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] (Clem Clarke) writes: > It's a shame, but unless IBM does do a big rethink on this, and allows > small developers some sort of inexpensive or free access to the > mainframes, they will die. Allowing a "hobbyist" license for Z/OS, > VM and VSE on Hercules would be one way, and what does IBM really have > to lose? And the gain would be that they could have many people > working at no cost on these systems developing tools and applications > to make them better and better. some related thread drift from another n.g. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#3 nouns and adjectives that in the 60s and much of the 70s ... lots of the innovation came out of customer installations & datacenters ... since it was the customers that understood the need and requirement ... things like cics, ims, etc. later they were transferred to "development" organizations for product support. in many cases, this is misnomer ... since those "development" organizations are responsible for product maintenance ... not the products "development" (maybe doing plus/minus five percent changes per annum). I've periodically made facetious comments referencing the "term" inflation in using the word "development" applied to organizations that are primarily product "maintenance". something similar happened with the introduction of the ibm/pc ... large proportion of the "products" originated from end-users (that were faced with the actual problems and understood what kind of solution was needed). vendor product operations tend to have people like software engineers that understand issues about software maintenance ... but rarely have people with the necessary experience that they could see what solution was originally needed. even before ibm/pc came out ... there were some that had jump shipped from vm/cms (that had been providing mainframe-based personal computing environment) and were implementing some number of CMS applications on other early personal computers. These weren't ports of CMS applications (because the implementation details tended to be totally different), but frequently the look&feel and the solution they provided were the same. the "OCO-wars" were especially hard on the vm/cms community ... because not only was full source available ... but even maintenance, fixes, etc for customers were shipped as source updates ... based on CMS multi-level source maintenance facilities. Some studies from their period even claimed the number of system (source) updates done at customer datacenters (aka aggregate lines-of-code) was actually larger than the source lines-of-code in the base system. the high-end of the market is where the (quarterly) revenue/profit ... but all the innovation tends to originate at the low-end & mid-range ... in part innovation requires quite a bit of experimentation, trial&error, etc ... and the high-end is rarely made available for such experimentation. As a result, some of the other vendors found a need that could filled in the entry/low-end market segment (and long term ... it is frequently the entry/low-end that tends to feed the high-end with the applications that keep the high-end quarterly revenue sustained). the pre-occupation with quarterly results has been a sporadic topic for at least the last 40 yrs. during periods when there was significant general economic growth ... the generational issues appeared to almost take care of themselves ... allowing the perception that executives could solely concentrate on the quarterly issues. however, this approach somewhat came to roost. i've mentioned before about being at a talk at MIT in the early 70s where Amdahl was asked how he was able to convince the money people to support his new clone computer company. His reply was that there was already something like $200b that customers had invested in 360 applications ... that even if IBM were to totally walk away from 360/370 ... which might be considered a vieled reference to the future system project http:///www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys ... (just) that (existing) software application base could keep him in business thru the end of the century. starting in the early 70s, i had been heavily involved with HONE deployment ... first its original objective to provied "hands-on" experience to branch office SEs with operating systems running in virtual machines ... and then the transition to being primarily an online, interactive environment deploying applications (mostly implemented in cms\apl) supporting sales & marketing worldwide. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone in the mid-70s, I got con'ed into helping with the virgil/tully microcode assists ... including spending time off & on over a period of a year running around the world with the product managers, meeting with business planning & forcasting groups positioning the processors in the market. One of the things that I saw was that the business positioning environment in world trade was somewhat the early stages of what was going to be happing in the domestic market a decade or so later (the HONE tools somewhat gave me perspective of what sales & marketing was doing world-wide ... from the mechanics bottom-up ... where-as all the virgil/tully forcasting was perspective of sales & marketing somewhat from top-down). lots of past posts talking about (both) 360 & 370 microcode: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#mcode ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
