Nostalgia

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Sat Feb 7 15:38:29 1998

> When I worked on a Honeywell DPS-8 Mainframe in DC, the whole third floor
> of the building was a IBM 370 floor. I believe they had five systems in
> all. The fourth floor was a small VAX. The Honeywell was the mid-sized of
> the three systems :^) and our floor was still probably more than half the
> size of a basketball court. The 370 floor would have been the size of
> about 5 basketball courts IIRC with several Terabytes of DASD! Of course
> now you can get Auspex Fileservers that will hold over a Tb using off the
> shelf hard drives.

In general, S/370 (or S/360, for that matter) installations are big, but
they did vary quite a bit. The low end processors are maybe the size of
two medium refridgerators (IBM rarely used/uses standard 19" racks - a
real pain when they meet raised floor tiles), but the high end ones are
huge. The DASDs also vary greatly in size.

I still maintain that one could run one of the small processors at home
without too much dificulty. If someone gets me a S/360 or 370, I will even
prove it!

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Sat Feb 07 1998 - 15:38:29 GMT