IBM System/360 Model 91 Operators Console at the Seattle Living Computers Museum + Labs

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4 жыл бұрын

Beautiful functioning IBM System/360 Model 91 Operators Console at the Seattle Living Computers Museum + Labs. Used by the U.S. strategic command to track satellites and publishes tracking data that allows the prediction of a satellites position and altitude. This one is currently tracking the international space station from the museum.

Пікірлер: 61

@robertbilling6266 3 жыл бұрын

The wonderful thing about computers of this era was that after about 3 days you really could read the lights when it was running and know roughly what was going on.

@mrz80 9 күн бұрын

I toured the facility at NASA/GSFC where the 91 was installed when I was a kid, doing the career day shadowing thing. After high school I worked in that facility for several years, alas after the 91 was long gone. We did still have the very first Amdahl 470/V6, tho

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 3 жыл бұрын

The whole System 360 series was a massive and expensive gamble for IBM -- nobody else had tried to create an all-encompassing architecture that could be implemented on small(er) computers as well as large ones. Hence the “360” in the name, representing the full-circle coverage of the concept. I think this was also the architecture that invented the concept of byte-addressability, which has become ubiquitous nowadays.

@ByWire-yk8eh 2 жыл бұрын

My co-workers at IBM Poughkeepsie who designed the 91 said you needed sunglasses when you pushed the "lamp-test" button.

@rty1955 4 ай бұрын

The lights on this panel are not the real lights. They have been changed to LEDs. The real panel just glowed with incandescent bulbs

@jaakkooksa5374 3 жыл бұрын

That's what all computers ought to look like, with lots of flashing lights and buttons.

@sharronneedles6721 2 жыл бұрын

Isn't a monitor just a big screen of flashing lights, and the keyboard has lots of buttons. /lh🤣🤣🤣

@jerseybob4471 2 жыл бұрын

I worked for IBM for 37 years. I was trained on the 360/91 and supported the one at Princeton University. The cpu had a clock cycle time of 60 nanoseconds and could execute multiple instructions each cycle. The control panel lights were normally a blur.

@AmauryJacquot Жыл бұрын

@@apollomoonlandings the blinkenleds appear to simulate something. I don't believe they are really representative of what is really happening in the computer

@rty1955 4 ай бұрын

@@AmauryJacquothaha the 360 NEVER had LEDs. They were not even invented yet when this machine was produced, hence this is not an actual oanel

@kvmoore1 20 күн бұрын

@rty1955 This is an actual 360/91 panel. However, it may have been rewired and rigged to respond to simulations run on software from a modern PC. It looks AMAZING!!! I hope the Living Computer Museum opens back up so I can come and visit it one day to see this in person.

@RobertoFloresAndFamily 7 күн бұрын

@@AmauryJacquot I think (at least in this case) probably just for show.

@arrowrod 4 ай бұрын

I worked on Model 91's at UCLA and Lockheed. I got about 5 minutes of training. The first Customer Engineers that maintained the 91 got a year of training. Fortunately, all of the problems were light bulb replacement and iron core memory failures.

@darrenalkire5281 4 ай бұрын

Very cool!

@marcwolf60 16 күн бұрын

How do you cope with a core memory failure?

@arrowrod 16 күн бұрын

@@marcwolf60 We had one extra memory cabinets. Pulled the faulty one replaced with the extra. Then we diagnosed and replaced whatever parts that were required in the removed cabinet. Then one day, we had two cabinets fail...

@johnsavard7583 3 жыл бұрын

Its successor, the 360/195, which added cache memory, basically had the same architectural advances as we saw much later in the Pentium Pro and the Pentium II: cache, an out-of-order floating-point unit, and an advanced division algorithm (although the 91 and 195 used a faster algorithm, even if on slower hardware).

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 3 жыл бұрын

IBM was never able to keep up with CDC and Seymour Cray, though.

@Michael-wn4jj 3 жыл бұрын

The days when some people could read binary like a newspaper 👏

@artiem5262 6 ай бұрын

those of us who ran these beasts got to know what the lights felt like -- normal operation, heavily I/O bound states, or the doom of machine checks. I got to tend one of the 91's at UCLA for a bit. Also spent time with plenty of 360/50s, DEC PDP-10s and SDS Sigma 7 and 9 mainframes. Flashing lights and lots of switches! Another feature of the 91 and family -- intercom jacks in each bay for the engineers to use, as the only way to talk to someone at the other end of the machine was over headsets.

@stan.rarick8556 16 күн бұрын

@@artiem5262 right on (46 year IBM mainframe career as programmer/operator)

@jyounder 3 жыл бұрын

the pc boards in the back look modern, Something to make the lights flash perhaps?

