Big Blue's biggest mainframe yet is the size of a fridge At least twenty years after pundits first pronounced the death of the mainframe, IBM has released a new one. Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the market, but IBM will be hoping that the billion dollars it's poured into developing the new z13 mainframe will get the big end of town as excited as Big Blue itself is …
I dont get it how IBM can claim that their latest Mainframe can emulate 8.000 x86 servers? Considering that a Mainframe cpu is much slower than a decent x86 server, something does not add up.
This z13 Mainframe gives 110.000 MIPS in the largest configuration z13-NE1, costing millions of USD.
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011915-story04.html
This is only 40% faster than the even slower z12. Since z13-NE1 only has 21 sockets, and each socket is much slower than a decent x86 cpu, how can it replace 8.000 x86 servers? Well, it turns out that IBM assumes all x86 servers idle at 1-2% load, and the Mainframe is loaded to 100%. Now, imagine 21 of the x86 servers start to do some work, how can 21 slower z13 cpus keep up with the work load? It is impossible. IBM marketing division is over ambitious again.
Also, in the link above, the IBM die hard Timothy Pricket Morgan explains that an old IBM P795 Unix server gives 1.6 million CPW. Whereas this z13-NE1 gives 735.000 CPW. This means that the old Power7 server is much faster than this z13 cpu.If you normalize, 32 sockets POWER7 cpus, vs 21 sockets z13 cpus, you see that the old POWER7 cpu is 43% faster than this brand new z13 cpu.
Ergo, the old POWER7 cpu is about 50% faster than this spanking new z13 mainframe cpu. And we also know that the latest x86 cpus are much faster than the POWER7, and even faster than the latest POWER8 cpu. So, tell me how 21 slow z13 cpus replace 8.000 x86 servers?
BTW, this z13 mainframe has 10TB RAM. That is chicken sh-t, considering that the latest x86 servers with 8-sockets has 12 TB RAM. And Oracle SPARC M6 server has 32 TB RAM. And this year Oracle will release their M7 server with 64 TB RAM.
IBM may have done it again, too early to tell if this is as big an architectural breakthrough as the System 360 was in its day, there is very much a market need for safety first with security built-in and persistent, protected and audited real-time transaction analytics available end-to-end.
Mainframe concept is still very much with us, from large flagship first-rate systems to writ small on a chip and wafer, due to the need for absolute security and transaction data integrity for the new internet and of things.
Perhaps true now more than ever in today's tough marketplace and volatile world? Safety first.
Fujitsu, with their partner Oracle, is a major mainframe maker and this development is likely to raise the protected performance bar for both.
Interesting and fascinating to watch how this market reacts and develops...
There is a market need for "safety without investing into software failover and clustering".
These require qualified software developers, testers and in most cases fairly complex test setups to verify failure paths. That costs money and quite a bit of it too.
This is what mainframe addresses and it does it pretty well too.
Probably, if you think you have the space.
This looks like the same racks that the 9125-F2C P7 775 system is packaged in (they're both products from IBM Poughkeepsie, NY), an if so, this is 2 racks side-by-side, with each rack over 2.10 metres tall and 1.8 metres deep. Both racks together would be around 2 metres wide.
In addition, they will not take standard 19" wide rackmount devices without some additional mounting hardware as the 'gap' is 26" IIRC (sorry, I realise I've mixed measurement units).
IBM actually have some quite fancy doors available for their standard T-series racks, if you want to pay for them!
Pretty much all racks have castors now, including supercomputers and mainframes.
I can check, but I think that all of the IBM P7 775 and z196 and the Cray XC40 frames that I can see in the machine room here have castors.
They also have wind-down feet and load-spreader bars when they are in their final position, so that they don't move.
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Even back in the 360 days we had a Johnson bar to lift the boxes on one side to retract the feet so it could be rolled about as needed.
And transistors weren't just a feature of the 360. The earlier 7080/7090 used transistors in their memory (and elsewhere). Of course, they were as big as your pinky fingernail, but they were still transistors.
... I planned the installation of a full height 9076 SP/2 into a normal office space in an IBM building in Basingstoke.
When installed, it was about half full, and did not quite exceed the floor loading weight.
After I left, I heard it had been filled. I had visions of it descending through the 11th floor, then the 10th, the 9th and on to the ground!
@Peter "After I left, I heard it had been filled. I had visions of it descending through the 11th floor, then the 10th, the 9th and on to the ground!"
Indeed it was filled up and we later updated the switch on it. It sat there for quite a while being used by both HW and Call-AIX members.
We also had a S70 with separate disk enclosure next to it. So we must have been way over the floor limit at that time.
Many (many) years ago we had one of the first VAX 11/780's installed in an office with no goods lift. Those systems weighed around 3/4 tonne (and were less powerful than my current mobile phone!). Floor loading was OK, but when it was delivered it was discovered that the only way to get it in the lift was to uncrate it in the lobby, slide it in (1cm clearance), reach round to push the 2nd floor button, and then run up the stairs.
It was about 50% over the weight limit for the lift, but people assumed that the lift probably had a factor of 2 for safety, and there's no-one in it, so it'll be OK. It was, almost. The lift stopped about 5cm below floor level. Ever tried to get a 3/4 tonne box up a 5cm step when you only have 1cm room at the sides to insert fingers, levers, etc.?
They did it, eventually. The DEC service guys said that it went better than a previous delivery, that one had to go in via a window, and just as it reached the 2nd floor it slipped out of the crane's webbing...
A similar lift story from after I left IBM, but not as interesting.
We had a Power 4 system delivered in a T42 rack to a site I was working at in Poole, and to keep it under the weight limit for the lift and to get it through the doors (it was too high for the lift doors) we stripped the drawers out of the frame in the loading bay, tipped the frame on it's side, and then re-installed the drawers in the frame once it was on the machine room floor. All without telling the IBM hardware engineers!
The only problem we had was that the SPCN (Sequenced Power Control Network) cables were put back in the wrong locations, which gave us problems with the I/O drawer identification for the remaining life of the systems, even after they were connected correctly.
It should be noted that IBM pretty much invented virtualization with the 370 mainframe systems in the early 1970's. About the same time, Intel were making 4 bit microprocessors and TTL chips.
The virtualization will be performed either by the PR/SM type 1 (hardware) hypervisor or z/VM.
Read up on Type 1 hypervisors. There does not have to be a host OS, at least not as I think you understand them.
"Read up on Type 1 hypervisors. There does not have to be a host OS, at least not as I think you understand them."
Well presumably something has to control the physical hardware or nothing would be able to be loaded from disk. I'd call that the OS or at least the kernel.
Yes, that's quite true, but if you look at PR/SM, the IBM Power Hypervisor, or Amdahl's MDF (the bare-metal hypervisors I've had experience with), they are deliberately very limited in function. The name Hypervisor (derived from an old alternative name for an operating system, the Executive Supervisor) was coined to indicate that it was a supervising program that was not an operating system. It was very deliberate to not call the hosting environment an Operating System.
It's only relatively recently that you've had Type 2 or 'hosted' hypervisors that sit on top of what one would describe as a normal operating system like Linux or Windows. Examples include the original incarnation of VMware, Xen, KVM and Parallels. I understand that HP's Integrety VM sits on top of HP/UX, although I have no experience.
And then you have things like VMware ESXi, which is classed as a type 1 bare metal hypervisor, but is really a canned Linux stripped of all functions that are not required to host other systems. Mind you, you could probably say the same about IBM's Power Hypervisor, but that is so deeply embedded in the firmware of Power systems that it's relatively difficult to see that it is Linux at heart.
Complicating it still further are Oracle/Sun's containers and IBM WPARs, which are not true VMs but still allow you many of the advantages of partitioning.
It's all getting complicated.
