Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Excellent post!
These panels scared everyone and were IBM's trademark.
In fact, they were a testament to the state of technology, which did not allow "intelligence" to start the machine, interpret the states it was in or repair it when it broke.
This would happen with large-scale integration that allowed the existence of small processors that would do what technicians with great difficulty were required to do, which was decode hexadecimal messages and determine after difficult painstaking what was happening.
Although this was partially done for the larger models, which used CRTs instead of panels, the panels would only be eliminated in the 4300 generation, when a microprocessor began to interpret hexadecimal messages and transmit what was happening in English to the operator or CE.
Two important things happened there that would determine the future of IBM: The microprocessors that allowed this interpretation had their development outsourced and one of the companies belonged to Bill Gates, who returned to IBM and asked why they didn't make a home computer with it.
He was received with laughter and ridicule and, worse, allowed to try to do this alone, including using the small operating system developed by IBM, with all the information open and available.
The second thing that would determine what happened to IBM was a violent cost reduction in terms of memory costs and processing power, which would follow this trend until its policy of centralizing its strategy on hardware became unfeasible for IBM.
See in detail
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP4341.html
I elaborated all of this in greater detail in
https://computers19752016.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/the-missin-link-1975-2016/
I'm going to put a link on my blog site indicating this excellent post and I hope it won't be a problem.
Thank you for keeping the memory
Sep 17, 2023, 6:48:03 PM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old