On Jun 13, 2007, at 9:56 AM, Tony Harminc wrote:
On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:58:19 +0900, Timothy Sipples
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Back indirectly to Kirk's point: in the fondly remembered
yesteryear --
let's pick the 1970s as an example -- how much did BT/Is pay for
MVS time
(in 1970s inflation-adjusted dollars)?
Mostly $0. The common practice in the 1970s was to trade product
and/or
consulting for mainframe access. I knew lots of people who spent
many happy
nights in various datacentres running their compiles, and testing
their
products.
As a customer for several of these tiny ISVs, I well remember the
product
tapes would often enough come from a different place each time -
wherever
the developer could scrounge cycles. At least a couple of these
efforts are
now very well known, products owned by the likes of CA and other
mainstream
vendors.
Even into the late 1980s it was possible for the proverbial "two
guys in a
garage" to design and build mainframe software using this model,
and sell it
to Fortune 500 companies.
Tony:
Vary true ... There used to be a product (it may still exist for all
I know) that was a competitor to IBM's DFHSM (at that time it was
just HSM). We were in Chicago and he used to fly into here from the
west coast to test on our MVS system (this was in the 70's). He was
able to get his product to work under MVS and then presented our
management with a bill. I had no idea what was going on as we had no
plan on purchasing the product (asm2???) and I took him and the bill
to my management and introduced them to each other and explained what
was going on (not that I knew). I left the meeting as I hadn't a clue
to who agreed with what. The vendor was shown the door in short
fashion and we never heard from the vendor again.
Ed
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