On 08/02/2019 09:32 PM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
I have a pair, plus parts.
The hardware is excellent. They have fairly fast processors, and the
I/O capacity is great. Reliability is typical IBM.
The OS sucks balls. All the balls.
Commercially, they were not a success, despite being IBM's first
"open" system, in that they invited third party developers. It seems
like every S/1 I have ever seen has some CDC DNA in it, for some
reason. They ended up successful within IBM, once they found out they
were better comms boxes than the real mainframe boxes (3725, for
example). Some S/1s were built specifically for comms use on
mainframes (7171).
Yes, we used some Series/1 machines at Washington University
for async dialup and local terminal use. They had a channel
interface, and this worked WAY better than even the Memorex
1270, which still hit the system with a huge amount of
interrupts.
We also got a disk development lab donated from IBM that was
all run by S/1 systems. They scrapped those and a bunch of
the SLT/MST interface gear, and replaced it with modern stuff.
Jon