FYI my 2006 paper on virtualization and hypervisors written for the analyst briefing where we told them we were going to do Power virtualization is here: https://cathcam.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/virtualization-technology-outlook-and-ibm-directions.pdf
I think currently the Docker style containers is the more interesting at the moment. Many ways somewhat similar to CMS. I still think that a CMS style container, where you standardize the I/O is the optimum app approach, but as we learned with Java, that will never be enough and developers will always be looking for that added/extra way of trying to optimize.
You got me thinking back more than 25 years to my training on Amdahl's Multiple Domain Facility (MDF) that I talked about in my last post, and I realised that back then, hypervisors did not really virtualise I/O.
What early hypervisors would do was to segregate memory and access to I/O channels (literally in the IBM mainframe world, but I suppose analogous to a set of disks or other devices hung off of a single adapter in more modern thinking), and provide a time-slice scheduler between partitions for the CPU.
All handling of I/O was performed natively by the hosted OS, including boot block requests, and it was only in very rare situations (such as extended I/O interrupts) that the hosted OS even knew it was running in a virtualised environment.
What this meant was that a hosted OS had to have complete and exclusive access to a string of disks, or indeed any other device, and all the hypervisor had to do was check that a hosted system did not try to access disks or other devices that were not presented to it.
The most difficult part of slicing a machine up like this was making sure that device interrupts were handled by the correct hosted OS, the one that had initiated the I/O operation.
There was virtualised addressing for each LPAR, so each hosted OS ran as if it has it's own contiguous address space starting at 0, and running up to the memory address configured. Additional protection was provided by memory having access keys attached to each page, and a hosted OS had to have the correct key to access a page, and each LPAR was only given it's own memory key. I think this memory keying was a hang-over from the early version of IBM VM, which did not have a fully virtualised addressing scheme.
It's only since you have shared virtualised I/O to the hosted OSs that hypervisors have become particularly sophisticated.
When will these Old IT Grey suits getting fat on their pensions realise that Mainframe never died out , it just got turned into a buzzword called "Cloud".
As a young programmer, I can really tell that El Reg is populated by an ageing demographic of foosty old IT professionals who have long since traded in their development skills for pseudo architecture jobs where they are so abstracted from the real world of IT, they can only make a connection by sounding off the buzzwords you find on this site's articles and white papers.
The principles of IT are constant, however they keep renaming and re branding those principles every five years to sound like they are fashionable e.g.
Mainframe --> Cloud
Schema-less Data --> Big Data
Usability --> Happiness
Death to the Architects and managers, vive le Developers.
I bet few of the script kiddies who call themselves programmer would not know about such things.
I love to wind VB programmers up by asking them to explain the following:
1. Recurssion
2. Passing functions as parameters
and how can they be implemented in VB...
I shall assume that you mean pre .NET (i.e. real) VB.
1. Recurssion isn't a word. Recursion, on the other hand, is trivial in VB. You will probably want to precede your parameter names with the ByVal keyword.
2. Use the AddressOf operator and a suitable declaration of CallWindowProc.
Next!
-A.
Is 'recurssion' a louder version of recursion - a cross between recursion and percussion - something used in executables where the cymbal table hasn't been removed? (Was going to make a joke about Marimba and Castanet but I see a once proud technology that got Wired's front page in its day doesn't even rate its own Wikipedia page - the ultimate insult - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanet_%28disambiguation%29)
@captain veg & John Styles
You've obviously been around too long!,
Firstly you both spotted the (unintentional) typo. But more importantly you actually understand the questions! I've found many 'developers' first response (other than the blank faces) to these questions to be:
1. What's that?
2. Why would you want to do that?
Captain Veg, you get extra points for not only knowing that VB changed significantly with .NET, but also how to go about coding these useful constructs. Although if truth be told, they should be used with caution and eyes wide open in real world systems, because as we all know stacks can and do overflow and it is relatively trivial (particularly if you are using ASM or C) to play around with values held on the stack or in heaps...
John, you also get a point, I had forgotten all about Castanet - it has obviously been too many years since I had the 'joy' of deploying BMC's products..
OP Here,
Why would anyone use VB, unless you're wanting to implement some Macro in a Defect per Function Point spreadsheet (a completely useless tool for QA measurement), just so you can pass it onto your Senior management/ overlords , thus screwing over developers while you get a big payrise.
Java / C++ / SQL Developer
Latterly because of a large legacy codebase. But in the first place, because it was the only way to get a Windows app up and running in a sane amount of time. I'm talking about the Windows 3.0 timeframe. There was no Java. C++ was new and didn't offer any help in building graphical UIs.
Having previously made a living writing C and assembler for DOS I invested in a copy of Petzold. I counted 80-odd lines of code in his "Hello, world" program, just to put some text on screen. VB could do that with a few mouse clicks and no code at all. No contest.
-A.
I love to wind VB programmers up by asking them to explain the following:
1. Recurssion [sic]
2. Passing functions as parameters
and how can they be implemented in VB...
Step 1: Write LISP interpreter in VB.
Step 2: Done.
Per Kolmogorov Equivalence, all Turing-complete programming languages are not only capable of computing the same functions; they're all capable of computing the same functions using programs of the same length, except for a constant increment which is small relative to the size of large, complex programs. That increment is the length of an interpreter for language B, written in language A.
Nothing old about negative zero, our code still has some special case code to suppress them, left over from when Microsoft changed the behaviour of the C runtime in VC++ 2005. fortunately -0.0 and 0.0 are equal so the code just tests for equality and then uses 0.0. <oldfart/>
> When will these Old IT Grey suits getting fat on their pensions realise that Mainframe never died out , it just got turned into a buzzword called "Cloud".
Yeah, we know.
We've *forgotten* more buzzwords than you've ever *learned*.
Now get off my lawn!
Hey youngster - stop playing on the mainframe lawn and go in play in the Android/iPhone park with the other pesky teenagers on TheReg....
Once you've read enough Gartner reports declaring everything you use "dead" and replaced by the latest flash in the pan, read up on various subtle forms of humour such as irony then you can come back for some more grouchiness...
Well, I never saw the point of managers until I became one, ditto directors. But I at least had the sense to keep my opinion to myself. As you seem not to, you may have made a career limiting decision.
Here's a hint; businesses run on customers giving them money, and someone pays for the pizza.
So whenever you have a guest they will oogle it in disbelief while you close the door via remote control, then lean forward and whisper: "I'm Batman."
At least you will know how to operate it, contrary to that darn espresso-monstrosity that nearly cost as much and now only collects dust while you suffer the humiliation that is Nespresso.
Anyhow, this could do better. Why are the door designs not mirrored? Does it have a faint purple glow oozing out from inside? Do the doors make a cool decompression noise when opened? Can you program it to rumble, hiss and growl when certain people are nearby?
"At least you will know how to operate it, contrary to that darn espresso-monstrosity that nearly cost as much and now only collects dust while you suffer the humiliation that is Nespresso."
How hard can operating an espresso machine be? Does yours have black buttons labelled in black letters on a black background with little black lights that light up black to show that you have done it? We have a pretty swanky espresso machine at home, and even I can operate that.
And I don't even drink coffee (to me coffee is to my taste buds like Vogon poetry is to my ears, and no, that is not due to how I make coffee)
I have sent an email to the Office of the Prime Minister - I'm retired and they can't make trouble for my company - spelling out why their universal backdoor policy will not work and would in fact backfire on UK business, adding that it would only be secure when the Met and other police forces are somehow cleaned of the criminals known to have infiltrated them. I'll let you know (insecurely) when they come for my BlackBerry.
It is funny though that IBM are emphasising the need for encryption just as the goons who advise Cameron are telling him it must be stopped, because, terrorism. By the same logic we need total nudity everywhere, and transparent luggage, because that will stop gunmen and bombers.
"I have sent an email to the Office of the Prime Minister - I'm retired and they can't make trouble for my company - spelling out why their universal backdoor policy will not work and would in fact backfire on UK business"
You appear to be under the impression that the Office of the Prime Minister gives a toss.
In my experience when an outfit is going ahead with a blatantly stupid idea despite being given a metric shitload of reasons why it's stupid, the chances are you don't understand their goal. In this case the goal may well be totally insane from a rational proletariat point of view, but from the point of view of keeping Dave, his school chums and their sprogs in safe and in power forever it may make perfect sense.
Besides if they do destroy the UK, it's pretty easy to emigrate these days, even Idi Amin managed to retire somewhere sunny...
They never had red stripes until the naughties...
The original systems were always beige side panels or IBM Blue and the front panel a contrasting colour of black(assuming you accept black is actually a color).... its only since the x-box generation did they switch to black. Amdahl systems were of course red...
See this picture http://blogs-images.forbes.com/davidewalt/files/2012/03/ibm-system-370.png
Why oh why have you got the massive "Hero" picture at top and then the same bloody picture, a little smaller, 4 paragraphs later. It's like you're doing this deliberately now........
Please please please stop putting massive friggin' pictures at the top of articles. It adds absolutely nothing and just pisses everyone off! You are not The Metro!!
Can anyone explain the point of them? It goes to show how poor your design is when I actually spent my time writing this instead of actually reading the article...seriously, couldn't read it! your website makes people that angry now.
Ensuring that it won't be welcome in the UK after the next election, the z13 has enough grunt to handle “real time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale”
I suspect that IBM's reply to Dave Cameron's request to nobble encryption will be along the lines of:
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJ8cAGm6JE
Upvoted, but then I got distracted wondering it a obelisque is an obelisk sitting at an oblique angle.. and would that impact the MTBF of the spinning rust?
But a pair of those beautiful monstrosities sitting either side of the throne in my EGVL canted slightly forward to give the impression of looming over petitioners/peons with the growls mentioned earlier in the thread.. that makes me happy.
I think the sort of people who possess evil volcano lairs would prefer a few odalisques, but whatever floats your boat.
Unisys are also releasing mainframes all the time, notably ClearPath MCP machines continuing on the original high-level system structure of Bob Barton's B5000 from 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP
http://www.unisys.com/offerings/high-end-servers/clearpath-systems/clearpath-libra-systems/clearpath-libra-8380-and-8390-systems
and you can get it on a laptop
http://www.unisys.com/offerings/high-end-servers/clearpath-systems/clearpath-libra-systems/software-developer’s-kit-on-clearpath-lx-laptop
IBM did not usher in the mainframe era - Burroughs beat IBM by over a year with the B5000.
https://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/fol...
The B5000 not only beat IBM in terms of time, it was a far more capable machine, the first commercial machine with virtual memory - from Manchester university, ten years before IBM claimed to have invented it. In fact, most systems need MMUs to implement paging, but in the B5000 it is built in from the ground up with no need for MMUs.
Burroughs used plug and play - not only did it allocate and deallocate memory on the fly (part of its stack mechanism as well as virtual memory), but peripherals could be plugged in without the need to do an IBM-style SYSGEN. I was told last year that on IBM zOS you still need to allocate memory partitions for programs - surely this cannot still be true?
The B5000 line is still well in advance of IBM in the Unisys Clearpath MCP systems.
There were so many other innovations in the B5000 that it is still ahead of the time of 2015. In fact, all computing people should study its architecture and understand why it is still an achievement over 50 years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The IBM 360 by contrast was retrograde and a disappointment to the computer architects of the time, notably Edsger Dijkstra who said "In my Turing Lecture I described the week that I studied the specifications of the 360, it was [laughter] the darkest week in my professional life".
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/user...
The achievement of Burroughs and its chief designer, Bob Barton - who very few computing people have heard of, knowing the names of Amdahl and Cray - should not be underestimated, especially as Barton went on to impart many of his different ideas to students as a professor at University of Utah, including Alan Kay and John Warnock.
The B5000 was also designed around a high-level language, ALGOL, which is far superior to C, which is not really a HLL, but rather a structured assembler, exposing all the foibles of underlying machines. The B5000 had its OS and all systems software written exclusively in ALGOL, years before Unix with C.
If one gets excited by mainframes, the Burroughs line is it. IBM is just ho hum.
The B5000 may have been groundbreaking but, as it ended up being emulated on Xeon processors, doesn't that mean that the original architecture was a dead end? Computer scientists may wet themselves over clever architectures, but at the end of the day the IBM 360 was successful because it was affordable and there were programmers available. Affordable and scalable downwards has turned out to be the key to success, whether it's 8086 /Windows or ARM/Android.
"Computer scientists may wet themselves over clever architectures, but at the end of the day the IBM 360 was successful because it was affordable and there were programmers available"
"Affordable" as opposed to offering better price/performance ? :)
I suspect IBM's *existing* dominance in the market place, Lawyers, FUD and marketing muscle had a fair amount to do with 360's success. For folks to succeed in the face of that kind of opposition they need to offer a performance/price ratio that far exceeds other offerings (at least 5x better).
The B5000 was a cracking piece of work - it does make the opposition of the time look terminally retarded. I can't help but wonder if the industry as a whole would have been more productive over the past decades if something like B5000 had become ubiquitous. Even without IBM et al dominating it would have been tricky though - I think they would have had to have cannibalised their high margin business to do so - few companies are capable of biting that bullet. DEC actually started out by punting small low-cost machines, and they shipped the LSI11 (a 4 chip processor) in 1975 and followed up with the F11 (1979). Then they went backwards with the VAX-11/780 - they built it out of 74 series TTL and 'shipped' it in 1977. :(
"...I suspect IBM's *existing* dominance in the market place, Lawyers, FUD and marketing muscle had a fair amount to do with 360's success...."
That is correct. In fact, the very term FUD originates from IBM, handling the Mainframe competitors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Definition
"...FUD was first defined with its specific current meaning by Gene Amdahl the same year, 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products...."
Hi Arnaut. >>The B5000 may have been groundbreaking but, as it ended up being emulated on Xeon processors, doesn't that mean that the original architecture was a dead end?<<
Not at all. The B5000 (Now Unisys Clearpath MCP) was designed as a high-level architecture with features such as virtual memory and security baked in. Security was baked in since processes are not allowed to write out of bounds of allocated memory (both on and off stack). This was surprising for 1961, when security was hardly an issue. The basis of most viruses and worms is being able to write out of bounds.
The B5000 took a different approach to computer architecture - it had software people design the architecture to be programmable, rather than leave it up to electronic engineers who designed circuits pleasing to them then turning it over to software engineers to program in assembler and find the machine was pretty well unprogrammable.
http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1961/5058/00/50580393.pdf
Towards the late 1970s with more powerful hardware it was realised the architecture could be done on cheap commodity processors and emulated. This is the basis of today's virtual machines such as JVM. It also came out of the B1000 which had a different emulated machine for every language.
http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1963/5062/00/50620169.pdf
The B5900 came out early 1980s.
http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/BurrMain.html
Since then the B5000 line has practically been all emulated.
As for IBM 360's success - IBM had a very 'effective' (to put it nicely) marketing force. Burroughs marketing was hopeless. But this kind of success does not reflect on the architectural merits of the machines, because Burroughs wins hands down. It is not just a clever architecture - it is a very practical, secure, and efficient architecture. HP also came out of Burroughs and is where their revers-polish calculators came from.
"Affordable and scalable downwards has turned out to be the key to success"
That is exactly why current B5000s are emulated. You can go from running it on a laptop to biggest transaction-processing mainframes.
Now I could bemoan the fact that Unisys management did not get it (the way Xerox management did not get what PARC were doing). The architecture should have been decoupled from mainframes and made for personal processors.
