Computer History IBM System/370 Mainframe original technical announcements 1970 (data processing)
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Your contribution greatly helps! Thank you! ~ CHAP. -- Computer History: IBM System/370 mainframe. 1970 - Three Original IBM film clips announcing the IBM System/370 mainframe computer, the 3330 Disk Storage System, and the 3311 High Speed Printer. Partially restored from old VHS tape, these are rare unedited, original content from IBM engineers and managers giving their first hand experience at the time of release. Excellent historical content. The System/370 was the replacement line for the IBM System/360. Film Courtesy of IBM Archives. Hope you enjoy these. Run time: 14 mins. Color.
IBM System/370 announcement
www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib...
See also the IBM System/360 Announcement video of 1964
• Computer History: IBM ... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I joined IBM in June 1973, initially as an operator then as a systems programmer. We had a S/360-67 for CP-67 (the 1st machine with virtual storage) and a S/360-40 for OS/360. In late 1974 these were upgraded to a S/370-145 for VM/370 and DOS/VS and a S/370-158 MP (2 MIPS!) for OS/VS2 JES3. Retired after 43 years, but still working “part-time” as a mainframe consultant on the current versions z14/z15 running z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, and Linux on Z.
First IBM machine with virtual storage, it was beaten to market by the Burroughs B5000 series and that was preceded by the Ferranti Atlas series.
What application were running on these machines or what were these devices used for?
At the time mainframes were the major provider of computing power (there were several vendors then, all with different architectures). Mainframes ran pretty much all Data Processing workload. The S/360-67 specifically was designed for "time sharing" (interactive work) with CP/67 and TSS from IBM, and several non-IBM operating systems.
Did you ever try VM on a model 168?
@@oneeyedphotographer Our budget did not run to a S/370-168 in the 1970s, but I knew sites running VM/370 on those machines. The S/370-158 was the first "1 MIP" machine and the S/370-168 was 3 MIPS. My current z/VM system is a LinuxONE III with 13 IFLs at 17,822 MIPS.
I'm sold! I'm contacting my IBM representative right now to make sure the IBM System 370 is right for me. I can't wait until Amazon leaves the whole set-up at my doorstep. :)
What do you need a computer for? I say the world would only need less than half a dozen computers that would serve all of mankind.
@@davidjames666 I'm thinking of upgrading my eight digit calculator I bought at Target to this. Maybe I don't need a fancy-pants 370, but it's time to catch up with the technology.
Don't order too fast, they have something new that's much more powerful. Comes with a telephone built in... and it all runs on batteries you don't replace.
@@scottmarshall6766 Thanks.
Hope you have a big doorstep.
Yep, I was there in the late 70's programming these machines and hanging out in the computer room in summer because it was the coolest place in the building on a hot day! No one would have believed some day we'd have the equivalent of 640 of those disk packs on a little 1 sq. in. piece of plastic called an SD card... or systems sitting on your lap with thousands of times the main memory of those systems!
Yes, love those days of the ice cold data center(!) Good memories! Thank you!
I worked as a computer operator, programmer and service repair tech with each of those devices in the years past and wow how things have changed over the years. From Teletype, vacuum tube core memory then paper tape, cassette tape to floppy disc and then on to hard drives and solid state drives and memory. Methods and storage size has changed so much and each one a much better method and improvement in storage. Amazing when there was a time that a floppy drive would cost about 500 dollars and provide 88k of access storage on each disc then progress to hard drives with 80 meg of storage for only 700 dollars at the time as for as personal computer usage. How would anyone at home ever fill up an 80 meg hard drive was the thought and now one can buy for much less a terabyte of storage on a flash drive for about the cost of a family going out for dinner one evening. lol So glad I got to be part of the beginning of the computer age and now anyone who has a smartphone has a powerful computer in their hands which can do so much or at least we think so for now just like we did back in the early 1970's. lol
Hi Jerry, loved your comment and background story. It is amazing we have lived through so many changes in just this one industry! Thanks very much for sharing your experiences with these early tech devices! ~ Victor, at CHAP
Indeed. I recall back in the day ( early 80’s) we had a 4MB 3031. I was on shift one night, senior Op was so excited, a 2MB upgrade was scheduled. Middle of the night, the council closed off the street below. A semi trailer arrived with a big wooden crate strapped to its tray. followed by a big mobile crane. The machine room was on the first floor. Had to lift the new memory frame up into the room via a big window that had been pulled apart earlier in the day. IBM engineer miraculously arrived just in time as the unit was almost in place to be bolted to the mainframe. For those not familiar with mainframes of that era, the 2MB memory frame was the size of a large double door fridge.
Such a big day for us 😎
@NRG , and nowadays Santa Claus still eludes people hidding the human race price of progress.
Wow... that brought back some memories. I'm a recently retired Mainframe technical support technician (40 years). I started out on a 370/195 running MVT and retired on a Z10 running z/OS v2r2 (with 303x, 308x, 438x & 309x mainframes in between), so I've seen a lot of water go under the technology bridge.
IBM, Amdahl, NAS, Hitachi mainframes... 3330 DASD to DS888x disc array sub-systems, 3480 tape drives to fully robotic STK & IBM tape libraries.
COBOL, CICS, IMS, MVS, JES2 & JES3, JCL, VM (Virtual Machine), REXX, I had to be proficient in all of that stuff.
And... if someone gives me an uninterpreted punch card, I might even remember enough to read the Hollerith code, well... maybe not, since I have trouble remembering what the heck I had for dinner two nights ago.
I have still have one of those 3330 disc packs! I used it for a foot rest under my desk for 30+ years... lol.
Hi 3hnenry21, Wow, thank you for the great comment! I love the "alphabet soup" of acronyms and brand names! We might be of similar age, since I recognize 95% of these terms. It sounds like you had a long and varied career in IT, working with the "big stuff". I bet you are someone who can appreciate how far we have come in speed and storage capacity. Glad you found our channel. Hope you will enjoy some of our other vintage computer videos as well! ~ Victor at CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Yes... I do appreciate just how much IT technology has changed over the decades. I remember how my Grandmother lived long enough to witness going from horse and buggy to Neil Armstrong on the Moon... I feel the same way with IT tech.
When I saw this fast printer, all I remembered was a memory dump.
About 50 years ago, I was engaged in the development of an MVS compatible OS in Japan.
During testing, a programming error causes the CPU to halt and a memory dump to be printed from a high-speed printer.
I remember that one dump list used about half of the printer paper box.
I investigated the cause from the memory dump, applied a binary patch, and continued testing.
I also remember that I took several boxes of dump lists of bugs whose causes were unknown to the office and stayed up all night investigating them.
I was happy to be able to recall the fun memories of my youth with this video.
thank you.
Hi @DogAndbeef, thanks for sharing those stories! You must have had lots of patience to read debug dumps all night. Wow! ~ VK
OSIV/F4 perchance?
Right down to DATASET OR MEMEBER NOT FOUND in TSO/TSS.
CPU speed and memory capacity seem funny/minuscule these days, but that impact printer is a still beast for pages per second output,
quickly consuming an entire box of fanfold green line. I'd imagine it really ate up ribbons.
I worked at Simpsons-Sears Canada in the early 70s as a space planner and was involved in designing the expansion of the existing IBM System 360 data center to accommodate the new System 370 upgrade with associated peripherals. The area was a glass enclosure with the required raised floor for wiring and a dedicated air handling system. They reduced the number of tape units and expanded the use of disk storage. The room took up about ten percent of the floor space and since the building also housed the mail order processing system and inventory warehouse, the floors where very big. Between this and getting the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that had the first kit computer, the Altair 8800, on its cover inspired me to learn Fortran and study computer technology which today is still supporting my family. I still do space planning though!
Hi @audibleeye, being a space planner for mainframe systems back in the 1970's sounds like a fascinating position! I bet it was a challenge to get all the cable connections and power hook-ups done, especially with required redundancy and cooling required. Thanks for sharing your story! Have any data center films of that era?
Actually, the Altair was not the first kit computer. There were some based on the 8008 CPU before it. I had an IMSAI 8080, which I bought in Nov. 1976.
I started working at 16 years old in 1977 in Wellington NZ as a trainee computer operator on 370 125/135 (NZ Dairy Board). My mate type in commands on the console starting with 'A' (alter power/vs command) then 'b', 'c' and so on. When he got to one letter (maybe 'Z' but can't remember now) the command dumped all the accounting records and he got the sack! Fun times! I finished up as an SNA Systems Programmer in AirNZ, Auckland and when I left got to take the front panel of a 3705 Communication Controller with me which I installed in my kids tree house. Oh yeah baby.
A 3705 front panel in a tree house! Wow, that is one idea I never heard of before. Very cool! Thanks.
Fun fact: I believe it was that printer that had a sound deadening hood that opened automatically when it ran out of paper, making it easier to load a new box. You could also raise the hood with a software code. Of course, operators would sometimes leave a cup of coffee sitting on the lid while they worked, so some prankster would run a program, dumping the coffee all over the floor. The printer came to be called the coffee dumper.
That's why smoking and drinks, of any kind, were banned from the computer room.
OTOH, I think making disk platters pizza-sized was no accident.😁
That sounds like the 1403 "Nancy 1" Printer, it was an impact printer with the charters on spinning metal belt that was incredible noisy. i could print 2000 lines of print per minute. I could have gone faster but paper would come out smoking. I did 30 years at IBM, very little of it had anything to do with Big Mainframes. I worked the Mid-range product line as CE and later as Program Support Rep and ended up as Systems Engineer in Marketing. All of that in a big city Branch office.
@dimbulb23 Both the 1403N1 and the 3211 had power hoods.
You're right about the noise; I think it was fixing so many as a CE that has been the cause of my poor hearing now!
I actually bought a 15 disk pack drive - with the disk pack for $25 back in the 90's. Got it running too! Supplied my own 208V transformer and hooked to both legs of my home breaker box. Now I own several obsolete memory cards that way out strip that thing! I love old computers too! I once owned a PDP-11 with core memory. Now, my free upgrade smart phone kicks the ass of ALL these wonderful technologies. It's almost disappointing!
*Guy walks into "dust-free" room in office clothes without gloves, cap or mask*
*Guy opens hard drive*
😱
Raised floor was not a clean room. This was not a fab facility. Generally temperature was the only thing these machines really worried about. They were solid state, dust was not a major concern. Hell, I know of some places that allowed the operators and sys progs to smoke in the machine room.
The hard drives had an independent air filtering system.
@@kevinloesch7568 The presenter said it was a dust free room, not a clean room. You should not walk into a dust free room without wearing a coat and a hat. A clean room is another level above with either air locks and usually full dust free overals. Additionally solid state only refers to the electronics, the platters and heads would not be classed as solid state and whilst in a production test facility would protected against unnecessary dust.
@@kevinloesch7568 Newcastle University had an IBM. 370 go out of service because of algae in the cooling system. It was solved by introducing guppies.
One of the IBM guys where I worked smoked cigars in the machine room.
800 million characters, or theoretically about 800 MB. In 2022 HDDs for longterm data storage (data you don't need to regularly access, like backup) are 20+ TB and HDDs for active storage (data you need to access frequently or constantly) are up to 16 TB per disk. And that's all on a single 4 platter half-height 3.5" drive. The amount of storage you can fit into a normal server rack has become absolutely astronomical. The DiskPac did however have the benefit that you could swap out the discs and thus had infinite capacity, while swappable harddrives has largely gone out of fashion as we got into the terabyte range. SSDs are quickly catching up in size as well, but they still have that problem that they wear out very fast under heavy load, although that too has improved a lot
Around '73 or so, the bank needed more horsepower.
