All about the IBM 1130 Computing System

Posted by jruohonen 2 days ago

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Comments

Comment by sillywalk 5 hours ago

It's amazing how many different, incompatible computer systems IBM had back then.

Comment by 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.

Comment by annzabelle 4 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.

Comment by 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.

(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)

Comment by egl2020 1 hour ago

My first computing experience: Fortran on an 1130 in about 1967.

Comment by madanparas 5 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.

Comment by 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? :)

Comment by rahen 13 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.

Comment by dhosek 6 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.

Comment by 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.

Comment by userbinator 5 hours ago

The demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.

Comment by protocolture 5 hours ago

Either it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.