DOS360: Forty years 528

Certainly the CPUs are very much faster than the old S-360. However, IMHO, the PC hardware remains inferior to S-360.

The big difference is how S-360 handled multi-programming, IMHO much better than a PC. The I-O was kept properly separated.

Further, S-360 was able to handle far more I-O devices and activity than a PC can. I doubt even today's sophisticated desktop PCs could handle multiple users banging away on them, along with multiple high speed printers, readers and punches. But our DOS S-360-40 handled it smoothly. (Admittedly our 2415 tape drivers were incredibly slow).

Unfortunately, as PCs have grown in size and horsepower, their operating systems have grown along with them. It frustates me to no end that my home PC--an old Pentium 120 is faster than my work PC (Pentium 4 1.5 GHz) because of the bloated junk loaded on the work unit. I try to use older MS programs (ie Word 6.0 instead of Word 2000) because they run so much faster and don't have unnecessary bloat.

Our S-360-40 had enough core to handle good, well written COBOL programs--we didn't have to resort to memory tricks to save space. The resultant programs were maintainable but ran well. (Our substantial Autocoder emulation apparently didn't take advtg of the available core and ran rather slowly).

We had enough CPU cycles and core for spooling and a small online system as well.