IBM told 'em that the 165 was an interim machine, and that the 168 with MVS was the system that was needed, but would not be available for a couple years, so the bank got a 360/195, which was blazingly fast. Faster than the 168, when we got one, but only had 2mb of real core memory, whereas the 168 had 16mb of solid state. Slower CPU, but could run more simultaneous jobs. After the bank had 3 168s, they didn't need, and mostly didn't use, the 195 any more. So I used it as my own personal PC. Tough life I led.
Hey LIn! One South Van Ness, 1455 Market St, 2000 Clayton Rd... does that bring back some memories? LOL Yes... we know each other.
The 360/195 was one of those machines with the maddening "imprecise interrupts." Ah, those were the days! IIRC we had a model 91 (also with the imprecise interrupts) at APL where I was an intern for a few summers in the mid-1970's.
@@3henry214 NO WAY LOL
I worked for IBM Canada in the 1980s, and one of the jobs I had was to convert RPGII programs to RPGIII because customers were upgrading from System 34 computers to System 38. Size of a deep freeze and 2MB of memory, such heady times. The System 38 took 45 minutes to boot up after a power outage. Yeah. Such an amazing time to be in the industry.
Hi crmonkey63, that sounds fascinating. The System/38, System/34 and System/36 all a bit different as I recall. Yes, 2 MB of main memory was "beefy" back then. - Am wondering how different RPG II and RPG III were? ~ Thank you for sharing! ~ Victor, CHAP
What is RPG?
@@gaborm4767 It stands for Report Generator. You 'program' it by filling in a paper matrix with a pencil like a lottery ticket. If you haven't seen it in action, I encourage you to search for it.
After I left my first job in 1973, I worked in an office which had an IBM System 370/145 computer on the premises. At that time, I was data typist who worked on the IBM 029, 059 and the Extrex Data Scope terminal. The input from the 029 card punch machine and the Entrex Data Scope went into the IBM System 370/145. That was the first time I have ever seen a computer in real life. This film was the first one that showed something that pertained to my former line of work. I am glad that I watched this show. I am somewhat disappointed that the IBM System 360 had to be replaced.
Hi Captain Keyboard, it must have been fun to have worked in an office with such a technical behemoth as the 370. Thanks too, for the info on the Entrex Data Scope terminal. Had never heard of this, but it looks very familiar. Found some info here: entrex480.blogspot.com/p/nixdorf-620-restoration.html ~ Great comment. Thanks so much! ~ Victor, at CHAP
It was all fun and games until you dropped a deck of cards.
@@b-genspinster7895 Please tell me when did I "drop a deck of cards?"
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Great Afternoon to you, Victory Victor! In a few more jobs until 1995, I worked on the Entrex Data terminal, which was used in a key-to-disk operation. In the 1980s decade, Entrex was sold to Nixdorf. Those data terminals had key punch keyboards with the numbers located on the right side of the keyboard. Until next time, Happy Keyboarding!
@@captainkeyboard1007 good grief! It was a joke. Holy moly the feelings worn on the sleeves here omfg!
As a young Engineering Student my University had a 370 that I batched submitted (punch cards or teletype) in 80's. It was that time DOS PC's were coming in but no Fortran Compiler which was a deal breaker for engineering students. When I Graduated the main frame was still there but assume on the way out. When I went into Aerospace we still used main frames (not sure what model), but within 5 years work stations with local processing and batch (Cray) were in use. By mid 90's desktop PC's were in use. By 2010 laptops ruled and remote access was starting to be the norm. Now Laptops and VPN encrypted laptops are ubiquitous... The computing power at our hands makes the IBM 370 look like... well a 370. Ha ha.
????
There was FORTRAN available for CP/M systems before the IBM PC even existed. I recall seeing the ads in Byte magazine. When I took a FORTRAN course at night school, we used an IBM system, but I did my homework on a VAX 11/780 at work.
On a 370/115 in the late 70's, I mainly coded APL in batch mode using optical mark recognition cards. Also loved those clicky IBM terminals. These days I am using APLX for Windows.
Yup, I worked on all those machines... OS MVS JES2
Watching that printer reminds me of all the paper jams I had to clear, and replacing worn-out printer ribbons
Wow... brought back some memories!! Started my IT career on a 370/158 in the mid 70s, as an operator, working up to applications and systems programming eventually to mgmt. Tape drives and the tape library rooms, changing disk drives, and even had two modems for the plants to send info in! And yes, this printer!! We needed to upgrade the 370/158, and upper management at the time considered a 168 (or whichever was the current IBM machine) and an Amdahl. They listed the pros & cons of each, the only con for the Amdahl was "not IBM". We went with the IBM machine.
Be curious to know which country. My father went to Armdah around that time. They had dedicated phone lines to 1 states and data going to at least 2 other interstate plants .
WOW - your experiences sound almost exactly like mine. My company eventually got rid of one of our 370/158's for an Amdahl. The /168 was the "next step up" from the /158.
“Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying An IBM” … a saying carved in stone during those times 😎
In the '70s the bank I worked for had four 370's and a Honeywell. I was one of the late night operators. It was so much fun feeding tray after tray of punch cards into the input reader.
I love the industrial design. The colours chosen still look good today.
I didn't know white boards existed in 1970.
I started my work career at a large computer shop of a bank. At the time we had a 360 with a teletype console. We soon got a 370/158 with a CRT console....How modern!!! I ran all the equipment in this video as I became a lead operator and had to be able to run everything in the shop. Years later as the bank bought other banks we opened the largest DASD farm in private companies. IBM flew in all kinds of people to see it. The bank I worked for was very advanced and wrote their own OS programs that worked better than IBM's did ,,,,,,and IBM ended up buying many of them. I retired many years ago but ran into a IBM engineer that told me those OS mods we wrote were still in use on mainframe platforms.
