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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.
Either it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.