The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[email protected] (George Henke) writes: > After all is not MVS a far more robost operating system than VM which, by > the admission of its own authors, is really little more than a hypervisor > developed, of yore, to test different versions of MVS? some number of commercial online timesharing service bureaus were spun-off providing (secure) online interactive operation. recent mention of tymshare here http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#57 Adventure - Or Colossal Cave Adventure however, there were others. a couple of them relatively rapidly moved up the value chain providing all sorts of financial information (including to numerous highly competitive organizations on wallstreet in secure environment). misc. past posts mentioning commercial timesharing operation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare for much of its life vm/cms provided major interactive computing in addition to virtual guest testing. in the wake of the 23jun69 announcement, several internal "HONE" datacenters were setup with cp67 virtual machine to provide hands-on experience for branch office personal with guest operating systems. past post mentioning vm/cms-based online HONE system http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone however, the science center (besides doing virtual machine systems, initial cp40 and then morphed into cp67) ... also ported apl\360 to cms for cms\apl (doing a lot of work for operation in virtual memory environment). Lots of apl-based applications were developed providing sales&marketing support which were also deployed on HONE. Eventually the online interactive sales&marketing support applications came to dominant all HONE operation (and the virtual guest use withered away) ... including (any kind of) mainframe having to be preprocessed by HONE applications (before they could be submitted). the technology for majority of the internal network was also done at the science center ... and for a long period, the majority of the internal machines on this network (larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until possibly late '85 or early '86) ... and were vm/cms machines primarily providing interactive computing. misc. past posts mentioning the internal network http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet At one point, I got involved with the disk engineering development & product test labs in bldg. 14&15 ... and they let me play disk engineer. At one point that had tried to use MVS on their mainframe machines for testing of devices under development ... but experienced a 15min MTBF w/MVS operating a single testcell. They had to drop back to (scheduled) stand-alone testing (i.e. dedicated time, preschedule, schedule tending to be 7x24 around the clock). I decided to redo i/o supervisor so it would never fail ... and eventually was able to support any number of concurrent, on-demand testcell operation ... significantly improving dasd development and test productivity. I happened to do a purely internal document describing the environment and happened to mention the MVS 15min MTBF. I then got a phone call from the MVS operation ... I initially thot would be related to going through the list of things that could be fixed in MVS. Instead it turned out to be part of bringing the wrath of the MVS organization down on me head for even making any references to issues with MVS (some temptation to attribute reputation to carefully managing information) A couple years later ... with the pending introduction of 3380s, the engineers had several dozen (57) hardware error regression tests ... all of which resulted in MVS hang/failure and needing to reboot; in 2/3rds of the cases, there wasn't even any record of what had caused the hang/reboot. old email reference: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801015 misc. past posts getting to play disk engineer (and some referencing bringing down the wrath of the MVS organization) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#disk there was a situation in the aftermath of the demise of the future system effort (was going to completely replace 360/370), http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipeline (which was allowed to go dry during the future system period) ... as well as concerted effort to launch XA. POK managed to convince the corporation to kill the vm370 product, shutdown the vm370 development group at burlington mall, and move all the people to POK (otherwise they wouldn't be able to make the mvs/xa ship date). Eventually Endicott managed to acquired the vm370 product mission ... but effectively had to constitute a development group from scratch. There is also a joking reference that the head of POK was a major contributor to DEC VAX/VMS since so many people wouldn't move and left, going to work for DEC (on VMS). There were enormous number of vm/43xx machines mid-range mostly providing interactive computing (both internally within the corporation and at customer sites) ... it somewhat competed with vax/vms in the same market. The big difference between the vm/43xx sales and vax/vms sales were the large vm/43xx corporate orders that in some cases were nearly a 1000 machines. Going into the mid-80s, the mid-range market saw a shift to workstations and large PCs ... it can be seen in the drop off in vax/vms sales as well as lack of uptake for the 4331/4341 followon (4361/4381 had anticipated seeing similar huges sales as 4331/4341, but the mid-range market was moving to other platforms). misc. old email related to vm/43xx http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx Another trivial example was that the original relational/sql implementation was vm/cms system/r ... some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr there was then technology transfer from SJR to endicott for sql/ds. this old post mentioning some people in jan92 meeting in ellison's conference room http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 one of the people mentioned, claims to have handled the technology transfer from endicott to STL for DB2. -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
