Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Thanks for a great rundown of the 360 series. It was a classic, not just of technology, but of marketing design. Alfred Sloan built GM to produce a car for customers in narrow income bands, so GM had many car brands and models within those brands. IBM segmented its market similarly, and it really shows with the 360.
I saw the 360/95 at Columbia/Lamont-Doherty's and NASA's Goddard Center back around 1970. It had a huge 4MB memory module. It was the size of an industrial AC unit with water pipes for cooling running in and out of it. I was told it was all core memory. Was it replaced with a thin film memory after my visit? Was I listening to an unreliable narrator? He went on to head computing at the NSA.
Between that memory unit and the CPU there was a much smaller unit placed in a space clearly allocated for a module commensurate with the core memory unit. I was told it was a memory cache unit using "monolithic" memory technology. I was in high school and technologies were in flux, so I never got more detail than that. Perhaps that was the thin film memory unit? I vaguely remember it as having a 16KB capacity, but this is a rather vague memory.
Apr 14, 2019, 1:44:28 PM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old