April 7th - a bit of Geek history
Chris Byrne posts about the importance of April 7th over at
The AnarchAngel:
Happy Birthday to Information Technology
Today is one of the most important single dates in information technology. It could reasonably be called ITs birthday.
On April 7th 1927, the first long distance television broadcast was made... Information technology isn't just about computers after all...
On April 7th 1964, the modern mainframe, the IBM System 360, was officially announced. There were of course other large computers before the System 360, but the 360 represented the first truly modern mainframe... and more importantly, the modern generation of mainframe system software, and applications.
So much so, that many core mainframe applications running today, are at least in part, binary compatible back to the programs of the S/360 in 1964.
The system 360 pioneered so many things we consider standard today, it can be fairly said that all modern computing is in some way descended from it.
Five years later, April 7th 1969, RFC-1 was published, setting the first basic standards of what would become the internet.
So, happy birthday to the industry that pays my bills.
That industry paid my bills too -- bought me a nice house and let me move up to 30 acres in paradise...
My first programming experience was FORTRAN on a 360 -- punch your cards, submit your batch, retrieve your work after the run, debug, goto step one.
I moved over to an interactive PDP-8 running FORTRAN and Focal (their BASIC runalike) and then on to the PDP-11 and VAX.
On the personal side, I was running an S-100 CP/M system and when the IBM PC came out, I spent close to $10K for an IBM System 5150 with the 5161 disk expansion chassis and a Seagate ST-225 20MB hard disk.
It was a fun time -- still is!
Posted by DaveH at April 7, 2010 10:34 AM