SVS was bizarrely popular in Germany, and lived on there for longer than almost anywhere. IBM Bonn produced an _excellent_ SVS 1.7K DLIB tape that really was well sorted out and I had over a dozen customers using it.
One customer - Maizena in Heilbronn, part of Knorr and manufacturers of the German Army's pea soup tablets - converted from MFT to SVS in 1982 - well after stable MVS was available. They had two systems programmers - Herr Jung and Herr Joshonek. Their IT manager called them together after the MFT ---> SVS migration and said something to the effect that MFT had served them well for ten years and he expected SVS to do the same. One quarter later he was asking us for a remote support contract because both had left the company. We (Itel) sold them a 370/145 with a 3205-5 (? 4?) IPA-attached printer. Lovely little thing - built-in vacuum cleaner, etc. IMO one of IBM's best ever line printers. I went down one day and they weren't using it. I asked why, and opened a hornet's nest. SVS HASP didn't support it, and there were legal proceedings in progress about the mis-sale. I pointed out that HASP always assembled one spare printer device support block, and you just had to zap in the FCB CCW and the UCS load CCW. We had it working perfectly within an hour - very, very happy data centre. I also patched the HASP source to reassemble it correctly if they reinstalled. When I got back to Frankfurt from Heilbronn, I got roasted. The management were hoping to "ride" the court case and place a /158 - I'd blown their deal. Another SVS customer was Kommunalesgebietsrechenzentrum Kranichstein. You can't make names like that up. They had Memorex Double Density 3350s with IDI - "Intelligent Dual Interface". Was ever anything so inappropriately named? A status bus parity check - a common occurence - caused all IDI-linked controllers to forget all owed interrupts. Total system hang. SVS had a MIH, but its channel redrive was - IMO - incorrect. I can't remember after a quarter of a century, but it did a Clear IO when it should have done a Clear Channel or vice versa. I zapped the opcode SUCCESS!!! No more system hangs. A MIH message, and off it went again. Happy, happy operators. Claps on the back and lots of beer. Then their management reassigned all of the outages to a "software fault" and billed us for them. TOS error recovery brings back nightmares. Ford of Europe had a small /360 - perhaps a 25 - at Warley used for shipping data to Germany. It ran TOS - but on 2415s. If you've ever watched error recovery running off 2415s, you know what it's really like watching paint dry. Literally HOURS. I always though COS stood for Card Operating System. ISTR it was very similar in practical ways to the BPS card loader, but 8 cards instead of 6. You just loaded the 8 cards, and then it watched for not-ready to ready transitions at the loading card reader -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
