Ed Gould wrote:
Timothy:
I profess I have never installed VM (unless you count once 30 years
ago). That being said, its never the d/l'ing that is the difficult part
.. its always the "post" downloading that gets to be a PITA and always
requires some (some say quite a bit) expertise. The VM system I helped
set up was on a 4331 (w/3310's IIRC) was not a breeze by any stretch.
IIRC it was a IPO (but I could be remembering incorrectly). But to get
back to MVS the same thing can be said with a SERVPAC. I won't talk too
much about servpac's as I have already indicated my dislike for them on
here in the past. The d/l is almost never hard the customization is
always the gotcha IMO. So please don't say the install is easy as it is
only about a 1/3 (1/4?) of the job. You are making a broad statement,
IMO, and putting a broad brush on the effort and thereby making it seem
like any idiot can do so. This seems to be an effort by IBM (starting in
the 1990's) that sysprogs are no longer needed. IBM (even in the SERVPAC
classes) discussed that they are no longer needed that any joe blow can
do a servpac.
I am not picking on LE but if you take the defaults that LE put out, a
lot of your batch programs will not work correctly. The same can be said
for other "optional" customization items that need careful monitoring at
customization times. Most likely an untrained sysprog would take all the
defaults. I was training a sysprog at the time of the servpac and I gave
him the chore to determine which customization jobs were needed and he
didn't have a clue. Like I said I don't wish to pick on ONE component
but LE is a good target (sigh).
IBM (and you) seems to be sending out signals that we sysprogs are no
longer needed. I am lucky to be in retirement and not have to put up
with this BS from IBM anymore.
we did a lot of work for vm originally on 138/148 .... besides ecps
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
there was a lot of investigation trying to make it almost as
transparently part of the machine as current day LPAR. ... basically
pre-installed with lots of useability stuff on every machine that went
out the door
however this was back in the days when corporate still thot they had a
chance to kill vm ... and while they allowed endicott to ship ecps
support, the idea that every machine that went out the door had it
pre-installed was blocked (along with the lots of the usability stuff)
POK had the vm development group in burlington mall shutdown and all the
people were told they had to move to POK to work on the (internal only)
VMTOOL supporting mvs/xa development (justification was that mvs/xa
development couldn't meet schedule unless they had all the vm developers
working on it also) ... and there would be no more vm products for
customers. endicott managed to pickup some of the vm370 mission and
rescue some of the people from having to move to POK (although quite a
few stayed in the boston area and went to places like DEC to work on
what was to became VMS).
however, this (138/148) was the leading edge of some companies starting
to order the boxes in large numbers. this really accelerated in the
4331/4341 time-frame where it wasn't unusual to have customers ordering
the boxes in a couple hundred at a time. old reference to one such situation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers
the issue started becoming if the number of machines increase by two
orders of magnitude (100 times) ... where does the two orders of
magnitude increase in the number of support people come from?
this period also saw a big explosion in the number of vm/4341s on the
internal network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internal
which was nearly almost all vm machines already. at the time the arpanet
cutover to internetworking protocol on 1/1/83, there was possibly 100
arpanet nodes with somewhere between 100 and 255 connected system hosts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet
however the internal network was almost 1000 nodes by that time ...
almost all vm (and non-sna) machines. a recent thread
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#40 Arpa address
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#42 Arpa address
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#43 Arpa address
vax was also selling into that same mid-range market (as 4331 and 4341).
there was some study that 4341 was better price/performance and a claim
that something like 11,000 vax sales should have been 4341s ... recent
post mentioning the subject:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#17 virtual memory
however, in that period there was a SHARE study/report that found that a
lot of customers were buying vax (instead of vm/4341s) because of much
less resources/skills were needed to install, support and maintain the
systems (although overall 4331/4341 did still sell more total than vax,
in part because of large customers ordering them a couple hundred at a
time).
then there was an expectation of a similar explosion in sales for the
4381 (4341 follow-on) ... but by that time customers were starting to
buy workstations and high-end PCs for that market segment. you can also
see similar affect on the vax sales going into the mid-80s.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#31
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0
The issue in the 80s (especially early 80s) wasn't that sysprogs were no
longer (absolutely) needed ... it was if you had a customer with a
couple large mainframes in a datacenter ... and they ordered 210 4341s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers
where was the additional trained staff going to come from?
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