Hacker News Reader

Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

Awesome.

Were some of the smaller machines (135 or smaller) non-microcode? E.g. RTL or TTL hardwired?

Everything in that generation of machines was micro-coded except for the Model 195 which was then IBM's super scientific computer.

Ah, yes.

What did that use internally?

It was all discrete, hard logic circuits centered around a unit called the scoreboard. That term was borrowed from either Burroughs or CDC, I can't remember which. That machine pioneered many of the scalar optimizations that are common in today's architectures.

Oh, all those machines used linear ECL (Emitter Coupled Logic) circuits for speed. Terribly hot logic family but complimentary FET based devices just couldn't yet cut the mustard.

FWIW, the transition from the Model 155 to the 157 heralded the introduction of table driven virtual memory. We called it "relocation" hardware then. :-)

The first engineering model of the 155 used core memory but transistor memory became fast, reliable and cheap enough during its development that a very disruptive re-design was performed across the whole family of machines.

That was my first job out of the university and what fun it was! And what an incredible experience working for IBM was then.

What a fun gig. And what interesting times. I remember the headlines in Computerworld when the cost of a megabyte of memory had dropped to $15,000.

I did very little work on the mainframes, lots on the IBM 1800, a process control computer, and my first consulting gig was on a system 32. Don't ask me what programming language it was.

The new model was called the 158 (and the 168). There was a DAT box for the 155 and 165 to gain virtual memory (aka DAT).

Yes, I think you're right. Clunky memory. And I didn't know about the 155, 165 retrofit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com