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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 360/44, The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Date: Sun, 25 May 2025 22:50:18 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine)

According to Lars Poulsen  <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com>:
>> IBM sort of came around to that with the 360/44, which implemented a scientific
>> subset of the 360's instruction set and ran nearly as fast as a /65. It was
>> intended for process control so they added priority interrupts and some real
>> time I/O.
>
>I think it was early 1970 that I visited Haldor Topsoe (chemical
>engineering co in Denmark) which had recently installed a 360/44. I was
>disappointed to learn that it was not program compatible with other 360
>machines, so it had to use a tailored OS; AFAIR a modified DOS system.
>And I think also it had a different floating point format.

44PS was DOS-ish, manuals at bitsavers if you care.  It was pretty simple,
compile and run Fortran and assembler programs with a simple disk structure.

It used the same floating point format as other 360s but had a knob on
the console you could turn to use fewer precision digits and run faster.

I would be surprised if anyone bought a /44 and didn't use it for realtime
or process control.




-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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