Passed away in 2012 so he saw the modern internet age
>Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary.
>Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers.
ISAM in all important variants pretty much required DASDs, CKDs (Count Key Data) in fact as opposed to FBAs (Fixed Block Access - which act like normal drives people are familiar with)
Tapes don't provide CKD interface and thus do not work with ISAM.
And they're not strictly just a disk. It's more like a complex multiplexing system for an array of disks. It has interesting capabilities like "channel programs" that persist to this day which allow you to send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for in one of several access modes.
IBM still provides almost the entirety of it's OS documentation online:
The channel program concept described here, where I/O operations are offloaded to a dedicated controller with its own instruction sequence, was a structural ancestor of modern asynchronous I/O and DMA architectures. The System/360 also codified the byte as exactly eight bits, a decision so foundational that it became the silent assumption underlying every computing architecture that followed.
Amazingly, IBM is still making videos like this. You can find great videos online from them explaining the technical details of LLMs, ML, and the like [1]. The guy in this IBM clip is a progenitor of what they still do today.
I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.
>Pearson LeRoy Wood, 81, passed away April 4, 2012. He was born May 12, 1930 in Detroit, MI. A graduate of Detroit Institute of Technology, Pearson served two years in the US Army. He was employed by IBM for 37 years. He was a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church and also The American Legion, Post 67, in Cary.
>Survivors are his wife, Elaine; two daughters, Diane Post (Barry) of Cary and Susan Scofield (Fred) of Wake Forest; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; five sisters and two brothers.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/pearson-w...
a webcast about the many great benefits of the novel DASD (direct access storage device) over ISAM (index sequential access)
aka disk and tape.
16mm film
Flipchart
impeccable presentation
thx for the time machine :-)
Tapes don't provide CKD interface and thus do not work with ISAM.
And they're not strictly just a disk. It's more like a complex multiplexing system for an array of disks. It has interesting capabilities like "channel programs" that persist to this day which allow you to send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for in one of several access modes.
IBM still provides almost the entirety of it's OS documentation online:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=set-what-...
Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.
1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology