A Mainframe Computing Miscellany Quiz

Answer: PDP 11/70

The PDP 11/70 was an extremely successful line of computers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which despite great engineering found themselves unable to remain financially viable and have been bought by Hewlett-Packard. The GCOS was the late-model Honeywell (later sold to Groupe Bull) OS that ran on their DSP 8/70 and DPS-90 series.

The S370 was the main line of IBM mainframe computers for over a decade from the late 70s. The UIII (UNIVAC III) predates all of these and used original "core memory" (small magnetized donuts) -- you can see some components of this system in the technology museum in Ottawa, Canada.

Answer: Suction like cups for attaching a phone handset to computer equipment

Acoustic couplers accepted the handset of the old-style cradle phone (round speaker and mouthpiece style) into a pair of rubber "sockets" and the modem transmitted through the handset. The first of these operated at a blazing 110 bps (BITS not bytes) per second which meant transmitting 1100 bytes (less than 300 ASCII characters) would take between one and two minutes.

Answer: A teletype terminal that could be attached to a mainframe

The TWX-33 ("twix thirty-three") was a Teletype 33 terminal that used paper rolls and a teletype keyboard (with round keys) and could be attached to mainframe computers for remote work in the 1960s. The "33" was the lightning fast maximum printing speed of 33 characters per second using a small cylindrical print head which moved up and down and smacked against an ink-impregnated ribbon between it and the paper --- this process caused the whole unit to shake as it printed.

It included an audible bell which could be programmatically rung on IBM RAX time-share systems!

Answer: octal

The Honeywell 800 was an octal (base-8) machine which existed in various forms from late 50s through early 70s. In 1965 Honeywell introduced Easycoder which generated COBOL-60 code from templates greatly accelerating development timelines and reducing number of programmer errors.

Answer: Gus German, Jim Mitchell, Richard Shirley, Robert Zamke

Other than William Gates and Steve Jobs who were both too young at the time (both only 10). The WATFOR/WATFIV evolution is one of many great examples of the influence and success of academic initiatives in the computing industry as a whole.

Answer: Saskatchewan Power Corporation (Canada)

The system used an electronic drum to allow dynamic memory management. The sale to the Canadian customer as the first sale was not surprising since Ferranti-Packard was the Canadian subsidiary of Ferranti, an aquisition of ICT. The FP6000 went on to become the basis for ICT's next generations of hardware and software (the various 1900 series with ExBM OS).

Answer: True

The vast number of vacuum tubes generated enormous amounts of heat that could only be dissipated using chilled water pipes and forced air. Some mainframe computers (the Univac I of 1951, a walk-in computer, was a little over 12ft x 12ft x 8ft had over 19,000 tubes, weighed about 15 tons, and consumed 125KW of power). It could add about 100,000 pairs of 10-digit numbers per second.

Answer: Amdahl

Gene Amdahl left and formed AMDAHL, and began shipping his Amdahl 470 series in 1975 and made significant inroads into IBM market. The pointed competition between IBM and Amdahl is often cited as a significant factor in pushing forward innovation and keeping downward pressure on prices.

Answer: False

IBM introduced its zSeries 890 in 2004. At the even larger end of things are the grid and supercomputers offered by various companys such as CRAY. There is speculation that the move to "virtualization" will add more interest in the mainframe commercial market.

Answer: To allow for visual sorting if you dropped them

The judicious use of diagonal lines down the top of a deck of cards allowed for the rapid (relatively speaking) manual sorting of a dropped deck of cards back into sequence. In addition, on the IBM-80 cards, columns 71 thru 80 were reserved for sequence numbers which could allow that invaluable piece of equipment, the card-sorter, to restore order to your dropped deck.