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sillywalk 5 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how many different, incompatible computer systems IBM had back then.
bombcar 4 hours ago [-]
Until surprisingly late, each computer (and then computer system) was a custom-crafted device.
Even after somewhat "mass market" systems, the software was almost always entirely custom for the end-user.
annzabelle 5 hours ago [-]
For the last 20 years of his career, my dad worked on a program to attempt to migrate the IRS off their dependence on IBM 360 Assembly Language.
Apparently the current attempts to throw LLMs at the problem are running into the issue that there's very little open source IBM 360 code available to train on.
recursivedoubts 6 hours ago [-]
I would love to see people start to move these simulators onto the web, https://infinitemac.org, like, so that the systems were more accessible to casuals.
My first computing experience: Fortran on an 1130 in about 1967.
madanparas 6 hours ago [-]
The DMS operating system on the 1130 had a 5-character filename limit. Chuck Moore wanted to name his language FOURTH, to signal a fourth-generation language. The filename limit truncated the name to FORTH. A disk system constraint from 1968 is why the language is called Forth.
iberator 7 hours ago [-]
I always wondered what if time hardware development stopped in 1969: how far we couuld go with such machines with new fresh software? :)
rahen 17 minutes ago [-]
Not very far off, the IBM 1130 was very much built around its punch-card reader.
I've written a backprop in Fortran IV for the 1130 and while it works, it was tedious.
Add ten more years, and the IBM 801 could have been a CPU architecture good enough to scale all the way to the present day without emulation, unlike the 360.
dhosek 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of our software really depends on things like fast disks and significant memory. I think we might have ended up with the development of memory-constrained algorithms that don’t exist now, and computing would be very much a batch-mode endeavor rather than the interactive process we have now.
bitwize 3 hours ago [-]
In 1969 we had Lisp, and the PDP-10. Interactive computing was very doable even then. I'm sure Stallman would have love for ITS on the 10 to have remained the default.
userbinator 5 hours ago [-]
The demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
Either it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.
Even after somewhat "mass market" systems, the software was almost always entirely custom for the end-user.
Apparently the current attempts to throw LLMs at the problem are running into the issue that there's very little open source IBM 360 code available to train on.
(I've built two online systems for teaching my students computing: https://bcp.cs.montana.edu and https://mtmc.cs.montana.edu w/a similar vibe)
Add ten more years, and the IBM 801 could have been a CPU architecture good enough to scale all the way to the present day without emulation, unlike the 360.