On 5/23/2021 2:02 AM, Jim Brain via cctalk wrote:
I, of course, came from UNIX and TCP/IP land, and 802.2 and all these
crazy protocols were just bizarre to me. I had bought the Comer books
right after college because I was trying to implement TCP/IP on my
Commodore 64 (got SLIP, TCP, and IP working, back in 1995 or so), and
there was a guy at the company named Walter Falby who was a uber 370
programmer. At one point, he was leading the Compuware group writing
a program that would trick the 370 into feeding different dates to
regular apps on the machine, to be sold as a utility to help companies
test their SW for the year 2000 rollover. Deep knowledge of 370
assembler. Reminds me of "Mel" of the free verse story fame. Anyway,
Falby started asking me about TCP/IP, and I was happy to share what I
knew. He borrowed my Comer books and printouts of the RFCs (not sure
where I printed them from back in those days, but they were available
somewhere) and implemented a full TCP/IP stack for the 370, they
called it Host Communications Interface (HCI). I'm not sure if
Compuware gave HCI away to customers or they just charged a bit for
it, but I remember Walter being stupified IBM was selling TCP/IP for
such a high price and deigned to do something about it.
Dang, knew I should have checked my memory before I posted. Walter
Falby is a great developer as well (still works at BMC/Compuware), but
the HCI guy's name was Andy Coburn, and he is sadly passed on. A great
370 developer.
