peter.far...@broadridge.com (Farley, Peter x23353) writes: > IMHO part of what is vanishing mainframe clients is IBM's failure > several decades back to continue to support universities with > discounted hardware and software. Lack of mainframe availability at > university level has translated into current managements with no > exposure and no desire to learn the advantages (TCO, security, etc.) > of mainframes. Not the whole reason, but a significant contributor.
The gov. legal action resulted in number of IBM responses ... 23jun1969 unbundling announcement that included starting to charge for (application) software; it also saw IBM pull back from the enormous grants and discounts it gave academic institutions... some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle IBM did come back in the early 80s with the academic business unit (ACIS) ... it was putting several hundred million into universities (but lots of it would go into non-mainframe technologies). IBM also sponsored the university BITNET (where this ibm-main mailing list originated). some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet it used technology similar to IBM internal network ... some past posts (larger than arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime mid-80s) http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet that originated at the IBM cambridge science center ... some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech this was non-SNA (and not communication group technology) ... at about the same time in the late 80s when the communication group was forcing the internal network into moving to SNA ... BITNET moved to tcp/ip (which would have been much better for internal network also, rather than SNA). I've told the story several times about senior disk engineer at late 80s, annual communication group world-wide internal conference. His talk was supposedly on 3174 performance but he opened with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The issue was that the communication group had strategic "ownership" of everything that cross the datacenter walls and was fiercely fighting off client/server and distributed computing trying to preserve their dumb terminal paradigm install base. The disk division was seeing applications fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with a number of solutions to try and correct the situation, but were constantly being vetoed by the communication group. some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal Somewhat as work-around to the communication group opposition, the disk division VP of software was investing in open system and distributed computing technology ... the POSIX support in MVS ... as well as startups that built mainframe based distributed computing hardware and software solutions. trivia: the original mainframe tcp/ip product was implemented in vs/pascal (which had none of the buffer length related exploits that have been epidemic in C-language implementations) ... however for various reasons it only got about 44kbytes/sec using full 3090 processor. I did the enhancements to support RFC1044 and in some tuning tests at Cray Research between Cray and 4341, got sustained channel speeed throughput using only a modest amount of 4341 processor ... possibly 500 times improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed. some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044 -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
