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What to run on mainframes?

"but, but, but, what about my gamez??? that's all I really care about"

sorry kid, wrong world.
That is true. But from From Al's own website there are a dozen or so references to "game" in this 1962 Catalog of Programs for IBM Data Processing Systems:
Nothing special, things like Black Jack, Noughts and crosses, Checkers, Baseball, business strategy simulations etc. but games nonetheless.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pgmCatalog/C20-8090_Catalog_of_Programs_for_IBM_Data_Processing_Systems_KWIC_Index_Apr62.pdf
 
That is true. But from From Al's own website there are a dozen or so references to "game" in this 1962 Catalog of Programs for IBM Data Processing Systems:
Nothing special, things like Black Jack, Noughts and crosses, Checkers, Baseball, business strategy simulations etc. but games nonetheless.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pgmCatalog/C20-8090_Catalog_of_Programs_for_IBM_Data_Processing_Systems_KWIC_Index_Apr62.pdf
Well games and fun programs go back to the earliest days of computing. So museums could run classical text adventures like Colossal Cave, Startrek, Hunt the Wumpus. Turing insisted that the Manchester Mk1 had a Random Number Generator for simulations and he and Christopher Strachy wrote a programs for noughts and crosses, checkers/draughts. They also wrote a chess program but did not have a machine big enough to run it on but the algorithm may be available. Moon Lander which I played under MTS was also fun, if a little simple. They also wrote a program to write love letters, a service which may be useful to one or two of us on here.... although the output of their program may be a little fruity for the modern generation..


.. it may also be interesting to note that the wife of his college, Max Newman was in the Bloomsbury Set...



which may have influenced there design
 
Some of the early games were important proofs of problem solving techniques but I can't of any that clearly showed that it is being run on a mainframe as opposed to being minimal software running on a smaller computer.
 
The Catalog shows that the Management Decision simulation game ran on a 7070 and the three-dimensional Noughts and crosses ran on a 650 (I have a few 650 tube pluggable modules, my dad was a 650 CE). They were both mainframes, I think the 1620 was smaller?
 
Some of the early games were important proofs of problem solving techniques but I can't of any that clearly showed that it is being run on a mainframe as opposed to being minimal software running on a smaller computer.
When I started there were no smaller computers most everything ran as time sharing session on the Mainframe. At college we had an IBM 1130 but only as a Remote Job Entry (RJE) station to the IBM mainframe. Then when I started work we had a Honeywell H3200 and a Visual Record Computer, which wasn't really a computer plus a Key to Disk machine. So all this stuff ran on the Mainframe.....
 
For IBM APL was the game changer; before APL everything was batch jobs - you submitted a job and picked up results later. APL gave you interactive sessions at the computer. (This all from a colleague, back when I worked at IBM).
 
Interactive programming far pre-dates Ken Iverson's APL. APL is suitable for a certain category of programming--and was not wildly popular, due to its somewhat unusual notation. Still, if your problem employed matrix manipulation, or was math-heavy APL was well worth considering.

The 1620 and 650 are in completely different categories. The 650 was a drum-memory, first-generation system with an optional 50 words of core storage. It was slow and used a 1+1 instruction format, where the location of the next instruction to be executed was part of the current instruction.

The 1620 was a second-generation computer built into a desk, so physically smaller than a 650, it was a decimal variable-word length system with a base 20,000 digits of core. It was provided in several flavors--the 1620 Model I (CADET) which did all arithmetic via table lookup in core, the Model 2, which had hardware to do math, and the 1710 which was equipped for industrial control, which had a real-time clock and interrupt capability. A lot of 1620s (and the later 1130) were sold to schools; businesses preferred the 1401. The 7070 (and 7080) can be viewed as the successor to the 1401; large second-generation decimal machines, part of the 7000 series of which, I suspect the "scientific" 7090 was most popular.

In 1963, IBM's product offerings were all over the map covering several divergent and mutually incompatible product lines. All that vanished with the introduction of the System/360 line, which greatly unified IBM's product line. For the older system users, IBM offered emulation packages on the S/360.
 
I should have specified - IBM mainframes (which is what this thread is about). Also, this was what IBMers (IBM employees) had access to; customers of IBM might have a different world view.
 
The OP never mentioned IBM in his original post that started the thread. How do you get IBM-exclusivity out of this?
Sigh, if you want to split hairs, I was the one who dragged IBM into this thread. But this thread is about mainframes. So the only point I was trying to make was that for IBM (the company), the gamechanger for IBM employees when it came to usage of the (IBM) mainframe, was APL as it allowed them real-time access.
Sorry I failed to make that clear.
 
