[fpc-devel] Episode 4. Addressing and it's limits Part Two

[rvmartin2 at ntlworld.com]

Mark Morgan Lloyd <markMLl.fpc-devel at telemetry.co.uk> wrote the following on 09/02/12 14:08:24:

> I feel I have to respond to this after a couple of things I've read over 
> the last day or so. I for one have never attempted to belittle "big 
> iron", since it has always seemed clear to me that that type of kit has 
> its uses: if nothing else then to do things like running the name and 
> certificate servers that keep distributed systems going. It's also worth 
> noting that IBM and Burroughs did engage in controlled decentralisation 
> quite early, putting a significant amount of "smarts" in their terminals 
> well in advance of anything done by their "trendier" competitors such as 
> DEC.

IBM earned over $15 billion last year from the sale of mainframes.

> In the current case I was relying on the precedent set by the GCC 
> porters and the Linux maintainers to say "OK, we need to have some 
> policy to determine what vintage of hardware is supported". However 
> noting the availability of old IBM operating systems and the interest 
> people have in running them, and in particular noting the amount of work 
> being put into the OS/380 project, I'm fairly rapidly coming to the 
> conclusion that the S/370 is worth supporting, even if we brush the 
> S/360 under the carpet.

To an application programmer there is (was?) little difference between 360 and 370.
 
I'm puzzled by this whole idea of Free Pascal supporting 360/370.
Who is it aimed at?  Who needs it?