System / 3

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IBM System / 3 at the Olmsted County Historical Society Museum in Rochester, Minnesota .
IBM System 3 Model 10D
IBM System / 3 Model 15 In the background 4 stacks of 3340 plates
Punch card with 96 columns

The System / 3 was a minicomputer for medium-sized companies from IBM . The computer was first shipped in 1969. The models 6, 8, 10, 12 and 15 were built. In 1978 System / 3 (also S / 3) was replaced by the successor product System / 38 .

System description

The small space requirement for the time and the costs made the system / 3 attractive for medium-sized companies. The 96-column punch card was new instead of the usual 80 columns, with the punch card format being 1/3 of the usual size. The disk storage was between 2.45 and 9.80 million characters. RPG II was used as the programming language. This was based on the RPG of the IBM System / 360 . Monolithic Systems Technology (MST), a hardware technology from the 1970s, was also used.

A typical disk-oriented configuration consisted of a central memory with 12,288 characters, a 4.9 million character hard disk, a multi-function punch card unit (MFCU), an offline card sorter, a printer (200 lines per minute) and two data recorders (for punch cards). A typical punch card-oriented version had a main memory of 8,192 characters, an MFCU, an offline card sorter, a printer (100 lines per minute) and a data recorder.

Plate stacks of type 3340 ( Winchester ) could be connected to model 15 .

chronology

  • 1969 - Model 10 presented (working memory 8 K to 32 K)
  • 1970 - Model 6 presented
  • 1973 - Model 15 presented
  • 1974 - Model 8 presented
  • 1975 - Model 12 presented

Components of the system

  • 5410 central processing unit
  • 5424 Multi-Function Card Unit (MFCU)
  • 5203 printer
  • 5444 Disk Storage Drive
  • 5471 printer keyboard
  • 5475 Data Entry Keyboard
  • 5496 Data Recorder
  • 5486 Card Sorter

literature

  • Solomon Martin Bernard: System / 3 Programming RPG II , 1972, ISBN 0-13-881698-0
  • FR Crawford: Business System with Punched card data processing and System / 3 Model 10 , 1973, ISBN 0-13-107698-1
  • Charlie Massoglia: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the System / 3 But Nobody Told You
  • Charlie Massoglia: System / 3 Disk Sort as a Programming Language
  • Jerome T. Murray: An introduction to computing: IBM System / 3 , 1971, ISBN 0-04-510037-3

Web links

Commons : IBM System / 3  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IBM product announcement: IBM System / 3 (PDF file; 1.72 MB) in English
  2. ↑ IBM expands the Basis Computerwoche again, December 17, 1976