
Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today - stargrave
http://www.cpushack.com/2018/05/27/mainframes-and-supercomputers-from-the-beginning-till-today/
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skissane
> The first mainframe was created by the well-known IBM in 1964

Were the IBM 700/7000 series (1953-1964) not mainframes? I would say they
were.

And what about other vendors pre-1964 machines, e.g. UNIVACs. Were they not
mainframes too?

> you need to determine what the super-computer differs from the mainframe and
> which is faster

I'm not convinced that "mainframe" and "supercomputer" are necessarily
mutually exclusive categories. What about the IBM 7030 Stretch? Doesn't it
belong to both?

There have been supercomputers with an S/360-descended architecture. For
example, the Fujitsu FACOM VP and VP2200 series, the Hitachi HITAC S-810. Such
machines were both supercomputers and IBM-compatible mainframes, and could run
variants of MVS.

~~~
rbanffy
A good way to distinguish a mainframe from a supercomputer would be served
with... a car analogy.

A race car is often uncomfortable and hard to drive. You need to be physically
fit to drive it. Supercomputers are the race cars of computers. You need to do
crazy tricks to extract their maximum theoretical performance. Mainframes,
however, are more suitable to run common tasks, are easier to drive and
generally more reliable. A mainframe like a 360/195 would be somewhat like a
BMW M-series. Its performance is impressive, but you don't need to practice
your whole life not to kill yourself in one.

~~~
skissane
The problem with the "car analogy" is that some supercomputers are also
mainframes.

For example, look at the 1st Top 500 List, from June 1993. In position 36, was
the Hitachi S-3800/480 at the University of Tokyo [1][2]. The S-3800/480 was
an S/370-compatible machine with vector processing extensions. It supported
two operating systems, OSF/1 Unix and also VOS3, which is a fork of IBM MVS
[3]. Arguably, if a machine is S/370-compatible and runs a derivative of IBM
MVS, it is an IBM-compatible mainframe. Yet, also, it was a supercomputer. It
could run the same business and scientific software as any other IBM-
compatible mainframe. But scientific code can take advantage of the special
vector processing instructions (either through assembly or through the Fortran
compiler.)

This was probably the very tail end of this category of machines,
IBM(-compatible) mainframe supercomputers. But if you go back to the 1980s and
earlier, it was actually a quite common category, with instances being
supplied by IBM, Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi. (Unfortunately, the Top500 list
only goes back to 1993, so it omits most of this history.)

[1]
[https://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/?page=1](https://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/?page=1)

[2]
[https://www.top500.org/system/168780](https://www.top500.org/system/168780)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#Closely_related_operating_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#Closely_related_operating_systems)

~~~
rbanffy
> The S-3800/480 was an S/370-compatible machine with vector processing
> extensions.

IBM also had the Vector Facility for its 3090 series. I'd still say these are
the M-series (or the post-Audi Lamborghinis) of computers - fast, but they
don't require you to sacrifice comfort for speed.

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apple4ever
Very cool.

I wish I was able to locate a Thinking Machines CM-5 before they were all
destroyed. Even the front indicator panel would have been nice.

I’ve created my own smaller version with an Arduino and some LED panels but
its not the same.

~~~
rbanffy
I'm thinking about building a panel that'd would gather core activity of a
couple machines and map that onto one or more 8x32 LED matrices. The core
activity would be gathered from a client running on the machines themselves
and sent to the machine running the panel.

On my tests running ffmpeg, however, the results would be disappointing: all
LEDs light up at the same time...

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jgelsey
Disappointing it does not mention Convex Computer, which:

-produced the world's first commercially available gallium arsenide supercomputer, the Convex C3

-owned the minisupercomputer market from ~1986 through its end in 1995

-built the first commercially successful flat address space, cache coherent massively parallel processor the SPP1000 series in '94

~~~
iamcamiel
I agree wholeheartedly :-) Incidentally, I have 9 Convexes at home:
[https://vaxbarn.com/index.php/43-project/641-the-convex-
comp...](https://vaxbarn.com/index.php/43-project/641-the-convex-computer-
collection)

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ordu
_> During the first month of IBM, orders were received for more than a
thousand copies of such machines, and in the 6 years of the family’s
existence, more than 33,000 such machines were sold._

What for? I can imagine some tasks for such a machine in the middle of XX
century, but not for thousands of them.

~~~
analog31
As I recall, it was widely believed that there was an economy of scale for
mainframe computers, so you were better off serving all of your users with a
single timesharing machine if possible. If most of your programs ran in batch
mode, then you might need 64k, but only for a couple seconds a day, so you
shared those 64k with 1000 other people.

~~~
krylon
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosch%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosch%27s_law)

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madengr
It’s evident, scrolling through that, how drab computers have become. The 360
had a giant control panel with blinken lights, and cool looking tape drives.
The Cray looks cool, despite the lack of control panel. Everything else is
just a drab rack.

