The RAL IBM 3032 was delivered in March 1979 with a set of 8 IBM 3350 disc drives. The 3032 ran under the VM operating system which allowed the concurrent running of several virtual machines within the 3032. The 3032 eventually took on the front-end duties of the dual 360/195 system running the existing highly modified MVT system in one virtual machine. At the same time, development work was possible in a separate virtual machine. In particular, the IBM CMS system was developed with the aim of taking over from the locally developed ELECTRIC system for interactive editing and job submission. The 3032 was slightly slower than the 360/195 on branching and integer instructions but only half the speed on floating point operations.
It was May 1980 before the 3032 completely took over the front-end role and by then there was the start of a CMS service as an alternative to ELECTRIC. In 1981, the memory was increased to 6 Mbytes and with the 11 Mbyte IBM 2305 fixed head file moved to the 3032 as a paging device, a full CMS service was introduced and the rundown of ELECTRIC started. A second-hand 2305 was added to increase the paging space. Initially, the 3032 was able to do some back-end processing but by 1981 the build-up in concurrent users meant it was used completely as a front-end processor.
The IBM 3032 was replaced by the IBM 3081D in July 1982. It had been the bridge that allowed the transition from the old dual processor 360/195 to the latest IBM system.
