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Re: What is the oldest computer that could be used today for real work? [message #411097 is a reply to message #411088] Sat, 18 September 2021 18:30 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Thomas Koenig

J Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> schrieb:
> On Sat, 18 Sep 2021 18:20:22 -0000 (UTC), John Levine
> <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>
>> It appears that Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> said:
>>> On Sat, 18 Sep 2021 04:07:50 -0000 (UTC)
>>> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> According to Branimir Maksimovic <branimir.maksimovic@gmail.com>:
>>>> >> You can still run programs compiled on a 360 on the latest ā€œzā€ box.
>>>> >>
>>>> >Why?
>>>>
>>>> Because they are still useful? Is this a trick question?
>>>
>>> I suppose the real question is why not recompile them to take
>>> advantage of the newer hardware.
>>
>> A lot of 360 software was written in assembler. I gather a fair amount still is.
>> For some they still have the source, some they don't, but even if they do, it's assembler.
>>
>> The newer hardware has bigger addresses and some more instructions but they don't run any faster.
>> If you look at the zSeries principles of operation you can see the many hacks they invented to
>> let old 24 bit addresss 360 code work with more modern 31 and 64 bit code.
>
> Something that ran adequately on a machine with a 10 MHz clock will
> generally run so much more than adequately on a machine with a 5 GHz
> clock that there's not much incentive to optimize anyway.

There are a couple of things that could go wrong, though, especially
if the problem sizes have grown, as they tend to do.

Tradeoffs between disk speed and memory made in the 1980s may not
work as well when the relative performances of CPU and discs have
diverged as much as they did, and there is a factor of 10^n more
data to process, and all of a sudden you find there is this
n^2 algorithm hidden somewhere...
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