System360 Hardwired vs. Microcoded 400
+--------------- Brian Inglis Yes, that is precisely true. It had additional interrupt facilities, in addition to higher performance floating-point than other computers in its range. +---------------
When I was in school (late 70s) we used a 360-44, and I studied it quite a bit. The 44 had transistorized registers, instead of registers...
I worked in a university computing lab in the late 1960's, and when we were replacing an IBM 1410 (which had been connected to some Adage A-D & D-A converters) with a new machine the finalists were an SDS or XDS Sigma 7, an Adage Ambilog 200, an IBM 360-44, and an RCA Spectra-70-55. The 360-44 was being considered for its realtime capabilities and some special interfacing hooks, but the Spectra-70 won out and I had to build a bus-tag channel adapter from it to our analog-hybrid gear -- anybody remember the CATSUP signal?.
On my web site, I made a particular effort to include the instruction format for the Philco...
A few years later I was working in a different department, this time replacing an IBM 1620, and the finalists were an IBM 360-44 and a DEC PDP-10. The PDP-10 won and became one of my all-time favorite machines!.
The useful weirdnesses of the 360-44 were just not enough in many cases to overcome its lack of general compebreastiveness, I suspect.
-Rob
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System360 Hardwired vs. Microcoded 401
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