The ES/9000
Picture 23 of 24
In late 1990, IBM replaced the illustrious 3090 with the ES/9000 line, which ushered in the era of fiber optics with a technology IBM called ESCON or Enterprise Systems Connection. Naturally, this was not the only new thing about these systems. In fact, Thomas J. Watson Jr. considered the ES/9000 as the most important release in the company's history. Even more important than the System/360, you ask? Well, Mr. Watson thought so.
So let us assume he was lucid and not simply issuing hyperbole. Certainly ESCON was an important technology. It was a serial, fiber optic channel that could transmit data at 10 MB/s and up to nine kilometers apart when it was released. Or maybe he was referring to the massive amounts of 9 GB of memory it could use? Or perhaps it was the ability to use eight processors in one sysplex, which allowed it to be treated as one logical unit? Then again, for the first time, one could create multiple partitions and allocate processor resources to each logical partition, and run any of the new (and compatible) Enterprise System Architecture/390 operating systems on them. Maybe that was it.
I doubt it was the performance, which was roughly 1.7 to 1.9 times the speed of the 3090/600J (the previous fastest mainframe from IBM) in commercial applications, 2.0 to 2.7 in scalar, and 2.0 to 2.8 in vector performance. Although impressive, we've seen similar jumps before between generations. None of this sounds so earth shattering that it should be the most important release in the most important computer company's history does it? Yes, by today's standards 9 GB is a lot and 10 MB/s over nine kilometers is faster than the Internet speeds to which most of us have access. Serial transmission has been around for a few years now, and virtualization is becoming more common all the time. Eight processors is a good amount, but dual-socket quad-core processors are not that rare anymore. And we'll soon have processors with that many cores. So, I just don't know.
Maybe it had something to do with it being released in 1990. You know, when the 486 was hot and George H.W. Bush was in the first part of his term. Before Yahoo! existed and about six years before the first article appeared on Tom's Hardware about Softmenu BIOS features for Socket 7 motherboards. Taken in that time context, it was a monumental achievement, with so many important advances in so many aspects of the systems. All in all, it's very hard to disagree with Mr. Watson. Would you have expected otherwise from such a distinguished and accomplished person?
But, although this marvel has technology that hardly seems old even by today's standards, our story is surely not done. But, what can top the ES/9000? It's hard to imagine, but then again, it's even harder to imagine a computer line staying the same for 19 years. So, let's take a look at the latest and greatest from Big Blue.
But will it Blend?
Wonderful article, thanks Tom's. =]
Killed a good hour of my day, and I very much enjoyed it.
Really cool. One observation, on page 7 I think the magnetic drum is rotating 12,500 revolutions per minute, not per second....If my harddrive could spin at 12,500 revolutions per second I'm sure it could do all sorts of amazing things like flying or running Crysis.
Good article, however although not quite "Complete". There is no mention of Collosus (which was used to break Enigma codes from 1944) or The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicknamed Baby, which was the world's first stored-program computer which ran its first program in June 1948.
So the ABC was in fact the first mobile computer? The picture does show wheels under the table at least
But I guess netbooks are easier to handle, and have batteries
I am with pugwash - its a good article but why does it seem like it is a bit US centric, no mention of Alan Turning or "Baby" and the Enigma code cracking machines of Bletchley Park
Err what about the Zuse Z3?
I agree with others, in that I am surprised that there was not even a mention of a Turing machine or other very early "computers".
Surely they qualified as Mainframes of their times?
It's a shame that multiplication, addition and division benchmarks are not persistently noted throughout the article.
I know that now a days it's very much dependent on software design, but it would still be nice to follow the progression in terms of calculation power of the machines.
25 pages??? i love ad block but damn this is annoying
Where can we get an 80/80 of this article without all of the noise? No PDF?
So.....can it play Crysis?
Out of curiosity, since its a metric I am more familiar with, what would the TeraFLOPS rating be in the newest and bestest from IBM. And how much would one of those bad boys set you back in the wallet.
Was a very educational and interesting article.
"The 704 was quite fast, being able to perform 4,000 integer multiplications or divides per second. However, as mentioned, it was also capable of doing floating point arithmetic natively and could perform almost 12,000 floating-point additions or subtractions per second. More than this, the 704 added index registers, which not only dramatically sped up branches, but also reduced program development time (since this was handled in hardware now)."
Many of these statements are sure to be wrong. 1) For sure, it would not be faster at floating point than integer. 2) Index registers have to do with memory addressing, not branching.
First, I agree with the title being misleading, and I apologize for it. It was never intended to be a complete guide, which would be virtually impossible. I don't know why that title was chosen.
The choice of computers was U.S. centric, because computers were U.S. centric. I chose only one mechanical computer, and it was made by IBM, since they were the dominant company. To add more computers would have been boring, and none of them were important technological milestones. So, while they might be specifically interesting to you, I was of the opinion too many computers from the same time frame would be boring. I almost chose the EDSAC over the EDVAC, but, went with the first design over the first implementation.
With regards to the index registers, "the IBM 704 added index registers and a “TSX” instruction that would branch to an address but leave the address of the TSX in an index register. A single unmodified branch could use that index register value to return."
Loops involve branching, branching involves memory addressing.
With regards to floating point vis-a-vis integer, you need to be more careful about what you're sure of. For one, multiplies and divides are generally slower, being much more complex. But, more to the point, this information is available directly from IBM.
As one who live the mainframe era from the 2k machines for $500K...this story is incomplete without the story of the competition that was the force behind the commercial introduction at a furious pace of things we take for granted today.
Any mention of mainframes without the Honeywell H-800 series, the H200 series or Multics leaves out systems that have had a large influence on computing as we know it. The H-800 was one of the first multiprocessing systems of the late '50s, the H-200 was Honeywell's answer to the 1401 in the '60s and Multics merely contributed much of the hardware architecture for the Intel CPU used in today's PCs and foreshadowed UNIX and many of the development tools we use today. I saw no mention of GE and their 600-6000 series. And NCR. (Remember the term "BUNCH" as the competitors to IBM.)
So starting in the '50s, you should also have the history of the BUNCH woven in even to their demise. Not every great idea originated from IMB (though many did).
What, and no mention of Lawrence Waterhouse and his work during WW2???
Nice article, it was fun to review that history. I would have added mention of the groundbreaking Cray machines, especially the seminal Cray-1 (and it's successor X-MP) as the first "supercomputer." The X-MP looked like a futuristic chaise lounge with the main circuits in a center column surrounded by a circular padded bench. They were so arranged to reduce interconnecting wire lengths, as the speed was limited by the time it took electrons to travel through the interconnects...a speed of light limitation! The later Cray-2 was unique in that it was completely immersed in a bath of liquid Flourinert to cool the dense circuitry.
the first computer programmers were all women!
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/s [...] 187&page=1
Great Article! I learned something new today! I've never been so "into" the computer history before.
Thanks Rich Arzoomanian for writing this article.
all jokes aside, this is the best tom's hardware article i have read to date. thanks for taking the time, effort and expense for putting it together.