Thanks for a little flashback. Those were good old days.
Hi Dave, great story. Wow, yes, I remember when banks and companies sometimes had their own in-house IT folks that could write custom programs for the hardware the company bought. Those were very smart folks! I don't know how often that happens now. Some government organizations did this too, but years of budget cuts can erode away the number of sharp IT staff. Thanks again! Glad you liked the video. Hope you will explore some of our other videos! ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject We had two really smart program guys. They wrote a DDA (demand deposit acct, checking) that cut run time in half! IBM bought it among others. Those were exciting days. Thanks for the reply!
The S/360 console was usually a 1052 but there was a later RPQ to attach a S/370 3215 instead. We had 2260s as secondary operator consoles with OS/MVS Multiple Console Support (MCS). Later on those were replaced by 3277 displays and then 3278. There was a primary console variant called the 3278-2A that had a button which would power-off the mainframe (dangerous).
My first job in 1968 was with an IBM 360 Model 30. 32K of memory. With its peripherals it was a mere million and a half (NZ) dollars. Two 5MB disk drives, three magnetic-tape drives, a punch-card reader, a paper-tape reader, an 1100 lines/min printer, a 1419 MICR reader, and that golf-ball typewriter. It filled a largish, specially-airconditioned room. The floor was raised above the concrete slab to provide room for all the fat cables. Now we have Raspberry Pi, which has more RAM storage than used to exist in all the disk-drives in the world.
Hi Nobilangelo, that is an amazing analogy about storage space. Haven't heard it put that way before. Thanks very much! ~ Victor, CHAP
Yep, these were the computers that I remember from Six Million Dollar Man. Very nice. One MB storage back then, and now 4 year olds are playing games on tablets with several thousand times more capacity. Wonder what it will be like 50 years from now.
I first saw a 370 in 1974, IIRC. At the time I was a technician with a telecommunications company, based in the Toronto Stock Exchange. The 370 was used for the first computerized trading system (CATS) in the TSE. While I didn't work on the 370, my work often had me in the computer room. In the late 90s, I worked as an OS/2 product specialist for IBM Canada. While most of my work was on ThinkPads, the "big iron" was still around. I'd often log in with PROFS and one of the programs I supported was a 3270/5250 emulator called Personal Communications.
Yo PROFS! That was a workhorse of a mail system. I remember the 3270 and 5250 emulators, but "Personal Communications" is a term I don't remember as well. Thanks for the memories!
In Canberra we had our very on S/370 model 168. Two, after some time. Initially they ran OS/VS2 Release 1 with ASP, basically MVT with virtual storage, and later the two machines were configured as one (-MP) and ran MVS, each job with its own 16 Mb address space.
ASP managed the workload for both computers when loosely coupled.
Treasury bought a 158, the successor to this, in the same timeframe. I had a little play with that, we had a tape in need of conversion.
One evening I walked into the computer centre and asked whether I could borrow a computer.
"Yes. Can you separate one out?"
"Yes."
I wasn't allowed to actually type commands into the running machine, so I dictated the commands, something like this:
VARY CPU(1),OFFLINE
VARY STOR(?-?) OFFLINE
VARY CHAN(?),OFFLINE
I needed a channel for some 3270s, for 2314(2319) DASD. There might have been some reconfiguring DASD, there are limits to what you can take off a running computer.
The main computer kept on uninterrupted with its workload, I got to run VS1 for a few hours. I don't remember now, I might have been running a SYSGEN for our state computers.
Happily, I was able to put it all back together when done.
Hundreds of thousands of instructions per second, up to 2 MB of memory - what a beast!
for the time it was very fast and could run multiple programs simultaneously... it was a Beast!
My IT career started in 1977 with the local electric company that had a pair of IBM 370/158's and about 24 of those 3330 disk storage devices - we thought they were the cat's meow.
We had a 155 and upgraded to a 158... they were (at the time) the Cat's Meow :)
It was just fifty years ago and I played with those beautiful machines - in a batch manner. I wonder if those people could even imagine how computers/computing would evolve in following fifty years. How about in next fifty years? Since I will be gone in a decade (or, two if I am lucky) it won't matter to me. But, a forever geek in me can't stop wondering.
Hi Charlie, yes, it has me wondering too. Perhaps we will all have embedded microchips by then, helping to repair nerve damage and help people live better lives.~
I worked at IBM's Havant Plant in England from 1970 thru 1979 where System 370's were built. Started in Test Engineering and then moved on to Manufacturing Engineering, where I was very closely involved with production of the new disc drive (or DASD) code named 62PC or Piccolo. Great days and a great firm to work for! Thanks for the memories.
Hi Gospelman, Great story. When you mentioned code name "Piccolo" it reminded me of how many times IBM used "code names" for new and upcoming products. Others in the industry picked up on this too. It seemed sometimes as a security concern (a secret name) and later a marketing strategy. That's just my view. Glad you liked the video. Please check out our other vintage computer films, there may be something of interest there as well. ~ Thanks~ VK
So did you work on the 370 installation at Centrefile in Finsbury Square in London when we upgraded from 360s?
@@1chish No, I never worked outside of the plant premises at Havant.
@@gospelman7222 No worries. That was one hell of a weekend!
@@1chish wasn't Centrefile part of NWB?
I remember seeing the IBM System 370 in action at GTE when my mom worked in their main office in Seattle back in the day. I was so impressed and amazed at how fast the printer could print out all that data coming from the mainframe. I became so fascinated and obsessed with data processing and computer technology in general that I decided right then that that's what I wanted to pursue as a career. My mom told me the future was telecom but I told her the computer would revolutionize everything. Turns out, we were both right. I am now well into my 60's and am still as passionate as ever about computers and technology. I owe a lot to IBM for helping me to become the systems and software engineer I am today.
