IBM System/38 Available for Free, Is It Worth It?

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Mon Sep 22 15:33:49 1997

Some System/38 information:

Apparently there are several models (4, 6, 18, 20, and 40, maybe more),
the best, the 40, being 4.4 times as powerful as the smallest member, the
4. The larger models also have a bit more control store, and on the 40,
some of the control store is some sort of high speed variant (I suppose so
simple microcodes, maybe for simple things like clocking general
registers, can work faster). It also appears that the CPU is one card that
sits over the backplane, and can be swapped out for upgrades. On the best
model, the memory tops out at 16 megabytes, with error-correcting. On the
higher end models, the memory cards can support two accesses. The best
cycle time is 333 nS, 1100 nS is listed for the slower machines.
A total of 6.2 gigabytes can be attached to the machine, as well as 256
printers, terminals, etc. Most I/O is handled by coprocessors to unload
the CPU.

This information was taken from "System/38 Technology: Designed With You
in Mind".

Sounds OK to me...

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Mon Sep 22 1997 - 15:33:49 BST