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An emulator for the IBM 7094 mainframe computer. (Big Iron circa 1960)
Posted by intabits on 22 Jan, 2019 00:11 -
In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the IBM 7090 series mainframes were the most widely installed large scale mainframe computers n the world.
These were the quintessential "Big Iron", or "Electronic Brains" as the media of time liked to call them.
Back in 2001-2004 I wrote an emulator for the 7094, and was the first to get it's operating system "IBSYS" to run, after it had been dormant for decades.
It has all the "blinkenlights", and can compile and run Fortan and Cobol programs.
Recently, with much help from one of my earlier collaborators, the emulator has been improved, and more demonstration jobs added.
I've made a video about it: https://youtu.be/4xaBS6pWrG0
And published the emulator, including source and demonstration scripts, along with a pile of IBM manuals at:-
https://www.fosshub.com/B7094-IBM7094-Emulator.html
It is dead easy to use, as no knowledge of the old systems, or of the emulator is required. A scripted demonstration system makes that possible.
So to see it for yourself, you need only to download, extract and run it.
Then just click stuff, and watch the blinken lights...
Hope you do so, and enjoy...
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Awesome work
Hope you'll post it at vcfed forums.
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Thanks.
Yes, just after the post above, I joined VCFED and posted the same there.
I also posted to newsgroup alt.folklore.computers (where I proudly announced the first run of IBSYS, back in 2004), but I'm not sure if it got through (I haven't posted to usenet for 15 years) -
I looked up the 7094 in "Computer Architecture" by Brooks and Blaauw, and while it doesn't have much detail on the 7094, it does go into detail on its predecessors, starting with the 701.
An excerpt from Chapter 12, page 645:QuoteIBM 701 (1953). The genius of the 701 was its rich set of directly attached I/O devices: a fast printer, a fast card reader, magnetic tapes, and a magnetic drum. These devices allowed much faster job turnaround than did other contemporary scientific machines, which did not have direct card readers and printers and so required awkward card-tape and tape-printer conversion steps. As a consequence, even though the latter were perhaps 50 percent faster in raw computing performance, for equivalent prices.
IBM 650 (1954). ... The next substantial change was in I/O control, the provision of semi-autonomous I/O channels performing elaborate sequences and reading and writing concurrently with CPU processing. This concept led to the IBM 709 and the 705 III (1957).
Transistor circuits led to the reimplementation of the 705 III as the IBM 7080 (1961), and then re-realization of the 709 as the 7090 (1959). -
In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the IBM 7090 series mainframes were the most widely installed large scale mainframe computers n the world.
Yup, serious big iron, alright. The machines were in a set of 11 or 12 big cabinets about the size of a commercial (not walk-in) refrigerator, and had 55,000 transistors on 11,000 circuit cards. The magnitude of making and keeping all that working 100% boggles my mind!
These were the quintessential "Big Iron", or "Electronic Brains" as the media of time liked to call them.
Jon
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I've just uploaded the part 2 video, describing how to compile the project with the Lazarus/Free Pascal Compiler development platform (and installing that also).
https://youtu.be/W5Blz5-chSU
The video also describes a few minor updates to the emulator project.
Enjoy!
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Very nice IBM 7094 emulator