Hi Mindright, yes, "computers and telecom" both have been tremendous growth industries! Thank you for sharing your viewpoint and vision on this! ~ Victor, CHAP
That printer seems miraculous, even by 2022 standards.
I worked in 1965 at the NC State University computer center as the computer operator for an IBM 360/60 system. Punch cards, those large discs, and tape drives were the entire input/output systems. As someone else mentioned, it is so difficult to look back and think that we would have ever imagined what technology would be today.
Mutatis mutandis, today you basically have all those systems that filled up an entire large room on a small device that fits in your hand.
I don’t get it. What gets put into the computer and what comes out?
At 20 seconds in, three items are listed; the third is "IBM 3311 High Speed Printer". In fact the announced printer was the 3211.
I fondly remember submitting keypunch cards to an IBM 360 in the old days. Love the sound and mechanics of those old punch card machines.
My dad took me into his 360 installation one day . He ran the department. One of the operators gave me a go on the card sorter . I mashed up one card. The operator had to duplicate it. I can’t believe I am writing this with the thousands of cards around why that one had to be replaced. No idea it could have been someone pay for instance. I learnt a lot that day. The raised floor remained long after the company’s computers were consolidated.
@@beagle7622 Omg, you reminded me of those raised floors, thank you.
@@madmotorcyclist yeah, and the pully with two suction cups to pull the floor up!!!
I used to work on punch card readers and punches. Not IBM though.
Using the console printer in a demo of a benchmark was always a bad idea. I was involved in a benchmark test between IBM and Univac small systems back in the day. Both were running the same job streams. And the Univac won the benchmark even though the IBM system was twice as fast. The reason: the IBM programmers didn't turn off the logging feature of their system console. So every time a job ran, the console printed out the procedure commands on an IBM selectric typewriter---which was the bottleneck that lost the benchmark for them.
Ho Oldcougar65, that is a fascinating bit of comp history that I never knew. Thanks for sharing that! ~ VK
I was an MVS system's guy from about 1977 to 1990, and then worked on System/370 storage systems for the next 10 years before moving to the Unix world. I started off with reading ALL IBM Logic Manuals. Wow. Computer software that is DOCUMENTED. Still waiting for that to happen in the Unix world. Right now, I have three personal treasures sitting next to me: OS/VS2 System Programming Library: Debugging Handbook, volumes 1,2,3. 🥰
Hi @henkvandenbergh1301, Sounds like a very interesting and varied career in computers. "OS/VS2" wow, you don't hear those abbreviations too much any more. Powerful stuff! ~
Thanks for your info and comments! ~ Victor, at CHAP
I recently looked at the modern versions of the System Programming Library and the programs I wrote using EXCP/XDAP would still run now under Z/OS.
Someone would have to find and attach some remote 3270 terminals for my major projects.
And JES2 exit 6 which is where I fiddled with incoming jobstream.
The 3330 had its advantages and disadvantages. Because you could swap the packs you could store a lot more data on disk than you had units. Swapping packs though could have its own set of problems, for instance, mounting the packs on the wrong units. This however could be overcome by swapping the address plugs before they were varied online. The most common problem was when they simply wouldn't vary online. This was almost always solved by "popping the plug". i. e. pulling out the address plug and reinserting it.
Hi GrnScrn, that is an interesting solution. Sounds like it could get tedious in a very busy data center though. ~ Thanks! - Victor, CHAP
I was looking for address plugs, but couldn't see them.
私は日本人です、すいません、日本語ですいません、私も昔IBM370システムを教育うけ、日本搬入された、機械を保守、してきました。とてもなつかしく、昔をおもいます、大変いい動画をありがとう、ございます。
Translation: Sorry for writing in Japanese, I don't speak English. Long ago I was educated in maintenance on IBM370 systems, which were imported to Japan. Thinking about those days is very nostalgic. Thank you very much for the incredible video.
I remember it well as an operator in the 1970’s, especially on a Friday night evening shift when we put all 3 machines in stop and go to the pub at 8 for a couple of hours then press start and carry on, those were the days, no VDU’s. Still relate to those days when teaching z/OS courses today, always good for new mainframe intake to know how we progressed to where we are today, punched cards etc.
Hi Michael, the good old days... VDU, VDT, CRT, many young folks today probably don't know what those terms mean. : )
I cut my operating teeth on a 360 / 40 and a 360 / 50 working for a computer bureau in London. I was 24 when we upgraded to the 370 / 155s in '71 which we operated under OS ASP / MVT. I still remember going to work in trainers, hauling boxes of paper for the 8 printers, boxes of 80 column punch card and of course walking to a bank of 3330s to 'can' a drive change and then smelling the head crash
Computers looked like computers with flashing lights until they went into a System Wait State and a core dump was required. It meant something very different from what it does today!
Loved my time there but then went to Swindon to set up an insurance company's 370 system as Chief Computer Operator.
Great memories of some cracking people and always learning.
Hi 1Chish, sounds like an excellent background you have! Thanks for sharing the info. - "Smelling the head crash" that's a great term. I remember the smell of the oil used to lubricate the high speed printing chain too. Those were the days! ~ Charles, at CHAP
TIL: Printers used to be much faster (and a lot more fun) than they are today, and Poughkeepsie is a real place.
Yeah, when he said they invited all the press to go to Poughkeepsie. Now they could be saying "Come to Poughkeepsie; it's the next Detroit..."
@@SenileOtaku Reminded me of the famous line by Gene Hackman in The French Connection, "did you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie!"