@stan.rarick8556 16 күн бұрын

I would bet - the light sequences are not realistic, especially the red fault lights, which should be off unless there is an error. Fun fact: people would prank operators by turning on LAMP TEST, which lit ALL the lights, and pull semi-random bulbs out JUST ENOUGH so they were "off". The operator would see red fault light(s) and a "frozen" panel, an indication that the machine had halted. It would be a heart stopping moment because, if real, it meant your machine was "dead" and might be down for days.

@IconDevco 3 жыл бұрын

and now we have debug consoles usually in a little window at the corner of a brightly lit monitor

@loscheninmotion9920 Жыл бұрын

Beautiful computer!

@eugeneharry481 3 жыл бұрын

Pressing the lamp test button (turned on all lamps so one could see if any were burned out) made quite a display.

@Inkling777 3 жыл бұрын

Imagine a computer with a clock speed so slow it made sense to use flashing lights to indicate data moving in and out of registers. That's what is was like back then.

@tickertape1 3 жыл бұрын

This thing ran in the MHZ.... the panels were really used for single step. This simulation is slowed down considerably. In reality it would blur a lot.

@GH-oi2jf 3 жыл бұрын

That isn’t what the lamps are for. When the computer halts, the lamps show the state of the processor, so an analyst can figure out what is going on by interpreting the lamps. They are useful when things are not working properly.

@tommyhatcher3399 3 жыл бұрын

The pre-70's era was filled with breakthroughs. Back in the day when something new came on a computer, it's something never seen before. A brand new invention. After the mid-70's, anything you can call new, I can point to something from the 60's that did the same thing but more crudely. It's not fair to compare old computers with new. It's like me saying you the teleporter I just made that can teleport you a mile away and you say you don't care because in 50 years we'll be able to teleport to China.

@majkus 2 жыл бұрын

@@tickertape1 Right. Incandescent cooling times are long enough that when running, you just ended up with a bunch of dim lights.

@majkus 2 жыл бұрын

At one time, the UCLA Computer Club owned one of these (it was being discarded by the Health Services Computing Facility), and was arranging to sell it to Universal Studios as a prop. Unfortunately, the Club was unable to warehouse it long enough, and it was scrapped. Members did keep little pieces of it. There were, per Wikipedia, only 15 of these ever built, and UCLA had two of them (another commenter mentions one of them).

@lupus16309 3 жыл бұрын

Looks like something from an Irwin Allen set.....

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 3 жыл бұрын

Actually it was the earlier AN/FSQ-7, also an IBM machine, that turned up in pieces on the sets of loads of SF movies/TV series for years after being decommissioned. There is a spacecraft control panel on _Lost In Space_ that comes from a Burroughs/Electrodata B205.

@majkus 2 жыл бұрын

Some parallelization in processing was possible on this model. If you were insanely out for speed, and wanted to clear two general registers, you could subtract one from itself, and xor another one from itself, and they would happen simultanously because one was the arithmetic unit and the other was the logical unit. This all meant that sometimes you would need to deal with 'imprecise interrupts', when an interrupt occurred when two different instructions were in progress.

@hseochin 2 жыл бұрын

Wondering in terms of modern day hardware, which system nowadays would provide similar performance.....would expect some tiny spaced device is sufficient ???

@aliaktas8323 3 жыл бұрын

it is fantastic thanks

@richlobato8664 3 жыл бұрын

OMG! They hot the BAT computer!

@yepyep340 4 жыл бұрын

coooooool. Joshua

@nemesiss7554 Жыл бұрын

i love it...😁😉

@leefoster4133 3 жыл бұрын

Looks like some of the equipment I worked on in the military. Just wasn't the IBM 360.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104 3 жыл бұрын

Did you work on any SAGE systems, by any chance?

@KrisRyanStallard 3 жыл бұрын

Was there a System 360 running nearby or were they simulating one for the operator console?

@charlesbaldo 3 жыл бұрын

Its probably is real, I have been there. A bunch of years back I picked up an IBM 1401 (circa 1960) with a paper tape device. The price was just to take it away. We got it working. The hardest part was finding paper tape.

@tickertape1 3 жыл бұрын

@@charlesbaldo Its not. It’s just a panel emulation. do tell me more about the 1401 though!

@charlesbaldo 3 жыл бұрын

@@tickertape1 Thanks actually its not even the museum I thought it was. I had it confused with the Boston Computer Museum that closed 20 years ago. I was a young software developer in 1982, a guy I worked for had a two way radio repair business and some of the techs had a line on a 1401, it had 4k magnetic core and we programmed RPG on it. The deal was we get it out of his business and it was ours. I had the manual, until a few years I gave it to a friend who was a fan of an Icelandic musician that had an album called IBM 1401 users manual

@jcak552 3 жыл бұрын

Definately a simulation, the order of some of the lights would never happen on a real system.. and would definitely be more random.. I worked on the model 40 and 65 for 3+ years in a large installation... generally speaking a Red indicator being on caused the system to stop...

@tickertape1 3 жыл бұрын

@@jcak552 the doom of a “check”