IBM System 3 / was Re: VTL/Dutchess logic

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2010 Oct 11, at 11:51 AM, Rich Alderson wrote:

> From: William Donzelli
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 11:36 AM
>
>>> Just curious about the architecture: at the programmer's level did 
>>> it look
>>> like a primarily 8-bit machine, or a 16-bit machine which always 
>>> processed 2
>>> bytes in sequence, or it would best be described as mixed 8/16?
>
>> S/3s worked with strings of bytes in memory, basically. Very 
>> non-traditional.

OK, forgot about that possibility. I was aware of the 1401 (but not 
from direct experience).


> Not for IBM.  The 1401 was very much a character-oriented machine.
>
> The S/3 was not, in general, programmed by user programmers in 
> anything other
> than RPG III, which went on to be the programming model for the 
> System/3x and
> AS 400 families; IIRC the original RPG was a 1401 program product.

(I should have said machine-instruction level rather than programmer's 
level.)