My Dad ran a Computer Department for 30 years. I remember him upgrading the Departments 2 360’s to 2 of these. I am not sure how much Ram they had but it wasn’t much. Like 16mb. Mainly used Disc drives for storage, i have forgotten what the reason was.
I had a chuckle when he mentioned the user bein' able to convert from the 360 to the 370. Yeah, physically, that involved luggin' out one & luggin' in the other!
yeah but it was more "compact" than ever. lol
Back when IT was called DP. I watched this transition closely, especially as it moved through MIS.
Hi @lorensims4846
@lorensims4846 ,Yes, quite a transition in naming conventions and labeling, it was fascinating to watch. Back in the late 1950's and 1960's, computer courses, if there were any, were likely in the "Math" department of the university. -- Thanks very much for your comment and observations! ~ VK
I was hired by Honeywell in 1965 as a field engineer trainee. (fancy name for computer technician) Back then it was IBM and the BUNCH - Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell. Used to go out on service calls with a big leather toolbox in one hand and an oscilloscope in the other. Knowledge of the hardware served me well when I moved on up to marketing support and eventually software development. It was an exciting time to be in the business waiting for the "next big thing" to come along every year or two. Of course the biggest next big thing was something very small - the rise of microcomputers as they were first known as. Later called personal computers and workstations, they pretty well ended the reign of the mainframe computer like this one.
Hi OldDogNewTrick, oh, yes, "BUNCH" ! that was a great acronym for that time. It must have been an exciting time to work on a variety of different systems. You must have been very tech-savy hardware wise also, to survive those years. Then the Micros came... Great info, thanks! - If I recall, right before the BUNCH, they called the slightly larger group "IBM and the seven dwarfs -----Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA.... until GE and RCA left the Big Computer business altogether... ~
Still really amazed at how fast that printer at the end can print.
@Author B.L. Alley
They didn't need to be that big, there was a lot of unused space inside them. I think IBM made them that size to be more 'impressive', or decided on the principle that "Bigger Is Better". :)
@Author B.L. Alley
Mine too.
I should show it to my tree.
8:39 In other words, 100 megabytes. Last Saturday I bought two 32 gigabyte MicroSD cards for $5 - over 300 times the storage on a card smaller than my thumbnail. Crazy how much things have changed in my lifetime, I was three years old when those 3330's were being built.
I used the 370/165 in Cambridge as a student. Thanks for the nostalgia.
Hi Robert, glad you enjoyed it!
The first computer, that I worked on, was in 1967. It had 20K (yes K) of memory, no disk drives. 5 tape drives, a printer and a card-reader/punch. We ran an insurance company's systems on it.
Hi Gwine, that's an early one! - what computer was that? ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Honeywell 200.
The first one I worked on was a "Teleregister" in the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 70s. It was made with vacuum tubes and relays and was older than I was. It was used to transmit stock prices to brokers offices.
Was a computer operator on a 360 then we got a new 370 series, now my watch can do more than those mainframes.
De 1978 a 1996, trabalhei com os system 360/40, system 370 Models 145, 148, 158 e por último os systems 4331 e 4341, do fundo do túnel do tempo, saudades.
This is exactly what I did for a living, starting with 370/145.
"As much as 2 megabytes" of system memory. How times have changed.
I've told my kids about this type of stuff. The mainframe I started on had 64k total memory storage. They just can't fathom being able to get anything done with 64k.
@@deepsleep7822 use to be a barrier to entry, vast majority of "programmers" today would be flipping burgers back in the 70s.. ;)
And that memory wasn't cheap. Here's a snippet from IBM's announcement of the 370:
"Monthly rental for a typical System/370 Model 155 having 768,000 bytes of main memory is $47,985, with a purchase price of $2,248,550. Monthly rental for a typical Model 165 with 1-million bytes of main memory is $98,715, with a purchase price of $4,674,160."
And that was for base units, not including storage, printing, or other accessories.
Excellent info. It is fascinating how "IT" was such a massive annual expense from the 1960's to the 1990's. I think IT salaries take a bigger chunk now than the hardware did back in the day. But with outsourcing and "the Cloud", who knows exactly. ~ Thanks for the info! ~ Victor, CHAP
@@ckought69 When I first saw those numbers I thought those must be yearly lease rates! About the only positive is that the lease cost would be fully deductible for the year incurred. The accountants
must have had a big say in the lease vs. buy decision.
He said he was going to "post the results" but didn't give us the URL
Lol....he failed to say we'd have to wait for 50yrs to get the URL
He also failed to clarify which deep learning libraries exist for the 370, in case OpenAI decided to learn GPT-5 on a 370. Personally, as an owner of a couple of 370s, I can recommend them. They are great gaming machines.
and now my phone could do all those jobs in a few seconds... amazing how far the technology has come.
but can your phone read 5081s? ;)
Hahah i hear this argument all the time. Ask yourself how many users does your cell phone support? This machine could Handle thousands at the same time. Your cell phone would come to its knees and melt
I love how he flicked the paper to start the tear. I miss fanfold paper. (But not RPG II or the System/36)
I caught that too :)
An old pro that had done it thousands of times.
Back in 83, I got in trouble for having 1G of disk storage. That was on a 360/370.
Anyone who complains about modern computers should have to use one of these for a week 😏
…indeed! Or clean the damn tape drives at the end of each shift 😎👍🏼
@@MrSteamDragon or sent to the tape library to put rings into the scratch tapes ;)
@@RobertDeloyd ..and cursing when the little tab breaks off..😂
@@MrSteamDragon Yeah!
Retired COBOL, CICS, DB2, JCL guy here, been around a few IBMs.
😎
Cool. Glad you found our channel. Welcome!
I programmed in COBOL, Fortran, RPG, Assembler, etc. Started on a 360 model 30 with 32K of RAM. Took up a whole room.
