With 6 processors & more than 40 peripherals, it was the first system where existing software could be written once & still work on upgraded hardware without the development costs of re-writing software for a specific computer hardware configuration, a problem that plagued early vacuum tube & early implementations of transistor computer systems. This gave rise to a an end of the software crisis in the 1960 that IBM sought to solve & did with the 360 System.
Its amazing how far computers have come since the 1940's when the earliest gigantic room sized vacuum tube energy hogging slow early computers first took shape for nerds & computer scientists, who had to enter programs with punch cards, punch cards that continued to be used until the 1990 at the Social Security Administration of the USA, for employee log in & log out times for accounting & employee payment calculations for hourly employees.
Check out this cool YouTube video about this topic https://youtu.be/EkTHDgYTh64
Even through my childhood in the 1980's, computers were a green or orange on black text based system running DOS on IBM hardware with Intel Chipsets. By the early 1990's my dad drove me to a computer hardware store in Kent, Washington, USA where I used ~$700 to buy a motherboard, power supply, memory, hard drive, CD-ROM drive, a graphics card, case & monitor & mouse & keyboard to custom build my first desktop computer that ran Windows 95 as its operating system. I contributed $400 & my dad covered the rest. I used this system to learn about high voltage electricity & all sorts of other topics on Microsoft Encarta at first & then via a dialup modem to AOL, to Tesla webbings & early forums by Bill Beaty online where home made Tesla coils & other high voltage projects were the topic of choice.
I ended up building a CO2 laser from scratch & a moderately large Tesla coil, both lost during accidents, one resulting in a fire from the invisible laser output setting a door on fire, then the deck above it, the other resulting in an electrical fire that nearly killed me. Powerful gas lasers & high voltage are probably not good DIY projects for an unguided teen working on their own. My parents had no idea what I was working or nor did they understand these #physics topics, both were relators, my mom previously a hair dresser & my dad previously a drummer as a professional musician. I was the "alien" "weird" adopted one with a passionate interest & obsession with electricity since my tender toddler years.
I continue to be fascinated with electrical power, voltage & current & different frequencies that create RF & analog circuits, powering VFD displays, vacuum tubes, electronics, smart devices, my iMac, wireless inductive + magnet Apple Watch charger, appliances, electric vehicle charging, powering appliances, lighting & other applications like air filters, fans, pumps, motors, all sorts of stuff & things are energized by electricity, especially the internet from end user to cloud & everywhere in between! Today in early 2022 we have information jewelry & information furniture. Its the 4th industrial revolution & few people worldwide even realize it!
The IBM 4300 series improved computer to cost performance by 4X over 360 & gave ICL-Fujitsu a run for the money // things were accelerating with computer production product cycles with integrated circuits & the falling cost of computer memory. Over time, hard drives shrunk from fridge sized tape drives to washing machine sized spinning drives & then smaller & smaller until the 3.5inch desktop class drive arrived, later 2.5 inch & eventually even down to 1 inch in the first Apple iPod classic made by IBM.
Dark fiber, internet & e-commerce emerged out of the 1990's, then the early 2000's saw MID's & then smartphones launch, now you can hold the internet in your hand, accessing it via 4G LTE advanced & 5G NR wireless networks, amazingly!
Consider the glowing icon click interface of Mac of Windows computers & touchscreen touch icon input interface on tablets & smartphones. More intuitive & easier to use than text based terminal command input computer interfaces. The mouse on a desktop to click on things, the touchpad on a laptop to do the same thing.
Our eyes & eyes & hands through keyboards or HID human interface devices, touching data. I am streaming Pandora in the background right now while writing this on my 2019 Apple iMac 24 inch / Meg & I got a pair of these at Costco on sale because they were the last Intel iMac's we could buy before they went with the internally vertically developed chipsets & ditched my favorite IC manufacturer Intel! Intel the company largely responsible for the Silicon Valley economy miracle in California.
Most of the motion picture industry or Hollywood in America also owes much of its modern production abilities to advances made in computer science, applied technology & integrated circuit development, software engineering & other aspects of information technology that enable amazing green screen actor motion capture & CGI enhanced sequences to be recorded in 8K + resolution as we moved beyond chemical film to RED cinema cameras & similar from Sony & others. The digital imaging chip CMOS & CCD that came before it, are also examples of integrated circuits & why transistors are the most produced item in the entire history of human civilization on Earth! Trillions of trillions of transistors have been produced. An individual iPhone can contain more than 14 billion transistors made by TSMC using ASML EUL mirror mask lithography at the 5nm node!
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