I don't see any Multics there, and I doubt that it would be easy to port Multics to EPSILON.
While S/38 et al were spinoff's from אֶפֶס (FS), I don't believe that it is accurate to say that they *were* FS. My first reaction was that EPSILON was a poster child for premature binding; I was reminded of a project at TI (SYMBOL? SYMBL?) that had a compiler in hardware; fixing bugs could get expensive. To be fair, that was 24 bit addressing within each space; there was no limit set for the number of spaces. Still, I agree that it lacked vision and was a step backward from the 360/67. It didn't look like the author had thought through all of the issues. It looked either too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Was EPSILON the origin of ECPS:VSE? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Tony Harminc [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 5:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: EPSILON? I stumbled across a book on bitsavers http://secure-web.cisco.com/12Ot81bfjTTLWLXKFiRjoxUjnGi5pm87OqM23I4hRH7Bh1Ynxv5VXSug_kTE_6fCMo8T80jkyhiNj_f31h-BMikETYTSNb47viP2gCpWLa7OkT8xk8JKqg5plHvhEk7vm-RkPK73IO-4aqhR2zjyLfzKx8BJ0piWrUPyN6vDrII7c3Hb_ZfqKXrb3TVE2T0MAxtbLwTVpr7Nb4JkWpwGLWHFNJl4xjJDVV9EjENC-b25_elOC_RfI14no_zgusZYFu_Jk5cBvpEZToRCg0h7i55axduL_Bz9P2l7O-LTR9whRJfzcq_vK21uOQDYSMR9064kavZUSPcJJwxsjfLb_rL9RVbMj3xG2bon6uxgcywtACvvzslgsLgXjAnOpb4ryaZ5dfTp-rfnw5VA5TWoRAUjnzD3fGIcWLQnk6P2PkSXzZuj5ffXXRGHPYQXIzb30/http%3A%2F%2Fbitsavers.org%2Fpdf%2Fibm%2F370%2FEPSILON%2FPrinciples_Of_Operation_The_EPSILON_System_Oct1980.pdf dated 1976 that describes a follow-on system to S/360. It's an intriguing hybrid of S/360, Multics, and maybe IBM i (aka FS, System/38, AS/400, etc.) with some nifty ideas. On the other hand it seems to have quite limited vision in some ways, e.g. it has 24-bit main storage addressing, some concepts seem excessively hardcoded, and it's not obvious how it would be extended compatibly. The author is R.B. Talmadge, and there's no indication of his or her affiliation. I'd never heard of EPSILON before - does anyone here know anything about it? It was uploaded to bitsavers only in 2017. [Ah - I see an R.B. Talmadge wrote an article "Design of an integrated programming and operating system, Part II: The assembly program and its language" in the IBM Systems Journal in 1963. That seems to be about the 7094 and IBJOB.] Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
