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] (Steve Arnett) writes: > What ever happened to the Virtual Universe Operating System that was > announced back in the late 70s? Or did IBM keep that one for > themselves? ref posts in thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#49 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#50 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#51 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe? the programming announcement OS/VU http://www.cbttape.org/funny/ttosvu.pdf also discussed here http://mcraeclan.com/Links/Computers/IBMMainframeHistory/mvsosvu.htm for slight drift, here is old posting of "Gen A Sys" from july '79 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#38 Ancient computer humor - Gen A Sys there there is this ... THE CONDEMNED * WHEN THE EARTH WAS CREATED, THE POWERS ABOVE GAVE EACH MAN A JOB TO WORK AT AND LOVE. HE MADE DOCTORS AND LAWYERS AND PLUMBERS AND THEN - HE MADE CARPENTERS, SINGERS, AND CONFIDENCE MEN. AND WHEN EACH HAD A JOB TO WORK AS HE SHOULD, HE LOOKED THEM ALL OVER AND SAW IT WAS GOOD. * HE THEN SAT DOWN TO REST FOR A DAY, WHEN A HORRIBLE GROAN CHANCED TO COME IN HIS WAY. THE LORD THEN LOOKED DOWN, AND HIS EYES OPENED WIDE - FOR A MOTLEY COLLECTION OF BUMS STOOD OUTSIDE. "OH! WHAT CAN THEY WANT?" THE CREATOR ASKED THEN "HELP US," THEY CRIED OUT, "A JOB FOR US MEN." "WE HAVE NO PROFESSION," THEY CRIED IN DISMAY, "AND EVEN THE JAILS HAVE TURNED US AWAY." SAID THE LORD, "I'VE SEEN MANY THINGS WITHOUT WORTH - BUT HERE I FIND GATHERED THE SCUM OF THE EARTH!" * THE LORD WAS PERPLEXED - THEN HE WAS MAD. FOR ALL THE JOBS, THERE WAS NONE TO BE HAD! THEN HE SPAKE ALOUD IN A DEEP, ANGRY TONE --- "FOR EVER AND EVER YE MONGRELS SHALL ROAM. YE SHALL FREEZE IN THE SUMMER AND SWEAT WHEN ITS COLD - YE SHALL WORK ON EQUIPMENT THATS DIRTY AND OLD. YE SHALL CRAWL UNDER RAISED FLOORS, AND THERE CABLES LAY - YE SHALL BE CALLED OUT AT MIDNIGHT AND WORK THROUGH THE DAY. YE SHALL WORK ON ALL HOLIDAYS, AND NOT MAKE YOUR WORTH - YE SHALL BE BLAMED FOR ALL DOWNTIME THAT OCCURS ON THE EARTH. YE SHALL WATCH ALL THE GLORY GO TO SOFTWARE AND SALES - YE SHALL BE BLAMED BY THEM BOTH IF THE SYSTEM THEN FAILS. YE SHALL BE PAID NOTHING OUT OF SORROW AND TEARS - YE SHALL BE FOREVER CURSED, AND CALLED FIELD ENGINEERS!" * .... snip .... and then there is this ... In the first few months of the year that System 360 Operating System came to a full stop, all signs appeared normal and there was no indication of an impending disaster. The SDD Manager of Programming Systems stated at the spring SHARE meeting that the F Level of FORTRAN V would definitely be implemented and would at least equal the speed of the E Level FORTRAN V subset, provided it was run on a Model 75 or greater. There was no truth, he asserted, to the rumor that IBM was dropping FORTRAN in favor of PL/3. Option 89, or MVC (multiprogramming with a variable number of CPU's), which had been released in System Release 101.8 was hailed by a large number of users as the ultimate in operating systems. Representatives of a major government agency which had been running a Model 91 with 8 million bytes using a modified BPS supervisor, lodged a mild protest, but were shouted down by the majority. On April 1, an announcement by the Management Information Department of DPD caused quite a stir. Their Management Action Optimization (MAO) program would be written using the new Linear Interpretation Nucleus (LIN), part of DOS extended. This occurred, it was rumored, in spite of persistent efforts by the Marketing Verification Department (MVD) to persuade them to use OS. This department is charged with the "purification" of TYPE II programming standards. There were indications, however, that something was in the air. The OS Internals Workshop was extended from 13 weeks to 26 weeks. A resident psychiatrist was installed to try to cut down on nervous breakdowns, defections, and AWOL's. A blue letter advised salesmen that "throughput" and "turnaround time" were not to be used. The byword was to be "full utilization of system resources." At all costs, customers were to be discouraged from asking, "But when will my job be completed?" Release 91.0 contained a module of the nucleus that stopped the software clock during system overhead time. Murmurs about the difference between meter time and time accounted for led to