IBM's mini computerslack thereof 835
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Mike Ross (I believe it was) wrote on July 8th:
In the 1970s there were two major types of computer terminals available: One was the Teletype 33 (or 35) which used ASCII and ran at 10 chars-sec...
Ontario Hydro nuclear plants were designed with the 1800 in mind for process control: as the plants have a design life of c. 40 years, they have kept the 1800s running. Some special efforts by IBM to gather spares c. 1985, organized through the 1800 group at COMMON. The final release of Multiprogram Executive (MPX) is the most bullet-proof system software which I have ever seen. From memory, a total of ONE APAR was issued against that level, and that some eight years after the release.
As I recall there were two or three different grades of IBM Selectric terminals for various duty requirements. With Teletype you...
In addition to telcom use, there were several packages which had widespread use: a power Debt Management system created by Rich's department store in Atlanta became IBMs internal standard for that application: ported later to the Series-1. IBM also packaged a ship's bridge radar system with an embedded System-7. System-7 limited very much by initial development platform being mainframe only (MSP-7): creation of EDX on System-7 for laboratory use opened up the environment, but too late in product cycle, and EDX became a mainstay of the Series-1 (which leads to RS-6000s which are emulating the Series-1 emulation of the System-7, with the application being code which had been ported from the 1800, which had been developed originally for the 1620-based 1710 process control system (PROSPRO)).
I remember using a GTE badged 2741 type terminal in the early 1970s (late 1960s?) that...
As I have made that statement several times: the 100,000 number was that used by IBM at a COMMON conference c. 1990, when they had the "100,000th" unit on display (it was one of the "standalone" CPUs which used PC DASD). Been there, have the mug.
The count of Series-1s was kicked up by IBM success with some special products built early in the Series-1 life-line: the biggest was a CPU-disk-printer combination which went to every State Farm agency (some 6,000 units). The 100,000 count did not include the "green box" Series-1s used by the Marine Corps, nor units built in Europe, but it might include some upgrades where new processor cards were installed in older boxes. I was still obtaining upgrades for my Series-1s from IBM in 1994 (the RPQ souped-up version of the -K00 processor card), but the serial number on the boxes were still that of 4956-B00 systems c. 1980. Other parts of my environment have ship dates from early 1977 (the Series-1 was announced in 1976).
Actually, there were a bunch more: - CRT terminals, async as well as sync block-mode - dot matrix printing terminals - daisy-wheel printing terminals Most of these started proliferating from about 1972 onwards. A...
Bruce B. Reynolds, Trailing Edge Technologies, Glenside PA