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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

"The 3033 features a machine cycle time of 58 ns. It has a cache size of 64 KB. Main storage may be 4, 6, or 8 MB.
...

At announcement the monthly lease price for a minimally configured 3033 processor (without peripherals) was $70,400" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_303X

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Another couple of machines from 1977 [1]:

Cromemco Z-2: 8-bit Z80 @ 4 MHz, maximum 256 kB RAM (bank-switched in a 64 kB address space), 0.007 Whetstone MIPS - $4695

VAX-11/780: 32-bit VAX @ 5 MHz, maximum 8 MB RAM, 0.476 Whetstone MIPS - $241,255

In a similar same format (benchmark from [2]):

IBM 3033: ?-bit ? @ 17 MHz, maximum 8 MB RAM, 4.70 Whetstone MIPS - $70,400/mo!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955814

[2] http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm

There is a lot that isn't in that wiki page that has been posted to usenet.

The 3033 wasn't supposed to happen, the System/370 family was expected to be replaced by the Future Systems project [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Future_Systems_project

It's really interesting that, while the Future Systems project was cancelled, a lot of it went into the AS/400, which lives to this day as the IBM i (now based on POWER). It was so far ahead of its time that some of it is still well ahead of our time.

I work in an IBM i shop and concur that it is a powerful and elegant machine. All the old hats who've worked on it for most of their life, at least in my experience, still refer to it as the AS/400, rather than referring to it as the IBM i (before it was called IBM i, it was called System i).

Despite this, I can confirm that many of our non-tech savvy users and managers think of the machine as old and antiquated simply because of the way most of our user-base interfaces with the machine (TN5250 connection - green screen). I kid you not, many of the managers think we'd be better off replacing our IBM i with a new out-of-the-box machine, despite the fact that we have decades of homegrown programs and processes that have been built and customized on the i.

I think OS/400 has some really cool technology at the lower levels of its stack, but the applications running on top rarely really took advantage of them.

You start with an advanced machine-independent single-level store capability-oriented operating system, and then you use it to run RPG code???

OS/400 was based on an object-oriented idea. And yet, only IBM could ever define new object types. But IBM went ahead and defined all kinds of random obscure object types [1][2] for all kinds of obscure requirements, many of which are now quite legacy. It would have been far more powerful if IBM had opened it up and allowed end-users and ISVs to define object types of their own.

One thing always holding OS/400 back, is that it has never been a self-hosting operating system. OS/400 has never been able to compile itself, and the OS/400 development team didn't run OS/400. The code for the core of OS/400 was maintained on a mainframe running VM/CMS, which hosted cross-compilers (for PL/MP, PL/MI, etc); OS/400 developers would transfer the compiled code to an actual AS/400 for testing. Around the time of the RISC transition, the development OS changed from VM/CMS to AIX.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/api...

[2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rba...

> non-tech savvy users and managers think of the machine as old and antiquated

People need to be educated about the power of a good text-based interface. And I'll say the well laid out 3270/5250 screens are much nicer than trying to understand what Kubernetes or docker are trying to say with thousand-character lines.

It sounds puny today, but compare against the famous Commodore 64 released 3 yeas later:

    IBM: 17.2 Mhz    C64: 1.023Mhz
    IBM: 4/6/8MB RAM C64: 64kB RAM
    IBM: 64kB Cache  C64: What cache?

The IBM is a beast relative to what ordinary people could afford at the time.

VAX-11/780 maybe a closer comparison, from the same era:

     5 MHz cycle time (1 MIPS)
     2 MB - 64 MB  RAM
     8 KB cache
     Price $120 K

I much rather use VMS or Ultrix than any IBM OS :-)

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/780/EK-11780-UG-001_780hwUG...

http://www.vaxhaven.com/images/0/00/EK-11780-PG-001.pdf

While I do find VMS much more understandable than MVS (it's a completely different branch of the Tree of Computing, as similar to modern PCs as the extremophiles that live next to volcanic chimneys in the bottom of the ocean are to us), I have to say the VAX competed with the much lower end machines in the 370 family. Also, you don't measure a mainframe's capacity in MIPS - The CPU is a small part of the of overall system and a lot of hardware goes to the multiple IO subsystems that offload the main CPUs so that they can keep running your applications while the rest of the system focus on pushing bits in and out of the system. It was considered a "minicomputer", in contrast to a proper computer such as the System/370.

DECSYSTEM-20 is closer to a proper mainframe. It was at least 6x faster than VAX-11/780 on a benchmark I tried in ~1987. Also TOPS-20 was the bomb!

http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/cgb%20files/evolution%20...

Sadly it was an anachronistic 36-bit machine with no future..

36 bits makes perfect sense if you are thinking in octal.

I don't think many VAX-11/780s were shipped with 64MB RAM, the ones I used had 2 or 4.

Cray-1 from that era had 80 Mhz clock and 8 Megabytes (1 Megaword) memory. But had peak floating point of 160 mega flops. Also, no cache. But highly interleaved main memory.

The Cray designs and the IBM mainframes were built for different requirements. The Cray machines were designed for the highest possible processor speed while mainframes were much more geared towards business needs, where you do a lot of IO and just a little bit of processing on the data, before sending it back to tape.

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