Complexity? Blue sky? FS was the champion. From where I sat in FS
Architecture in the 1973 time frame, it was appalling. PFCSKs full of
themselves and full of the concepts of C++ were able to impose their
vision of an object-oriented computer on the hardware design. Two
additional layers of middleware were required to present a usable
application programming interface.
The death of FS was a most welcome event to me; the announcement of
System/38 was a shock but at least the performance demands at that end
of the scale were modest.
I was so relieved to be reassigned to a spot in VS2 marketing support.
Your recollection may differ. That's OK.
Steve Samson
Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
While FS was incompatible ... there were lots of other issues. It was
extremely ambitious with seemingly every blue-sky concept that ever
existed being thrown into the pot. At the time, I somewhat ungraciously
compared it to a cult film that had been playing continously down in
central sq for over a decade (as the inmates being in charge of the
institution). I also claimed that what I had running at the time was
"better" than what was described for resource management in the FS
architecture documents.
I believe the "nail" in the FS coffin was a study by the Houston Science
Center ... applications run on of a FS machine built out of the same
level technology as used in 370/195 ... would have thruput approximately
that of 370/145 (FS hardware complexity reduced thruput by over an order
of magnitude).
After the death of FS ... some number of people went off to Rochester
and created the s/38 that implemented some of the concepts from FS ...
as/400 cisc was the followon to s/38. later as/400 was ported from cisc
technology to power/pc technology. misc. collected posts on 801, romp,
rios, power/ps, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801
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