My System/3 model 10 (2010) | Hacker News Reader

My System/3 model 10 (2010)

ibmsystem3.nl

80 pointsfootpath15 comments

It's great to see these oldies get so much love. These are small enough that the power bill won't kill you immediately. The 'big iron' I worked with in the 80's required 400V tri-phase supplies and at todays' power prices you'd definitely think twice about starting them up.

Old PDPs also have their fanbase, and there is a ton of knowledge floating around about all these systems, sometimes more in the hobbyist sphere than there is left at the companies that built them (assuming they still exist). Of course you could emulate it all but the real hardware has its own kind of charm.

I see this one is here in NL, maybe I'll ask the owner one day if I can come by to have a look at the beast, it is definitely an interesting era to document in living hardware.

SIMH has a System/3 emulator:

https://github.com/open-simh/simh

And some software to run on it:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

Very cool! It warms my heart that a few of you will keep some of these vintage machines alive. I’m guessing there’s FORTRAN on there somewhere. Curious what you paid for it?

Mostly RPG rather than scientific computing, though you could get COBOL, FORTRAN and of course an assembler. 500 KIPS and very small RAM so likely those compilers were multiple passes and required a disc.

I did RPG II programming on the successor machine the S/36 for a few years. That was available in a micro form not bigger than a PC to mid and full size.

I still have nightmares of modifying old indicator infested RPG II spaghetti code for a local hospital to create magnetic tape versions of UB52 and form 1500’s.

I don't know if I would remember enough to be able to read an RPG program nor would I recognize RPG III and newer. We did use a third-party app that gave us RPG 2.5 where I worked last doing RPG. I still have 8" floppy disks with utilities I wrote at the time and the Pop editor.

In the video link in the posting and dig around, you found quite a good promotion video of Ibm system/3. It explained quite clearly all the components. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TLI50ZbXeuQ

What was system/3 used for?

I had to look it up, it is the ancestor to the as/400 family of computers.

which is the ancestor of the system i series.

I learned COBOL (a adapted heavily scripted version of that) on a AS/400 used to control automotive operations in a factory.

We had a System/36 at a family business, which was the ancestor of the AS/400. It was a large box, roughly the size of a refrigerator on its side. It had 256K of memory, a whopping 100 megabyte disk, something like 8 terminals, and a couple of line printers. I think it cost almost $200,000 USD in 80's money.

In the mid-90's, they replaced it with PCs.

It was a "minicomputer". Nowadays they are called "midrange" computers and nearly extinct. They were general purpose computers, used for all kinds of of operations/calculations.

Most minicomputers landed in companies/departments too small to afford a mainframe and where used for inventory, POS, bookkeeping, payroll, etc.

My school district got one; I assume they did accounting on it. RPG would be a good fit for accounting. But also, they taught programming to us students. I learned FORTRAN on one of these in 1979. 4K RAM and punched cards.

My mom used one in the 70s and 80s for accounting and billing in our local village. As I recall although they had multiple terminals to access it these were shared, you didn’t have a terminal on the desk. You’d pick the application you were going to use from a text menu, enter your identifier (no password), and make your entries. Actual billing runs or other accounting runs were done in batch overnight. When they upgraded to AS/400s everyone had PCs on their desks and used 5250 terminal emulators to access the system over SNA/APPC.

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