Talk:IBM System/3

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Some questions and quibbles[edit]

Ah, the System/3. I knew it well. My family business got one when I was 14 (1969, one of the first ones delivered in Colorado) and I spent many a happy night and weekend programming it when I should have been smoking dope and chasing girls.

I'm making a few corrections, though.

First, the lowest-end System/3 used only the 96 column cards. No "mass storage" --- such as it was --- at all. Eight K of memory. It literally wasn't powerful enough, in many ways, to provide the power behind a musical greeting card today. Adding disk storage made it a mid-range System/3. Second, it's hardly fair to claim the whole System/38 line was based on a failure, since it led to the whole System/38 line, which is still available in the AS/400 and iSeries. --- Charlie (Colorado) (talk) 18:14, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone remember the third party light sensitive device that sat over the 'stick lights' so you could have an audible warning for errors? --- James Robertson 13 Dec 2014. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.139.182.127 (talk) 10:04, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

RPG[edit]

The System/3 didn't "introduce the RPG language," which was in use at least as far back as the 1960s on System/360 - it was the primary language on the 360/20. Possibly the article is talking about RPG II? Peter Flass (talk) 07:07, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

CPU speed?[edit]

Does anyone know the CPU speed, either clock speed or instructions per second? BMJ-pdx (talk) 09:20, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

According to http://www.ibmsystem3.nl/hardware.html and https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102667928 and elsewhere, its instruction cycle was 1.52 microseconds, but http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/system3/fe/System_3_Model_4_Model_8_Seminar_Oct76.pdf gives 480 nanoseconds. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:10, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]