Your comment was confusing, I'll admit. But again, there were other IBM interactive systems, so I would qualify your remark with "some employees". I don't recall any of my friends who worked at IBM San Jose mentioning extensive use of APL. Out in the real world, I would guess that there were probably more than 100 COBOL and RPG shops running IBM mainframes for every one running APL.

I'm a bit surprised that no one mentioned CDC's (and prior UIUC) PLATO. Hosted on a mainframe, probably the closest to what we've got today--interactive networked multi-user graphical interfaces.
 
IBM had developed SABRE which presaged the standard multi-user terminal to mainframe setup seen in the decades following. IBM knew interactivity but IBM still understood budgets.
 
Yes, the IBM employees in question were those of IBM in Norway (long before my time as an IBMer).
 
At the risk of thread drift I would be interested to know about early interactive environments, particularly for programming (as opposed to specific applications like SABRE). My impression too was that APL was early and influential in this way, but I'd be pleased to learn about predecessors.

I'm also interested in early interactive environments for "number crunching" --- not programming per se but doing computing to perform a wide variety of off-the-cuff analysis, the kind of thing most people would do today by knocking together a quick spreadsheet for whatever it was they were interested in. I have the impression that APL was partly valued in this way (and that this is part of what motivated the design of systems like the IBM 5100). Were there other languages or utilities designed with the same purpose in mind?

I don't recall any of my friends who worked at IBM San Jose mentioning extensive use of APL.
SCAMP development was of course not far away at Palo Alto. Apparently Iverson came round to see it now and then.
 
We had APL as a standard poduct on the STAR-100 (well-suited to running it, as it was a vector super), but as far as I know, it was mostly a curiosity. The bombers at the national labs were almost exclusively FORTRAN. Cray knew this as well.
Neil Lincoln, who was pretty much the godfather of STAR/CYBER 200/ETA, confided to me that he taught his kids and wife to program in APL before any other computer language. He maintained that it transformed one's way of thinking about a problem.
 
BASIC was an interactive environment early on and had a lot of mathematical functions compared to the streamlined micro BASICs. Plus there were all sorts of interactive development languages that arrived and faded out like DEC's FOCAL as BASIC took over. I always thought APL's major advantage was the very condensed source code which only lasted until systems could afford enough RAM to use more conversational syntax.
 
APL had been used as an interactive system, but also they realized that after each statement they could switch away to a different user's statement operating in its own context, thereby getting multitasking. So IP Sharp Associates (IPSA) had a worldwide network of dialup numbers that you could use to connect to their time-sharing mainframe located in Toronto, Canada. They wrote a "mailbox" program, basically a mail server facility that allowed you to send and receive emails from other users as well. More info (sorry for the ugly link) : https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/collec...the I.P. Sharp's on-line time-sharing service.
 
I have an AS/400 820 system with a big FC/5035 migration cabinet. Used equipment purchased from a polytechnic university. It cames with a websphere MQ license, so I used it to develop a business application for a tea restaurant owned by my sister.It works very well, but the air conditioning system costs a lot of electricity.

Well, there you have the answer. Live in the right climate. Here in the UK we are being encouraged to move away from gas central heating and use electric boilers to operate the radiators instead, but there's nothing better in the winter than sitting round a lovely warm mainframe computer regardless of what it's computing, so when HoneyPi, my Honeywell 200 replica, is operational it may spend a lot of its time just computing Pi. If you are going to heat your house with electricity anyway then the computing power is effectively free. Of course as a backup I have just had a brand new gas boiler installed ...
 
APL had been used as an interactive system, but also they realized that after each statement they could switch away to a different user's statement operating in its own context, thereby getting multitasking. So IP Sharp Associates (IPSA) had a worldwide network of dialup numbers that you could use to connect to their time-sharing mainframe located in Toronto, Canada. They wrote a "mailbox" program, basically a mail server facility that allowed you to send and receive emails from other users as well. More info (sorry for the ugly link) : https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/collections/show/15#:~:text=In 1969, IPSA offered its first commercial APL,environment for the I.P. Sharp's on-line time-sharing service.

I worked for Scientific Time Sharing Corp (STSC) from 1979 to 1990.

APL-is-Sharp-button.jpg
 
And BTW, the APL*PLUS Mailbox was implemented by Larry Breed at STSC.
IPSA's came later. (as far as I know)
 
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