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Concept
IBM 8000
Summary
The IBM 8000 series was a proposed transistor-based successor to the IBM 7000 series. Important engineers on the project included Fred Brooks and Gerry Blaauw. The project plan for the 8000 series was presented by Fred Brooks in January 1961. Despite some technical successes, the project became a political football, amid IBM's search for a unified product line. The project was canceled in 1961 by Bob Evans, supplanted by the successful System/360 series.
The 8000 project may have seen the first use of the term "architecture" in relation to computers.
Pugh cites a number of reasons for the cancellation of the 8000 line.
Because more integrated technology was not yet available the system was to have been built using discrete transistor (SMS) components.
The proposed systems would have been incompatible with IBM's existing successful 1400 series systems.
The proposed instruction set was too complex.
The systems offered inadequate floating point performance, bolstered only by add-on processors.
Unlike System/360, which offered a series of processors with a common architecture, the 8000 was designed with a single main processor to which external components could be added to increase performance.
The components identified were:
8103 Processor
8104 Processor
8106 Processor
8108 High Speed Floating Point Unit
8112 High Speed Floating Point Unit
The 8103 was proposed as a low-end processor "to relieve the larger systems of the series from the tasks associated with input-output processing." The 8103 was to have featured a 4 K or 8 K 8 μs magnetic-core memory, organized as 16 bit words of two eight bit bytes. The system could also share 2 μs core memory with larger processors. Memory was organized into segments; segment size is unspecified in the proposal. The 8103 was to be multiprogrammed to support its mission as an input/output or front end processor. It appears that task switching was to be automatic under hardware control.
The proposed specifications for the 8104 appear similar to the 8103.
Official source
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