alt Hacker NewsIBM Confidential: System/360 File Organization [video]
Comments
Before watching that video all the IBM employees would have had to get together and sing songs. It was a long standing tradition at IBM that all employees at the start of the day had to get together and sing songs praising IBM and Thomas Watson. You can still find copies of the IBM song book floating around the Internet.
When my Dad started in the late 60s IBM had discontinued the morning song tradition.
(1964)
a webcast about the many great benefits of the novel DASD (direct access storage device) over ISAM (index sequential access)
aka disk and tape.
16mm film
Flipchart
impeccable presentation
thx for the time machine :-)
The channel program concept described here, where I/O operations are offloaded to a dedicated controller with its own instruction sequence, was a structural ancestor of modern asynchronous I/O and DMA architectures. The System/360 also codified the byte as exactly eight bits, a decision so foundational that it became the silent assumption underlying every computing architecture that followed.
Hairstyles used to be better than they are today.
Amazingly, IBM is still making videos like this. You can find great videos online from them explaining the technical details of LLMs, ML, and the like [1]. The guy in this IBM clip is a progenitor of what they still do today.
I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.
I'm interested in the program he would have used to typeset his presentation in the 1960s. Also not at all an attack but he seems to be either nervous public speaker or to have a well mananged speech impediment. Just an observation not a critique. It is fascinating IBM woukd have chosen such 'shy' person to make the presentation.
Great video for the month of "Mayframe"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zokKqP0plrM&t=176s
Sorry, it was stronger than me \s
Passed away in 2012 so he saw the modern internet age
>Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary.
>Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-w...