Any future development in architecture should take what is in the B5000 and extend it to today's needs, rather than wallowing around in low-level insecure architectures.
"...The B5000 may have been groundbreaking but, as it ended up being emulated on Xeon processors, doesn't that mean that the original architecture was a dead end?..."
Well, you can emulate IBM Mainframes on a laptop with TurboHercules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29#Performance
Does that mean z/OS is a dead end? In fact, IBM has threatened and sued TurboHercules, because it was so effective in emulating IBM Mainframes. An old 8-socket x86 server can emulate a mid sized IBM Mainframe, which scared IBM so the TurboHercules emulator has been stopped. Or... "effective" is maybe wrong to say, more correct would be "IBM mainframe cpus are so slow, so you can easily emulate a mid sized Mainframe on a x86 server giving decent cpu performance".
Emulate an IBM Mainframe on a raspberry pi:
http://www.millennialmainframer.com/2013/12/hercules/
A nice history lesson, for those unaware of the B5000 and its descendants, spoiled by unnecessary ranting.
Certainly the B5000 architecture has much to recommend it. That doesn't mean the 360 architecture doesn't; and more importantly, it does nothing to reduce the historical importance of the 360 or the present importance of its line.
Similarly, while ALGOL has ... some things to recommend it, it also has some grievous infelicities, such as pass-by-name, as the Man-or-boy Test demonstrates. And C is by no means "a structured assembler"; that particular mischaracterization is popular but meaningless, even for K&R C.
As for Dijkstra's comments - well, the man was a crank, frankly. A fine computer scientist who gave us many useful things, but he's mostly remembered for a series of complaints about various topics. I appreciate a good curmudgeon as much as the next fellow, and indeed I've enjoyed reading Dijkstra's attacks on all and sundry, but being criticized by the man is pretty much irrelevant.
Hello Michael. >>Similarly, while ALGOL has ... some things to recommend it, it also has some grievous infelicities, such as pass-by-name<<
No, pass-by-name is the basis of today's higher-order functions. It is pass-by-reference that is a disaster and the mainstay of C. That is a disaster and makes C a low-level language rather than a HLL.
C really isn't a HLL. Operators such as ++ attest to that. OK, characterize C as a low-level language instead of structured-assembler if you will.
>>As for Dijkstra's comments - well, the man was a crank, frankly.<<
That pretty much undermines any value in your comments. Dijkstra was one of the programming geniuses of the 20th century. What are you thinking of as his complaints? "Goto considered harmful" perhaps. In fact, Dijkstra hated that title, but was forced to use it by his publisher. However, if we are to have structured programming, unbridled gotos are forbidden. Donald Knuth showed how gotos may be used in an entirely structured way, but that does not justify the unbridled goto.
Dijkstra's writings on many topics are available on the web and still make very good reading.
One of his observations was that there is a big difference between European computation science (software based) and American computer science (hardware and product based). That is really the difference between Burroughs and other vendors - Burroughs (and Robert Barton) believed in computers that should be programmable and designed by programmers. All other vendors more-or-less designed circuits first and then told programmers to try and make something of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton
The IBM 360 does have something to commend it - the best thing to come out of it was Fred Brooks' Mythical Man Month. But he might just be another crank curmudgeon in your assessment?
The most practical computer ever marketed was the UNIVAC II....vintage 1958-66....
Being water cooled we were able to chill 2 cases of beer in the water tank without impacting the system.. Looks like one could not find the space to chill a single bottle let alone a six-pack in z/13
Sigh... what was more important, keeping beer cold, or keep food warm? When working night shift at P&O Computer Services, circa 1976, we could get takeaway and put in in the back of the IBM 370/145 and it would keep it warm while we played Adventure on VM/370 R3.
As I said earlier, some of the Redhat are doing now, vaguely reminds me of the CMS compatibility from back then... I can still run the 1976 version of Adventure in VM/ESA today. Where as loads of, but not all my Windows 3.1 programs no longer run on Windows 7...
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