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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: small old machines, ancient OS history, ARM is sort of channeling the IBM 360
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2024 17:16:40 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:
>> Virtual memory was pretty new technology at the time, and required a
>> disk or drum. The central idea of /360 was having the same ISA across
>> a wide range of machines, and virtual memory wasn't affordable at the
>> low end at the time, AFAICS. 
>
>But IIRC even low end S/360s required a disk, at least to IPL(boot)

Nope. They could IPL just fine from card or tape. You could run TOS on
a 16K machine that only had tapes. They also had BPS, which provided
card-only assembler, RPG and some utilities, but I do not get the
impression that was used much other than for debugging and
bootstrapping other stuff.

I believe that disk prices came down fast enough that nearly everyone
had a had a disk drive, even if they also put most of their data on
tapes.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly