News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on IBM System/360 Model 67. Parent comment

Re:IBM System/360 Model 67 by protomyth on Saturday August 22, 2015 @12:09PM (#10102847)
We had Zenith Z-19 and IBM 5250 terminals. I just couldn't remember, but it might also be that we didn't really get much of a tutorial beyond here's how to write, compile, run, and submit your Modula-2 / IBM 370 assembler program.

The funny thing I remember was how you typed commands in the ===== at the left side of the screen. It was quite nice for that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM System/360 Model 67 by YZF on Saturday August 22, 2015 @04:40PM (#10103670)
Yep. That was the prefix area... You could do something like SET NUM ON and it would show the line numbers (much nicer than the =====) or even hide the entire area. Was a good match to a 327X terminal. Clearly built by programmers for programmers in other times.

Despite it's reputation IBM had some amazing people (e.g. the name Mike Colishaw comes to mind) who apparently had the freedom to do some cool stuff. There was source code for everything (you got source code for your OS) ages before anyone knew what "open source" was and there was a vibrant community of sharing code between various academic sites who ran IBM mainframes.

[ Parent | on HN ]