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] (Bernd Oppolzer) writes: > BTW, on older machines (not IBM) there were concepts like storage tags, which > allowed to detect the use of uninitialized variables even for binary values. > I don't understand why these concepts never reached the market. This would > make software development and testing easier and maybe cheaper. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#4 Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#8 Is no one reading the article? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#9 Is no one reading the article? the future system project was going to have lots of stuff like that (as well as gobs of other stuff) ... and would have replaced 360 (and early 370). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys however as repeatedly noted ... FS was canceled (excessively ambitious?) and there was a lot of effort pushed into getting 370 activities moving again. recent post in another thread with various other detail http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#50 what's the difference between LF(Line Fee) and NL (New line) ? i've frequently commented that the FS example contributed significantly to the 801/risc philosiphy ... to do the exact opposite (of what was attempted in FS). much of the 801/risc effort was whenever there might be hardware/software trade-off ... you could make perfect software that would do it better than hardware (allowing the hardware to be made much simpler). cp.r operating system and pl.8 compiler were to provide the basis for that philosiphy. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 one such simplification was that there was no hardware protection domains (i.e. supervisor/problem state differentiation). pl.8 compiler would generate perfect software ... and cp.r operating system would guarantee that only correctly compiled pl.8 code would be loaded for execution. this resulted in a little hiccup. ROMP (16bit 801/risc) was targeted as an austin GSD effort for displaywriter follow-on (implemented on cp.r with pl.8). it was canceled in the early 80s and there was activity looking around to salvage the effort ... and observed that lots of hardware platforms were being shipped with minimal extra effort by leveraging a port of the unix operating system. a desicion to retarget ROMP to unix workstation market forced retrofitting bits & pieces to ROMP to try and compensate for not having an enhanced perfect software environment ... but having to rely on the UNIX/C operational paradigm (like needing hardware privilege/non-privilege execution states). the company that had been hired to do the AT&T unix port of PC/IX ... was then hired to do a similar AT&T unix port to ROMP. This was announced as AIX (and PC/RT). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
