🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5b71ce88...@news.dslextreme.com> you write:
>Your so-called "categories" are arbitrary and mostly meaningless.  Even before
>the advent of the 360, they were always "general purpose" computers.  Meaning
>they could be used for any application, given the proper programming.  The
>salient differences were in CPU speed, storage capacity, and data transfer
>rates. ...

Yes and no.  The architecture of the binary word addressed 704x/709x
scientific machines was rather different from the decimal word 7070 or
the character addressed 705/7080.  Sure, they were all Turing
complete, but the 7080 was bad at floating point arithmetic and the
7090 was bad at moving character strings around.

We all think it's obvious to have byte/word addressing where the word
addresses are byte addresses with the low bits zero, but it wasn't
obvious at all before IBM invented it for the 360.  Once they had a
memory architecture that could work either way, building the
instruction set wasn't so hard.

> The big advantage of having a line of computers with a
>single architecture would be to ease moving from one machine to another that was
>faster and/or bigger.  It also helped IBM, assuming they could consolidate their
>OS and system software development and support.

That too, although BOS, TOS, DOS, OS/PCP, OS/MFT, OS/MVT, CP/CMS, TSS,
and PS44 suggest that consolidating the system software didn't work
out so well.
-- 
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John Levine, jo...@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly