Fascinating machine in so many ways. The founder of the company was the grandfather of William Burroughs, author of (among others) Naked Lunch.
Burroughs was a late entry to the mainframe market, but when they went there, they did not have to worry about backwards compatibility, so they could do fancy stuff like virtual memory and a stack-oriented architecture.
You just have to love this item: "multiprocessing of independent programs, with dynamic scheduling by the operating system". These days, we call it multitasking and forget just how cool it is.
> they did not have to worry about backwards compatibility, so they could do fancy stuff like virtual memory
IBM did have to worry about backwards compatibility, but they delivered a virtual memory machine, the System/360 Model 67, by 1966.[1] The System/370, on which virtual memory was standard, was delivered starting in 1971.[2]
Their VM/370 operating system (1972) was a hypervisor (IBM coined the term back then) that provided virtual System/370 machines.[3] You could actually run instances of VM/370 in VM/370 virtual machines. It amazes me that this technology was already being used a half-century ago.
Burroughs was a late entry to the mainframe market, but when they went there, they did not have to worry about backwards compatibility, so they could do fancy stuff like virtual memory and a stack-oriented architecture.
You just have to love this item: "multiprocessing of independent programs, with dynamic scheduling by the operating system". These days, we call it multitasking and forget just how cool it is.