On 9/30/2019 9:39 AM, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote:
On 2019-09-30 1:27 p.m., Diane Bruce via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 10:57:25AM -0500, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
On 09/29/2019 11:46 PM, Jason T via cctalk wrote:
Well I said no more computers I can't lift, but exotic systems keep
finding me. So today we pulled a Tandem CLX out of a basement, along
with a few boxes of docs, 9-track tapes and random odd and ends:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/m2N7RKN3JXcmVTUC8
There's such as thing as "so obscure that no one knows/cares about
it". I've had those before. Do I have another? It sure is heavy.
-j
Tandem was hot stuff back in the 1980's. These appear to be
the last gasp of their technology.
I remember hearing that the credit/debit card database we were talking
to was a Royal Bank Tandem in Toronto when I was first involved
with Point of Sale protocols.
All of the Canadian banks used Tandem systems to front end the
Interact it was part of the initial plan for that system.
Paul.
Once you had fast networking between processors, the whole
Tandem concept became pretty easy to do on a few ordinary
processors, without special hardware. So, their whole
reason for being became moot.
Indeed.
Yes I suspect anything that HP may flog as nonstop these days would be
a high availability cluster which would probably include shared
storage. SAN has made shared storage trivial and even allows you to
spread the nodes in the cluster geographically. When I first
encountered HA cluster the shared storage was parallel SCSI with an
initiator in each system. The first that aloowed you to spread the
nodes enough to have them in different building used IBM's SSA, a
predecessor of SAN, to connect the storage.
In the early 2000s, I visited the HP site which had the developers for
the Tandem product, VMS HP/UX. They were using our ICE for development
of the Itanium versions of VMS and for HP/UX. I don't think there was
any plan to support the Nonstop in such a fashion, but the developers
were all there @ the same Cupertino site.
As to developing something to do a useful version of TAL and Nonstop w/o
any specialized hardware, I don't think so. We had a system which was
used for a port of the Ultimate / Pick system to Tandem, which was
eventually shutdown and abandoned, but going the other way, to run TAL
in any useful manner without the checkpointing would be pretty much useless.
And Stratus is still there with financial industry using it heavily.
The Tandem method used a checkpointing comparison method which had to
use TAL as the basic platform. Periodically comparisons would be
performed, but there was more than a little computing between comparison
checkpoints. And the voting out of a failed unit was done by hardware.
Stratus used a bus version. so they could have hardware pulled and their
loss was in a few microseconds. For the realtime trader guys Stratus
always won over Tandem. but where there was no need, either platform
was excellent as pointed out for recovering and continuing after a failure.
Also, I don't know if Tandem had it, but Stratus had serial connections
and gizmos which would allow Session protection on a terminal. you
could cut one or the other connection from your computer (required 2)
and not miss a beat on a terminal. If the terminal went black though
there were not as many options.
thanks
Jim
Jon
Diane
Paul.
