• 1977

Hardware Description

The IBM System/34 was a minicomputer marketed by IBM beginning in 1978. It was withdrawn from marketing in February, 1984. It was a multi-user, multi-tasking successor to the single-user System/32. Most notably, it included two very different processors, one based on System/32 and the second based on older System/3. Like the System/32 and the System/3, the System/34 was primarily programmed in the RPG II language. One of the machine's interesting features was an off-line storage mechanism that utilized "magazines" - boxes of 8-inch floppies that the machine could load and eject in a nonsequential fashion. Borrowing mainframe features such as programmable job queues and priority levels, the System/34 ran on 64K of memory.