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Re:Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM by PaulHoule on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @12:26PM (#43623556)
If I had to compare computers based on one number it would be the amount of RAM. The 360 had a 24 bit address space which could fit 16MB of RAM although only the largest installations, like the one at NASA, were that big. iPhone 16s have 8GB of RAM so you're talking 512 times the memory capacity, never mind that my desktop PCs are all loaded with 4-8x times that of the phone and you can definitely get a big server with a few TB.

An IBM 360/20 on the small side, however, ranged from 4kB to 32kB which was similar to home computers circa 1980, before it is routine to have a complete 64kB address space.

Where the 360 crushed home computers was in mass storage, 9-track tapes could store 80MB contrasted to floppy disks that stored less than 200kB. Large storage compared to memory meant a lot of focus on external memory algorithms, also there was already a culture of data processing on punched cards that translated to the 360 (e.g. terminals have 80 columns because punched cards had 80 columns)

Re:Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM by kjs3 on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @01:21PM (#43624202)
Where the 360 crushed home computers was in mass storage

Well...sure, you could put bigger storage on a mainframe. It's just money, after all. But you could put a tape drive on a home computer. And bigger disks. And a card reader, for that matter. Where the 360 really crushed the home computer was in aggregate bandwidth, via the Channel architecture. An Apple 2 could just about keep up with a floppy and a display. A 360 could keep up with dozens to hundreds of tapes, disks, card readers, terminals, printers and other things all at the same time.

Large storage compared to memory meant a lot of focus on external memory algorithms

I would agree with that. I would just argue the real mainframe advantage is a whole-system one and not point to a single factor (memory size).

Re:Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM by HPsquared on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @08:33AM (#43631343)
Comparing like-for-like (tape storage), you can now buy 45TB tape cartridges. That's a 500,000 times improvement per tape.

Edit: apparently these cartridges actually are 18TB, 45TB is "compressed" capacity. Still though, terrible marketing aside it's still factor of 225,000.

Re:Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM by saulpw on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @01:02PM (#43634488)
I agree. I did writeups on order of magnitude of RAM and computers over history:

https://saul.pw/mag/memory

https://saul.pw/mag/computer

The IBM 360 is ^4 RAM and the iPhone is ^8 RAM. So the iPhone is ~10,000x more powerful.