All about the IBM 1130 Computing System | Hacker News Reader

All about the IBM 1130 Computing System

ibm1130.org

44 pointsjruohonen19 comments

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

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.

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.

It was a very common thing until the world settled into PC vs Mac for the most purposes, until tablets and phones came to be.

No, it was the common thing till the introduction in the 1960s of the IBM 360 line of computers (which shared the same instruction set and operating systems).

I mean hardware vendors having multiple products with different architectures.

The port in 1977 of Unix to an Interdata architecture was one of the singular accomplishments of the Unix operating system.

An IBM 1130 system was installed in my country (Paraguay), at the National Computing Center (CNC) of the National University of Asunción (UNA), around 1969-1970. At the time it was, if not the very first, one of the first computers ever installed in my country.

It was used by reservation; that is, someone requested a time slot and got access to the computer for that time (paying the required fee, of course). IIRC, it even ran overnight.

I saw the system while I was a pre-teen, in 1982. At the time, it was still in operation even after more capable systems were installed and microcomputers were making their inroads. At that time its usage was reduced, but CNC folks told me it still was used by some civil engineers who did structural calculations with it.

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)

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

I always wondered what if time hardware development stopped in 1969: how far we couuld go with such machines with new fresh software? :)

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.

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.

The tragedy is that some folks 57 years later, still think their computers cannot handle something like Lisp, or languages with similar tooling.

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

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

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.

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.

How do you have non-IBM clones of something like this? It sounds like it would break every law ever made about copying hardware, BIOS, everything. And IBM would come after you with an army of lawyers.

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