In 1977 one of my best friends from h.s. got a job as an assistant professor at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton after getting a Ph.D. and working in a research position for a few years. While visiting he took me over to the campus to see their 370-178. It was a very impressive system. No doubt because Binghamton, NY is the ancestral home of IBM, IBM was particularly generous. About a year later I got a job with a major defense contractor whose business was booming at the time. Although my division was a loyal DEC customer, another division had a 370-178 located across the street and we had the option of using it. It was also impressive but not as impressive as the one at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton.
Hi Dale, thanks for the interesting historical info! ~ Victor, at CHAP
There was never a S/370-175. The largest general purpose was the S/370-168, but there was a S/370-195 which was really a S/360 (no virtual storage).
@@jlelliottonMust have been 370-178.
@@dalecomer5951 again, no such machine. The largest DAT S/370 was the 168 and the non-DAT 195. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370
@@jlelliotton Yes, there was. Why don't you try searching beyond the Wikipedia article for a change. Wikipedia is not the last word for anything.
@7:28 “… a dust free assembly area.” Or, at least it might’ve been before he rumbled into there, without anything covering his street clothes.
I learned operations on a 370/135 in my senior year of high school.
I watch these films to see if I recognize any of the server floors at the Poughkeepsie site. Although I wonder where the first film was done, since he said it was seven miles from the Poughkeepsie assembly plant. That might have been Myers Corners Road.
Nice to see some old friends from the early '70s when I got my first permanent job.
Wonderful: in 2021, "new" videos from the S/360 and S/370 keep appearing on TH-cam
These should be on sale in a few months hopefully
Welcome to 10G IBM! 🎉😃🥑😃🎹
Wow, this is so futuristic.
FYI: The IBM sales rep in this video was layedoff in the year 1980, and went to work for apple.
He retired to fla in 2001and now drives for UBER!!!
As a programmer this only means one thing to me: no stack! Yep, IBM felt that a CPU with a stack would be too expensive so assembler programmers had to either make their own in software or constantly save values that were automatically stored on every other system.
Fully agree! I got a Burroughs B6700 or even a modest PDP11 instead of that stackless monstruosity! :-)
Non re-entrant code is so much more efficient in the hands of a Real Programmer! It's also Job Security!😜
A stack is not necessary. If you fully understood the instruction set, you would understand why. I wrote in assembly since 1969 and never had the need for a stack, yet I could do anything, including recursive coding. So a stack is totally not needed
@@rty1955 I also did assembly on our school's IBM 370 and each routine needed allocate a space to save and restore the things that would have been conveniently pushed onto the stack when calling another routine with any other architecture. Yes, we even had to write a recursive function and to do that we implemented *our own stack* from scratch because you have no choice. I won't even get into its dreadful segmented memory that we also had to work around.
Come on, most instructions are "totally not needed" but forcing the programmer to implement them from scratch to save a few bucks was a ridiculous burden that created bugs and extended development time.
@@scottlarson1548 haha "conveniently" its a time waster for sure and def not needed. Just write control blocks simpler and easier. That has been used for decades and works perfectly
The brain dead Intel platform uses segmentation at a much more horrible level too.
Because of my in depth understanding of the operating system and architecture, I got the mainframe to do things in 1974 that even IBM said could not be done. That code is still running today.
2 million bytes of processor storage. Now I have 1,000,000 times that on my ssd pocket drive, 4,000,000 times that on just one of my portable hard drives and 25,000,000 times that on my home server.
They're talking about memory here, not disk storage. You have 25Tb of ram? The disk storage they mentioned was 100Mb, still quaint by modern measures.
Can't wait to see the interview in 50 years where they talk about 5-6 gigs a sec. on a NVME was fast.
PLEASE JOIN US in Preserving Computer History with a small contribution to our channel. www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LCNS584PPN28E Your contribution greatly helps us continue to bring you educational, historical, vintage computing topics. Thank you! ~ Computer History Archives Project
I forgot about batch jobs, jcl decks and production runs.
Hi B-gen Spinster, yes, and job queue's and core dumps...those were the days! ~ CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject I remember a beefy 3081 or 3090 running MVS could have 12 or so initiators but the newer (Z?) systems have 42! Or more! You need an automated system to mange 42! Does VSE even exist anymore?
Don't hold your breath for IBM to compare their products to their best competitors, it won't ever happen even today. The one thing I am most thankful for in my career was never having to work directly with any IBM mainframe or midsize computer. For me it was control data corporation, digital equipment corporation, prime computer, hewlett-packard etc.
Back when I was a computer tech, I worked on Data General, DEC, Collins and Prime computers. I didn't touch IBM computers until the late 90s, when I worked for IBM Canada as an OS/2 product specialist and most of my work was on ThinkPads.
Computer Operator : Gentlemen, I know how anxious you've all been during these last few days. But now I think I can safely say that your time and money have been well-spent. We're about to witness the greatest miracle of the machine age. Based on the revolutionary Computonian Law of Probability, this machine will tell us the precise location of the 3 remaining golden tickets.
[he pushes buttons on the machine; the machine prints out a response]
Computer Operator : It says: "I won't tell. That would be cheating."
[he pushes the buttons on the machine again]
Computer Operator : I am now telling the computer that if it will tell me the correct answer, I will gladly share with it the grand prize.
[the machine prints out another response]
Computer Operator : He says: "What would a computer do with a lifetime supply of chocolate?"
[he sighs, then pushes the buttons once again]
Computer Operator : I am now telling the computer exactly what he can do with the lifetime supply of chocolate.
In 1974 we would send punchcards to the University of Maine and they would run them on there IBM 370.
wondering if you sent the punch cards by "USPS" mail?
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Not sure Our school was only 20 miles from the University. The Teacher collected them, and passed the results back. May have gone by mail. To even think my school had a punch card machine back then was amazing.
