Manufacturer | International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) |
---|---|
Product family | 18 initial models, followed by others |
Release date | September 5, 1990 |
Discontinued | May 24, 1998 for the first 18 initial models |
Operating system | VSE/ESA, VM/ESA and MVS/ESA |
Memory | up to 9 Gigabytes |
Predecessor | IBM 3090 |
Successor | IBM_System_z |
Website |
Official website IBM Archives "System/390 Announcement". IBM Archives. IBM. |
Designer | IBM |
---|---|
Bits | 32-bit |
Introduced | 1990 |
Design | CISC |
Type | Register-memory Memory-memory |
Encoding | Variable (2, 4 or 6 bytes long) |
Branching | Condition code, indexing, counting |
Endianness | Big |
Registers | |
General purpose | 16 |
Floating point | 4 64-bit |
"System/390 introduces the IBM Enterprise System/9000 family"
was how IBM Marketing simultaneously announced on September 5, 1990 its next mainframe offerings, using two important numbered names:
The introduction covered new architecture, new hardware and new software.
Although the 9000 family name was mentioned first in some of the day's announcements, it was clear by "the end of the day" that it was "for System/390," although it was the name S/390 that was placed on some of the actual "boxes" later shipped.
The newly introduced ESA/390 architecture brought with it
These systems followed the IBM 3090, with over a decade of follow-ons, eventually leading to the IBM System z.
New models were offered on an ongoing basis.
18 models were announced September 5, 1990 for the ES/9000, the successor of the IBM 3090.
Water-cooled ES/9000 models included ES/9021-900, -820, -720, -620, -580, -500, -340 and -330.
Air-cooled ES/9000 models included standalone ES/9121-480, -440, -320, -260, -210, -190, and rack mounted: ES/9221-421, -211, -170, -150, -130, -120.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, patented technology allowed Amdahl mainframes of this era to be completely air-cooled, unlike IBM systems that required chilled water and its supporting infrastructure.The 8 largest of the 18 models of the ES/9000 systems introduced in 1990 were water-cooled; the other ten were air-cooled.
Logical Partitions, LPARs, a standard function on ES/9000 processors, are a feature whereby IBM's Processor Resource/Systems Manager (PR/SM), allows different operating systems to run concurrently in separate logical partitions (LPARs), with a high degree of isolation.
This was introduced as part of IBM's moving towards "lights-out" operation and increased control of multiple system configurations.
ESA/390 (Enterprise Systems Architecture/390) was introduced in September 1990 and was IBM's last 31-bit-address/32-bit-data mainframe computing design, copied by Amdahl, Hitachi, and Fujitsu among other competitors. It was the successor of Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 (ESA/370) and, in turn, was succeeded by the 64-bit z/Architecture in 2000.