The IBM System/360 Model 67 (S/360-67) was an important IBM mainframe model in the late 1960s. Unlike the rest of the S/360 series, it included features to facilitate time-sharing applications, notably a Dynamic Address Translation unit, the "DAT box", to support virtual memory, 32-bit addressing and the 2846 Channel Controller to allow sharing channels between processors. The S/360-67 was otherwise compatible with the rest of the S/360 series.
Origins The S/360-67 was intended to satisfy the needs of key time-sharing customers, notably MIT (where Project MAC had become a notorious IBM sales failure), the University of Michigan, General Motors, Bell Labs, Princeton University, the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University), and the Naval Postgraduate School. In the mid-1960s a number of organizations were interested in offering interactive computing services using time-sharing. At that time the work that computers could perform was limited by their lack of real memory storage capacity. When IBM introduced its System/360 family of computers in the mid-1960s, it did not provide a solution for this limitation and within IBM there were conflicting views about the importance of time-sharing and the need to support it. A paper titled Program and Addressing Structure in a Time-Sharing Environment by Bruce Arden, Bernard Galler, Frank Westervelt (all associate directors at the University of Michigan's academic Computing Center), and Tom O'Brian building upon some basic ideas developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was published in January 1966. The paper outlined a virtual memory architecture using dynamic address translation (DAT) that could be used to implement time-sharing. After a year of negotiations and design studies, IBM agreed to make a one-of-a-kind version of its S/360-65 mainframe computer for the University of Michigan. The S/360-65M would include dynamic address translation (DAT) features that would support virtual memory and allow support for time-sharing. Initially IBM decided not to supply a time-sharing operating system for the new machine. As other organizations heard about the project they were intrigued by the time-sharing idea and expressed interest in ordering the modified IBM S/360 series machines. With this demonstrated interest IBM changed the computer's model number to S/360-67 and made it a supported product. When IBM realized there was a market for time-sharing, it agreed to develop a new time-sharing operating system called IBM Time Sharing System (TSS/360) for delivery at roughly the same time as the first model S/360-67. The first S/360-67 was shipped in May 1966. The S/360-67 was withdrawn on March 15, 1977. Before the announcement of the Model 67, IBM had announced models 64 and 66, DAT versions of its 60 and 62 models, but they were almost immediately replaced by the 67 at the same time that the 60 and 62 were replaced by the 65.
Announcement IBM announced the S/360-67 in its August 16, 1965 "blue letters" (a standard mechanism used by IBM to make product announcements). IBM stated that:
"Special bid restrictions have been removed from the System/360 Model 67" (i.e., it was now generally available) It included "multiprocessor configurations, with a high degree of system availability", with up to four processing units [while configurations with up to four processors were announced, only one and two processor configurations were actually built] It had "its own powerful operating system...[the] Time Sharing System monitor (TSS)" offering "virtually instantaneous access to and response from the computer" to "take advantage of the unique capabilities of a multiprocessor system" It offered "dynamic relocation of problem programs using the dynamic address translation facilities of the 2067 Processing Unit, permitting response, within seconds, to many simultaneous users"
Virtual memory The S/360-67 design added a component for implementing virtual memory, the "DAT box" (Dynamic Address Translation box). DAT on the 360/67 was based on the architecture outlined in a 1966 JACM paper by Arden, Galler, Westervelt, and O'Brien and included both segment and page tables. The Model 67's virtual memory support was very similar to the virtual memory support that eventually became standard on the entire System/370 line. The S/360-67 provided a 24- or 32-bit address space – unlike the strictly 24-bit address space of other S/360 and early S/370 systems, and the 31-bit address space of S/370-XA available on later S/370s. The S/360-67 virtual address space was divided into pages (of 4096 bytes) grouped into segments (of 1 million bytes); pages were dynamically mapped onto the processor's real memory. These S/360-67 features plus reference and change bits as part of the storage key enabled operating systems to implement demand paging: referencing a page that was not in memory caused a page fault, which in turn could be intercepted and processed by an operating system interrupt handler. The S/360-67's virtual memory system was capable of meeting three distinct goals:
Large address space. It mapped physical memory onto a larger pool of virtual memory, which could be dynamically swapped in and out of real memory as needed from random-access storage (typically: disk or drum storage). Isolated OS components. It made it possible to remove most of the operating system's memory footprint from the user's environment, thereby increasing the memory available for application use, and reducing the risk of applications intruding into or corrupting operating system data and programs. Multiple address spaces. By implementing multiple virtual address spaces, each for a different user, each user could potentially have a private virtual machine. The first goal removed (for decades, at least) a crushing limitation of earlier machines: running out of physical storage. The second enabled substantial improvements in security and reliability. The third enabled the implementation of true virtual machines. Contemporary documents make it clear that full hardware virtualization and virtual machines were not original design goals for the S/360-67.
Features
The S/360-67 included the following extensions in addition to the standard and optional features available on all S/360 systems:
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