you couldn’t do a whole lot of compiling and execution with $50.00 of computer time. So, unless you could wrangle some extra computer time, computers were strictly for work. Except that people still figured out how to play Colossal Cave under the radar somehow.
Still, everything about the IBM 360 brings back the memory of the days when corporations had strangleholds on their monopolies and fought desperately to keep them. This was the era of Ma Bell and IBM – if you wanted to use a phone or a computer, you did it their way and paid for the privilege.
I actually consider myself fortunate – one of my advisors had been exposed to Unix. So by the end of my senior year, I was being introduced to DEC machines running Unix.
I used an IBM 360/67 with TSS in a summer job (didn’t realize TSS had such a short unsuccessful life, but I did use it briefly). Shows how long I’ve been playing with computers! My mother tongue is Fortran IV-G, and used WATFIV (WAterloo Fortran IV) as an undergrad in university.
Thinking back into the deep dark recesses of distant memory, pretty sure WATFIV was WATerloo fortran FIVE, since there was a WATFOR that I never used (one of my textbooks was titled something to the effect “Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV”
Fuck the 360. Fuck IBM and Fuck punched card. I was lucky to get in 2 compiles a day in college. But it did instill the discipline of thinking long and hard before doing :rolleyes:
I was barely born when the IBM 360 came out in 1964. Wasn’t it responsible for bringing in the modern computerized office? High level languages like COBOL and FORTRAN made it easier to implement accounting and payroll. Terminals meant staff in those offices could enter data through time sharing.
It seems like the 1950’s computers were much more task oriented and their size and cost made them too expensive for even the mid sized companies. Everything learned in the fifties went into the IBM 360.
Being an obnoxious grad student at the time, long ago I recall making a complaint to the computing services department that they shouldn’t make terminals available to the undergrads because they’d waste time sitting in front of them and hogging them all day rather than submitting card decks, getting listings back, thinking about what went wrong, correcting said card decks, submitting card decks…
(Yes, in hindsight I do fully admit that I was rather too obnoxious for my own good at times :D)
Ah the 360. We, too, had one in our college. (FORTRAN? It’s like a second language to me.) My first year, we used punch cards. Even then we knew how ridiculous that was. Next year we got terminals. Still had to wait for the fanfold printout to be put in the slot. I think by the end, we could run the programs on the terminals.
At my first job, in 1985, we had an IBM PCII. One. For the entire department. (And one CADAM workstation.) We were high tech!
I remember seeing one of the first models on display at the Seattle World’s Fair. I was completely overwhelmed by it and that experience probably was the seed for 40 years of mucking around with computers.
Got some hands-on experience with a mod 20 running RPG. Ghods, what a horrible language that was. Later on, did some serious COBOL programming on a mod 40.
Not “!m”? (Or up-arrow, enter if it was the last command. You do have a different window for each operation, right?)
First programming course: dial-up to a 360 using Model 33 Teletypes. Variant of PL/I. Going to an 1130 and Fortran II, punch cards, later was a huge step back.
But ditto on the discipline that 2+ hour turnarounds teach you.
I believe you’ll find that typing (shift+1)-m is actually more work than just typing m-a-k-e.
And while up-arrow would work, I will have typed several other commands in between each make, which means perhaps several up-arrows with a brief pause to see if that’s the commandline I want to execute or something miscellaneous.
So the cost of optimization is actually greater than just doing it the stupid, straightforward way that always works.