~~~
digi_owl
Much of that has with miniaturization.

Those massive tapes had downright abysmal storage capacities by today's
standards.

And binkenlights vanished when ICs could switch so fast that the human eye
would just see a steady light (much like we can't see a fluorescent lamp
blinking).

~~~
slededit
Those lights were directly connected to the main bus which ran at several
hundred khz to the low mhz. You never looked at them while the machine was
running except as a way to confirm "something" was happening. You would not
see individual pulses but rather they would appear dim or bright depending on
activity.

Instead the machines had a single step mode where you could force the computer
to execute one instruction at a time. Or you could pause the machine
completely and manually poke bits into memory yourself.

The real death of the front panel was when machines got their own bootloaders
and could load their operating system without the operator manually injecting
instructions on how to read from external storage directly into memory. This
actually happened much later than you might appreciate. This combined with
software based debuggers which could be more powerful.

~~~
masswerk
I'd agree, with the availability of glass monitors for diagnostic purpose and
the end of switches for toggling in initial loaders blinkenlights became
obsolete.

The transition is probably well illustrated by the Datapoint 2200 smart
terminal (which famously provided the blueprint for the Intel 8008): An early
illustration shows the machine with a DEC mini style row of console switches
[1], but when it was announced in 1970, the toggle switches were gone.
Ironically, the early 8-bit micros which sprang off from the DP 2200 were
probably amongst the last machines to come with toggle switches and console
lights (again, because of the lack of built-in diagnostic facilities).

[1] Concept illustration of the Datapoint 2200 (John Frassanito, 1969) –
arguably, console switches were just what you expected from a "self-
respecting" computer at the time, but, by the time the design had progressed
from concept to actual hardware, these just didn't make any sense anymore:
[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2urGdLzMYf8/VnY76lBDUlI/AAAAAAAANS...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2urGdLzMYf8/VnY76lBDUlI/AAAAAAAANS8/uTePme0mk8I/s1600/index16.jpg)

(From
[http://bugbookmuseum.blogspot.co.at/2016/01/datapoint-2200-8...](http://bugbookmuseum.blogspot.co.at/2016/01/datapoint-2200-8-bit-
computer-update-by.html) – Mind that Datapoint is then still CTC and the
terminal is marked "Veripoint 2200" in the concept illustration.)

------
kev009
This is kind of a scatterbrained article, it doesn't tie in mainframes in a
meaningful way. The CDC 6600 and IBM 7030 Strech would have been a better
starting point for supers. The S/360 mainframe was primarily a business line
of computers, although the 360/91 was a capable super.

So to expand on mainframes in particular, which are less well
documented/understood by my generation:

The IBM mainframe continued being primarily a business computer but they often
had enhanced capability models like the 3090 with optional vector facilities
that put them in competition with dedicated supercomputers.

Few people that came into computing in the 1990s and thereafter realize that a
lot of what we might assume to be "modern" capabilities existed since the
1970s, via these machines. The machines gave companies inter-office memos
(email), document preparation (word) and document/image storage (like modern
dropbox, gdrive etc), OLTP (like later RDBMS oracle etc), OLAP (like modern
hadoop, terradata etc), custom applications and hardware for all kinds of line
of business activities like automated logistics via bar code systems, point of
sales cash registers and bar code scanners, ATMs, complex billing generators
printers that could customize/cut/collate bills and notices, bill processors
with check printers/OCR scanners, phone switchboard integration for call
routing and auto-attendant etc.

VTAM and SNA allowed the machines to communicate, and intercommunicate with
machines of other companies across the globe. Time sharing services were
offered for smaller companies in a way not dissimilar to modern "cloud
computing". International networks existed to interchange data between
different computer types like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet).

The machines were also critical to the design and engineering of large
construction, manufacturing, PLM, and simulation. Aircraft, ship building,
power plant design, space exploration, automotive, circuit board and VLSI chip
design/layout/EDA.. all that was primarily done on these machines up until the
early '90s when UNIX workstations took over. CADAM, CATIA etc lots of good
history covered on [http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-
History.htm](http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm).

It's actually kind of astounding how much these did and how quickly it was
washed out of common knowledge. If you had a white collar job in the
'70s-early '90s you probably directly and indirectly spent a lot of time on
these machines. 3270 terminals and later PCs with 3270 emulation.

Today, the mainframe is still integral to the running of Western civilization,
although they are almost exclusively back office transaction processing and
batch reporting systems.

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analog31
The table at the end of the article, showing roughly Teraflops as a function
of year. I'd be interested to see a corresponding table for minicomputers,
microcomputers and other desktop machines such as GPU's.

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stevep001
I'm sorry, but an article claiming to trace the history of supercomputers that
doesn't even mention the CDC 6600 can't be taken seriously.

~~~
nigwil_
Also missing mention of the Cyber 205 and the Illiac IV.

