🚀 go-pugleaf

VALDIS@VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU (Valdis Kletnieks) writes:

>>Wrong newsgroup.  IBM mainframes are not PC's (we wish).

>Phil:

>Why would you wish that IBM mainframes were the brain-dead architecture
>that the PC uses?  You need the '386 before you can truly multitask safely,
>and even if a 386 *can* go at 15MIPS, it's still useless because it
>spends 12 of them doing loads and stores out of the 4 registers...

You misunderstand.  You interpreted it backwards.  I wished that the 370
architecture was in the box we call a PC.

>At the risk of starting a holy war, MS-DOS and the Intel 8x86 architecture
>are the single worst thing to happen to computing.

The only reason I disagree is because those are the TWO worst things.

>And is it true that a 360/44 had its SS format instructions
>intentionally removed to cripple it and keep it slower than the 360/50,
>because the 44's floating point made it so much faster?

While the other machines were microprogrammed, the 360/44 functioned mostly
from hardware interpretation of the instructions, including hardware floating
point operations in 5 different precisions.  Single precision was normal,
but double precision had a front panel dial that allowed 32, 40, 48, or 56
bit fractions to be used in calculation.  The PS/44 operating system JOB card
had a field where you specified the precision desired, the operating system
asked the operator to set the dial, and when all was done, ran the job.  So
you could make a delicate tradeoff between precision and speed (the shorter
formats were faster, of course).  It didn't seem to catch on.  The higher
models of the 360 series soon beat it.
--
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/ Phil Howard -- KA9WGN -- phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu   |  Guns don't aim guns at  \
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