I missed out on the System/38. I worked in the old IBM General Business Group when it replaced the 34 and 36 range.
In those days, DP division (Mainframe) always won out if there was a customer looking for a suitable system. Thos were the days of the antitrust case and we were told that there may be a split of the various divisions. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. A couple of years later, I worked on a 4331 that utilised 3310 drives (piccolo drives because that was how they sounded when the heads were clunking in and out). The 3310 drives were a temporary replacement for failing 3370 FBA devices that were suffering HDA crashes. On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 3:12 AM Mark Waterbury < [email protected]> wrote: > Not quite a "mainframe" but very similar > See: > https://www.gofundme.com/f/ibm-system-38-computer-rescue-and-restoration > > The IBM System/38 used IBM 3310 FBA DASD, and the "channel" hardware was > the same as used in the 4331/4341, with different microcode. > Announced in 1979 and delivered in late 1980 to early 1981, the IBM > System/38 was the world's first commercially available system to implement > "single level storage" where all DASD was formatted as 512 byte pages, and > the entire system ran in a single enormous address space, with 48-bit > addresses in the "hardware" (microcode/firmware), and at the application > level, (MI assembler and all HLL compilers) saw only "system pointers" that > are 16 bytes or 128 bits, on a 16-byte boundary, and approx. 96 of those > bits were used for addressing. IBM System/38 implemented over a terabyte > of virtual address space, way back in 1980! > IBM S/38 systems were all CISC based, with an instruction set very similar > to 370 ISA, with 48-bit wide registers. They were microcoded machines, > using the same technology as used on IBM mainframes of the period. The > memory hardware provided additional "tag bits" to protect MI pointers from > being modified by software, instead of using official instructions or > APIs. If some user code accidentally (or on purpose) modified any bytes > within a 16-byte quadword pointer, the memory hardware/microcode would > "reset" the tag bits so the next attempt to use that pointer as an address > would result in an exception message. > IBM System/38 included an integrated relational database, released to > customers well before SQL/DS or DB2 became available. S/38's (unnamed) > database did not use SQL (yet), as that was still a new language. All > "files" on S/38 CPF are "database" files. There really was no traditional > "file system" on disk -- you had named objects in named libraries, all laid > out in the vast single-level store address space. The MI instruction > RSLVSP (resolve system pointer) allowed the CPF OS or user applications to > "resolve" an object name to its 16-byte System Pointer address. > S/38 was all made available to customers several years before MVS/XA > became available. > > Please consider contributing to this worthy cause. :-) > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- Wayne V. Bickerdike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
