[email protected] (John Gilmore) writes: > The classic business-school analysis of DEC's misfortunes makes them > an instance of the effects of "disruptive technology": microprocessors > replacing mnicomputers.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013h.html#76 DataPower XML Appliance and RACF http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013h.html#78 IBM commitment to academia vax sold into the same mid-range market as 4300s and except for large corporate orders, in about the same numbers. the large corporate 4300s orders hundred to large hundreds at a time to be placed out in departmental areas was sort of the leading edge of the distributed computing tsunami wave. these distributed vm/4300s inside ibm contributed to scarcity of conference rooms inside ibm (i.e. they were going out into departmental supply rooms and conferences rooms) and big contributer to the internal network passing 1000 nodes in 1983 ... the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late '85 or early '86 ... some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet it also contributed to ibm coming out with the 3375 ... emulated CKD on FBA 3370. I had been told that even if I provided fully integrated and tested FBA support to MVS, I still needed a $26M business case to cover education, training, and documentation ... oh and I couldn't use long-term life-cycle changes ... I could only use incremental new sales ... and customers were already buying as much disk as could be made ... so customers would just switch from same amount of FBA as they had been buying CKD. some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd the issue was that 3380s were the high-end disk ... and the only disks in the low&mid-range were FBA. MVS couldn't participant in this huge explosion in distributed processing on 4300s ... in part because it didn't have support for disk that was suitable in non-datacenter environments. Disk division was forced into producing 3375 (CKD emulated on 3370) ... however MVS support paradigm also didn't scale well to running on hundreds of distributed systems. old post with decade of vax sales, sliced&diced by US/non-US, year, model http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 clusters of 4300s also represented threat to 3033 ... they had more aggregate processing power than 3033 and were significantly cheaper and required significantly less floor space and environmental resources. at one point, POK 3033 was playing internal politics and got the allocation of critical 4300 manufacturing component cut in half. old 4300-related email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx in the decade of vax sales, towards the end, it is possible to see workstations and large PCs moving up into the mid-range market. something similar happened to 4300s ... the 4331/4341 followons (4361/4381) was expecting to continued explosion in sales ... but the mid-range market was already starting to move (4361/4381 suffering same effects as vax). before 4300s shipped, there were engineering 4341 models in disk engineering&test ... and I had better access to 4341 for doing benchmarks than the performance group in (endicott) 4341 manufacturing. one of the benchmarks that I ran was for LLNL ... that were looking at buying 70 4341 for compute cluster ... if they met certain performance & price/performance requirements. old reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email790220 sort of start of being involved with LLNL compute clusters ... reference to more than decade later on cluster scaleup ... recent post with old email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013h.html#email910808 other old email on cluster scaleup http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa within hrs of the last email in the above, cluster scaleup was transferred and we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors ... and within week or two, it was announced as IBM supercomputer. I was also working with Jim Gray on original relational/SQL implementation ... system/r ... originally done on vm 370/145 in bldg. 28 (san jose research). early joint study on system/r was with bank of america. Old email from Jim about BofA doing 60 vm/4341s and I needed to further reduce the effort to manage large numbers of distributed machines. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email800311b later when Jim was leaving for Tandem ... he was palming bunch of stuff on me (including dealing with BofA, DBMS consulting with IMS group, etc) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801016 system/r folklore is that mainstream corporate attention was focused on EAGLE ... and was able to do technology transfer and get System/R out (under the radar) through Endicott as SQL/DS. Later when EAGLE imploded, the System/R group was asked how fast could they do a port to MVS ... which eventually comes out as DB2. misc. past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr the late 80s was when senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at annual, world-wide, internal communication group conference and opened the talk with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. the issue was that the communicatin group had strategic responsibility for everything that crossed the datacenter walls and were fiercely fighting off distributed computing and client/server in support of their dumb (emulated) terminal install base. the disk division was starting to see data fleeing the datacenter with drop in disk sales; they had come up with several solutions to correct the problem ... but they were constantly being vetoed by the communication group. this was significant factor in the corporate downturn and the company going into the red in the early 90s. some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal Time magzine had article 28Dec1992 about the downfall of IBM "How IBM Was Left Behind" ... includes a discussion of the re-organization of the company into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company ... behind paywall but lives free at wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20101120231857/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977353,00.html my archived posts in recent thread in (closed linkedin) IMBers discussing the company board bringing in new executive that stopped the breakup and "resurrected" the company http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013h.html#77 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013h.html#87 -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