I started with tge IBM 360, then the system 3. Back then it took tge computer. The sorter. And the accumulator. All had to be programmed.
Hi Bill, yes, it gave programmers plenty of work to do. : ) ~ Charles, at CHAP
A million bytes. Wow.
Out of curiosity, how did the 370 stack up against 360 clones/compatibles? I recall reading RCA and other vendors had compatible machines that could outperform the original so I'm curious how those stacked up to the 370 at the time.
Hi Kane, very good question. Perhaps one of our viewers can shed some light on that. I know that RCA was one company that left the large computer marketplace just about the time the 370 came out. The late 1960's, early 70's were super competitive for the leading spot in price and performance. ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Later on there was a bit of a speed war from what I recall, Amdahl made a set of 370 compatible machines that were significantly faster than the 370. In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s, Amdahl came out with the 5800 and 5900 series which from what I recall went from maybe 40 to 150 MIPS, but of course shortly after that IBM caught up with the 3090. The Amdahl 5870 (I think it was serial number 2) could run MTS which was also used by a number of 370 sites. from what I recall the Amdahl 470 came out around 1975 and I think was around double the speed of the 370/165 which came out around 1971. Roughly the RCA 7055 from the mid 1960s should have been similar in speed to the 370/135 or maybe 145, but again, I’m going a bit by memory. The 370 was very nice to program, it was an architecture built for higher level languages with a lot of registers, it seemed very similar to the Motorola microprocessor MC68010 combined with a 68451 and many 68440s.
@@dale116dot7 : IIRC, there was a company called NIXDORF that made 360/370 compatible mainframes. It seems Hitachi was in the mainframe business briefly as well.
I worked at a bank with the IBM 360/30/40/50 and 5 Check sorters for a few years. Then took a job at a college running RCA Spectra 70. They seemed faster and easier to use then the 360. Got recruited to work at Walt Disney World for $13,000 yr programming their RCA but could not find decent housing.
LoL psychology CDC JCL VSAM ISAM. What an epical evolution!
BTAM, EXCP for communications are on my resume. TCAM, VTAM.
I never saw it documented, you could read/write to UR devices using RPLs.
I like those IBM white shirts. The only thing missing is the song of the IBM.
Do you guys have any videos on the IBM 3278?
Hi Computer Aided World, I did a quick check and I didn't see any videos with the 3278 specifically (but will check again later). Love the look of that terminal! (FYI, There are some modified IBM 2260 airline terminals in our "Ozark Airlines" video and another terminal I can't make out.) th-cam.com/video/E4LKeYChuWU/w-d-xo.html Good question. Thanks very much! ~ Victor at CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Alright, thanks. I just bought one, pretty rusted, but working for fifty dollars. There is a surprising little amount out there, I'll probably have to ask bit savers. I put up a little video just showing it powered on for the first time (since I got it).
Your intro @00:24 and your TH-cam text description mentions the 3311 printer when actually it's the 3211 printer as seen @11:03
OMG, yes, good catch. Thanks!
Hi, we're producing a documentary movie and we'd like to use this video. How can we contact you?
Greetings Michal, thanks very much for your note. For any commercial use of the IBM content shown, it would be best to contact IBM directly, as they own the copyright for the film, photos, etc. Hope that helps. ~
I went to San Jose to buy one and nothing is there. I would rather run this than anything out today. Have we really gotten faster and does it matter. Seems like we accomplished more in 1970 than now.
"Quite compact" oh how times change
idk why im watching this because i know little to nothing about computers but its still interesting nonetheless!
Hopefully, it is a fun place to learn about them, and their various types and styles. : )
3:44 "you should understand, that to render every frame for the latest James Cameron movie, it would take longer than we have for this program...so we''ll let the job stream run, and my grandthey willl return with the results"
100,000,000 characters = 100 MB
It would be interesting to port DOS/Windows 1.0 to run on the 360 (with a graphics adapter/driver of course).
Note though that the OS of the 370 was a lot more advanced than DOS, despite its age.
Maximum storage of 800 megs of storage.
800 megs of storage was still a lot well into the 1990s on PCs. I remember my first gigabyte hard drive circa 1996 or 1997.
4:18 ! I wonder if they taught that trick in their manuals?
Yeah I noticed the paper flick like a pro.
BTW November 15 is the 50th Anniversary of the Intel 4004 (launched Nov 15, 1971) - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004 - we must all get drunk to celebrate.
0:38 Looks like this demo may have been the inspiration for a similar scene in the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which came out the following year.
Roughly 15 years from the time this was made apple will have a home computer but it would take 20 years for windows 3.1
Apple. Commodore and Tandy had production home computers only 7 years later.... In 1977 Apple released the Apple ][, Commodore released the Personal Electronic Translator, and Tandy released the TRS-80. I remember looking at these machines in stores and wondering how I would ever put together the $900 to buy one......
I remember, at Laings in about 1981, they replaced the IBM370 with a compatible machine which would run a bit faster. Suddenly all the overnight jobs that ran until 3 in the morning were all finished at 9pm, it was such a massive improvement. As a programmer they didn't let you anywhere near the machines very often, but when I started doing overnight support the rules were relaxed a bit. Was always cool to see the register lights flashing, and the huge freezer sized hard drives at work.
Hi Geffers58, that sounds interesting. Do you recall what machine they replaced it with? ~ Thanks for your feedback!
Victor, at CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject I was going to say BASF 760, that's what's in my brain. It's impressive, on reflection, that all the systems we ran, which were very complex, worked without a hitch. On the other hand, things were very much non-realtime.
I can smell that marker.
me too....
Not the best but not the worst. No business buyer was fired for buying IBM.
In the second video, if they're so concerned about dust, why does that guy just walk in, without putting on a suit or going through some kind of cleanup?