Mainframes were extremely slow compared to modern computers... | Ken Shirriff

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Mainframes were extremely slow compared to modern computers but they could support rooms full of users. The trick was that mainframes offloaded the text editing to the terminals, while a special "I/O channel processor" pumped data directly into memory without using the CPU. 2/14

A photo from a 1984 IBM manual showing a room with multiple IBM 3179 Color Display Stations. These look a lot like PCs, with large keyboards and CRT displays, but they are data entry terminals.

Like 16 July at 18:41 | Open on oldbytes.space

3 comments

mwkoehler

@kenshirriff awesome to be taken back to those days. Any idea what this board was from? I’ve long since forgotten.

18 July at 17:55 | Open on mastodon.social

@mwkoehler I think those 5120745 chips are 2K static RAMs. So this board is memory, probably cache, maybe for a System/370 computer.

19 July at 15:04 | Open on oldbytes.space

Tariq

I actually used a 3270 wayback in 1990s

I feel quite lucky to have been part of a tiny piece of computing history

The server side ran an OS call MVS I think but I'm not sure. - it definitely had pre-TeX typesetting .. roff, troff?

22 July at 21:30 | Open on mastodon.social