OK, I'll bite. zTPF,TPF,ACP, IPARS,PARS,SABRE are all IPL'able operating systems dating back to the 1950's, but in continuous development since then. PARS and SABRE originally ran on the IBM 7090(??). PARS was ported to run on the System 360. IPARS,PARS and SABRE all have their operating system and application code thoroughly intertwined. In addition there was ALCS which allowed PARS applications to run under MVS.
SABRE was written for American Airlines. PARS and later, on the other hand, were offered generally to any airline. Originally PARS (and SABRE) was designed for flights within the US. Later it was extended to (just) handle flights between the US and Western Europe. Far East, Japan, Australia? Forget about it. PARS could not handle flights taking off and landing on different dates (the international date line problem), so it was rewritten as IPARS. A side note: one technical challenge IBM has with developing SABRE was where to store the data - the solution was to invent the disk drive (RAMAC). IPARS/PARS (and I presume SABRE) had no clear boundary between application code, system code and the file system. All code ran key 0, supervisor state and had weird limitations (code objects could not exceed 800 bytes, for instance) and all records had to be certain fixed sizes. Later separated out the operating system and file system components as ACP and the application code as PARS. ACP provided a lot of new features (code was allowed to be upto 4KB in size), also it ran in supervisor state with the application code in problem state. ACP became TPF when Bank of America started using it, and later zTPF. All versions of ACP,IPARS,PARS and SABRE were shipped as source code. All airlines heavily modified the source and bought sold the modifications among themselves. This continued when TPF (an OCO product was released), but was limited to the application code. So with ACP/IPARS/PARS you are looking at the original open source code. The early versions of the code were public domain, but it pretty quickly became copyrighted, and that by the 1980's the intertwining of the copyright was already an issue. ---- Matthew Donald On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) < [email protected]> wrote: > In <22812F8E8B2542AC95AEDBCD8E53A58B@asus>, on 10/17/2012 > at 09:46 PM, T Gold <[email protected]> said: > > >I came here to find anyone in public or private that wants to talk > >about pars, ipars, tpf and or apc or all of the above. > > You already got an explanation of LPAR and TPF. Note that Airline > Control Program (ACP) is the OS for TPF. This is an appropriate venue > to discuss the IBM software, but probably not airline and bank > software running under TPF or the specifics of a customer-vendor > dispute. > > >In short it mostly seems to "be IBM". Recent statements by the > >major GDSs are that their problems are "IBM's fault". > > They might be telling the truth, but they have an incentive to make > the claim even if it's false. > > >I've love to see IBM follow that up with a statement in the manner > >of "Stop using our code or be subject to legal penalties". > > I doubt that there's a contractual basis for yanking the license. Even > if IBM sued for libel and prevailed, I'm confident that they'd have to > continue licensing z/TPF on the same terms as for other customers. > > >Is Pars or Ipars an actual operating system? > > PARS is an application running under ACP. An LPAR is a virtual machine > managed by the PR/SM feature of an IBM processor, which started as the > CP component of VM. > > -- > Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT > Atid/2 <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> > We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. > (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
