Re:A hunt for the government's oldest computer
by skissane on Sunday February 28, 2016 @07:12PM
(#11193029)
S/360 and descendant mainframes have gone through 3 generations of IO technologies: bus & tag channel (parallel copper cabling), ESCON (proprietary 1990s era fibre optic system), FICON (Fibre Channel based). Contemporary System z mainframes only support FICON, whereas card punches/readers were only ever bus & tag. However, I'm aware that some third party vendors offer protocol converters between bus&tag and ESCON, and between ESCON and FICON, (e.g. Optica Prizm) so in theory it is possible you could use a bus&tag-ESCON and ESCON-FICON converter in series to connect your legacy card punch/reader to a new System z mainframe. I don't know if anyone has tried it, so I don't know if it actually works. (I also don't know to what degree the IO code to handle physical card punches/readers still works in contemporary mainframe OSes, although given that virtual card punches/readers are still used under z/VM, it is possible that some of that code might still handle real ones.)
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Re:A hunt for the government's oldest computer
by techdragon on Sunday February 28, 2016 @07:32PM
(#11193078)
For no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity, I would love to see this done.