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sombragris 1 hours ago [-]
An IBM 1130 system was installed in my country (Paraguay), at the National Computing Center (CNC) of the National University of Asunción (UNA), around 1969-1970. At the time it was, if not the very first, one of the first computers ever installed in my country.
It was used by reservation; that is, someone requested a time slot and got access to the computer for that time (paying the required fee, of course). IIRC, it even ran overnight.
I saw the system while I was a pre-teen, in 1982. At the time, it was still in operation even after more capable systems were installed and microcomputers were making their inroads. At that time its usage was reduced, but CNC folks told me it still was used by some civil engineers who did structural calculations with it.
sillywalk 12 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how many different, incompatible computer systems IBM had back then.
bombcar 11 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 12 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 13 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 13 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 14 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 7 hours 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 14 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 10 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 12 hours ago [-]
The demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.
protocolture 13 hours ago [-]
Either it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.
It was used by reservation; that is, someone requested a time slot and got access to the computer for that time (paying the required fee, of course). IIRC, it even ran overnight.
I saw the system while I was a pre-teen, in 1982. At the time, it was still in operation even after more capable systems were installed and microcomputers were making their inroads. At that time its usage was reduced, but CNC folks told me it still was used by some civil engineers who did structural calculations with it.
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.