the removal of all meters and a shift from a 176 hour base to 264 hours per month. Dissatisfaction was increasing, however; one large scientific/engineering/commercial customer announced his intention to switch to a competitor, but after two years was unable to do so because he was unable to discover exactly what his system was doing. The end finally came in mid-October. System Release 110.7 was distributed, which converted everyone to MPSS (Multiple Priority Scheduling System), which combined the following control program options: Multiprogramming with a Valuable Number of Tasks Multijob Initiation Multiple Priority Secection Multiprocessing with a Variable Number of CPU's SYSGEN was accomplished with little difficulty in 504 system hours. Expectantly, customers IPLed and initiated their job streams. Nothing Happened Nothing. When it slowly dawned on everyone that nothing was going to happen, now or later, a flood of anguished telephone calls swamped the branch offices. At Poughkeepsie, in turn, all extensions, all twenty-five thousand of them, were busy. Unauthorized vehicles were turned away at the entrance roads. The Director of Programming Systems could not be found. At last a brave customer engineer fought his way through the crowd around his system and obtained a dump. As he scanned the hex, the horrible truth came home to him. All of core, as far as the eye could see, was filled with control blocks, each containing pointers to other control blocks. DADSM was allocating and suballocating, searching DSCB's and building new ones. Job Management was initiating new jobs, task management was creating tasks and ATTACHING and LINKING, data management was opening data sets, and building WTG tables, DCB's, DEB's, ECB's, and IOB's. It was finding TIOT's from tasks dispatched by task management, which pointed to JFCB's. But no programs were being executed. No data was being read or written or processed. Operating System had taken over all the system resources and was entirely occupied with issuing supervisor calls, saving registers, restoring registers, chaining forwards and backwards, and following pointers all over core. Every pointer led to some other pointer. Operating System, after several years of effort by thousands of programmers, had finally become a completely closed system. The great dilemma was solved only through the intervention of the Chairman of the BoaRD< WHO PERSONALLY ISSUED A BLACK_BORDERED BLUE LETTER ANNOUNCING THE WITHDRAWAL OF Operating System. A large bonfire was built in the Poughkeepsie parking lot in which a huge mountain of OS documentation was burned, while the local high-school band played a funeral dirge. Users all over the world wearily set to the task of rewriting using the BPS assemble. A new programming system was announced for delivery in two years, to be called Assembler Stacked Support (ASS). And everyone breathed a great sigh of relief and became happy for a time. OS IS NOT TO REASON WHY . . . (To the dune of "Everglades" and "The MTA", and with apologies to the Kingston Trio, which does not necessarily include IBM.) (sparkling guitar intro) I. I was born and raised around Poughkeepsie, A programmer is what I had to be; But IBM and its programming team Have turned me into a debugging machine. Running all my jobs under MVT. CHORUS: Where a job can run and never be found, And all you see are discs goin' 'round; And when you get your output the results are nil: If the JCL don't get you then the systems will. II. I put my job in the input queue. And watched in awe as the system blew. When I reran the job, I felt really crushed; I saw on my listing: INPUT STREAM DATA FLUSHED. Running all my jobs under MVT. CHORUS III. I reran the job and ran out of space; I reran the job with a step out of place; I reran the job with priority 10 ... (pause) "Will it ever return, no, it'll never return, And its fate is still unlearned, It may hide forever in SYS1.LINKLIB..." (pause) Running all my jobs under MVT. CHORUS IV. Well, I couldn't get a job past the JCL hump, So I never got a chance to read an ABEND dump, If I could get one through, I'd have debugging fun, 'Cause the job was in the language known as PL/I. CHORUS Getting lots of grief from this MVT. Running line a thief 'way from MVT. Getting round this mess via DOS. (rousing guitar finale) ... snip ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
