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] (Tommy Tsui) writes: > Actually, I worry becuase there are no competitors in the market, why > IBM announced the new CPU model so fast, it doesn't like a desktop > computer ..I think z9 is announced around 3 years...As I remember, IBM > never try to announced a new model of mainframe computer just three > years later...a market needs??? ..just curious...if you upgrade the > mianframe currently I think you also have a question... lots of industries were on 7-8 yr development cycle ... but they had two parallel efforts offset by 3-4 yrs ... so there was new announcements every 3-4yrs. in the 70s, the company had a problem because they had so focused on moving everything off 360/370 and on to future system replacement ... old post with somebody quoting from Fergus & Morris book http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33 lots of other posts mentioning future system effort http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys as a result the 370 product pipeline was allowed to run dry. then when future system project was killed ... there was mad rush to get things back into the 370 product pipeline. the 303x was rush stopgap ... while they tried to ramp up for xa. the integrated channel microcode from the 370/158 engine was moved into a dedicated separate box and relabled "channel director". then a 370/158 was repackaged with just the 370 microcode and relabled a 3031 ... with a 2nd dedicated 158 microcode engine running the channel director microcode. the 370/168 was repackaged to work with channel director and relabled 3032. the 3033 started out with 370/168 wiring logic remapped to faster chip technology ... which would have nominally resulted in machine approx. 20percent faster than 168. however, the new chip technology also had ten times the circuits per chip. there was some very targeted thruput redesign to better do things within the same chip ... which eventually resulted in 3033 shipping at 50percent faster than 168 (rather than just 20percent faster). in parallel with 303x effort, there was all the stuff for 370-xa. first was the new architecture that was referred to as "811" for the nov78 date on the documents ... eventually leading to 3081, mvs/xa, etc. after the 303x got out ... that team started on 3090 ... overlapped with 3081 work. circa 1990, the american automobile industry had "C4" taskforce to look at revamping their 7-8 yr product cycles (also doing two parallel efforts offset by 3-4 yrs ... even tho "new" models were introduced every yr ... they were mostly superficial changes between actual new product releases). The "C4" effort was that foreign competition had first reduced new product development cycle to 3-4 yrs (total elapsed) and were heading for 12-18 months for total elapsed time for new product ... from drawing board to rolling off the line. A major part of the "C4" was to heavily leverage information technology to totally redo how product development cycle happened. Part of the issue between having a 7-8yr elapsed product development cycle vis-a-vis a 1-3yr elapsed product development cycle ... was the significant increase in agility to adopt to changing consumer preferences and/or new technologies. several information technology vendors were invited to participate in C4 ... including both the company's mainframe as well as workstation divisions. there were some behind the scenes comments from the workstation division that they were already on a 1-3yr product development cycle ... while the mainframe group was on their own 7-8yr product development cycle (ironic that the mainframe group were being included in an effort to provide advice on how to move from a 7-8yr product development cycle to a significantly more agile product development cycle). Since then the mainframe group has significantly reorganized and revitalized themselves. some recent posts mentioning the C4 activity: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#84 Toyota Sales for 2007 May Surpass GM http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#85 Toyota Sales for 2007 May Surpass GM http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#22 Toyota Beats GM in Global Production http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#68 Toyota Beats GM in Global Production ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
