[email protected] (Elardus Engelbrecht) writes: > I vaguely remember that I worked [indirectly] with them when I started > worked around 1989. > > ICL [from Britain?] and Amdahl [from that wizard Gene Amdahl] were > guzzled up by Fujitsu.
Fujitsu was major manufacture and investor in Amdahl (from the start). Not long after Amdahl Co. was formed (early 70s), Gene had presentation at MIT in large, full auditorium ... some of us went over from the IBM Cambridge Science Center. Several in the audience pressed Gene pretty hard about being front for foreign interests (regarding the ties with Fujitsu) Later my boss at IBM was head of the workstation IBU (PC/RT, RS/6000, etc) and had some head-to-head with some senior executives and left, eventually forming HAL ... early 64bit RISC (also backed by Fujitsu). There was joke that they was so much traffic back&forth between silicon valley and japan that it justified the non-stop San Jose/Narita flight (and some companies had permanently reserved 1st class seats). Topic Drift Warning. One of the issues was corporate mandate that RS/6000 had to use PS2 microchannel cards (and not do their own). As mentioned in recent "Tech News 1964" posting, the communication group was fiercely fighting off client/server and distributed computing ... and PS2 microchannel cards had minimal throughput and performance. we had snide comments that if RS/6000 was restricted to to only using PS2 cards, it wouldn't have any better throughput/performance than PS2. For instance, the PS2 (32bit) microchannel 16mbit T/R card had lower throughput than the PC/RT (16bit) atbus 4mbit T/R card (a PC/RT server with 4mbit T/R card would have higher throughput than RS/6000 with 16mbit T/R card ... i.e. the workstation IBU had done their own 4mbit T/R card but were prevented from doing their own 16mbit T/R card. http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 The communication group had design point for 16mbit T/R card of 300+ stations sharing common LAN doing terminal emulation. The major justification for having done T/R was many large mainframe customers were running into bldg. weight loading restrictions with the massive amount of 3270 coax cables. T/R LAN enormously reduced the wiring needed, the aggregate LAN bandwidth increased the number of stations per LAN ... but terminal emulation didn't require significant per card throughput. In the late 80s, the communication group 16mbit T/R card was something like $899/card ... but there were $69 10mbit Ethernet cards running over CAT5 wiring, that had higher per card throughput than the 16mbit T/R card. The new Almaden Research bldg had extensive CAT5 wiring assuming 16mbit T/R, and found that not only the $69 ethernet cards had higher per card throughput ... but running 10mbit ethernet had higher aggregate LAN throughput and lower latency than 16mbit T/R. The communication group publications comparing 16mbit T/R with ethernet apparently used original 3mbit ethernet that did have listen before transmit protocol. ACM SIGOPS publication had paper that did detailed study of typical Ethernet configurations and found effective aggregate throughput was around 9mbits/mbit ... but running low-level device driver code that constantly transmitted minimum sized ethernet packets on all stations ... the effective aggregate LAN throughput dropped off to 8mbit/sec. The lower aggregate 16mbit T/R LAN throughput and higher latency was attributed to the token passing processing latency. http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal disclaimer: my wife is one of the inventors on one of the original IBM token-passing patents. -- 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
