[email protected] (Allan Staller) writes: > Big Iron is too expensive. Get Off! > Migrate to VAX (many). > Oops! Too many VAX's. Get Off > Migrate to Amdahl! (Big Iron).
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016h.html#47 Why Can't You Buy z Mainframe Services from Amazon Cloud Services? note that IBM 4300s in single & small unit orders sold about the same as VAX .... old post with decade of VAX sales, sliced & diced by model, year, US/non-us http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 the big difference was large corporations with orders of hundreds of 4300s at a time for placing out in departmental areas (leading edge of the distributed computing tsunami). the 4361/4381 followon were expected to continue the explosion in mid-range sales ... but as can be seen by the vax numbers ... by that time, the mid-range market was moving to workstations and large PCs. note that cluster of 4341s also had higher throughput, more processing power, more i/o, smaller space and environmental footprint than 3033 at less cost. POK felt the threat to 3033, that at one point the head of POK got the allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing componenent cut in half. in 1979, I got con'ed into doing 4341 benchmarks (before 4341s shipped to customers) for national lab that was looking at getting 70 4341s for compute farm (leading edge of current cluster supercomputing, grid computing, and cloud megadatacenters). other trivia ... ACS getting canceled because IBM executives were afraid that it would advance the state of art too fast and they might loose control of the market ... Amdahl leaves shortly afterwards to start his own computer company. https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html at the bottom of above ... it shows ACS features that show up more than 20 yrs later in ES/9000. even more trivia ... in the early/mid 70s ... the company started the Future System effort which was completely different than 360/370 and was going to replace 360/370. During the FS period, 370 efforts were being killed off. The lack of 370 offerings during the FS period is credited with giving clone processor makers a market foothold. When FS was finally killed (long delayed because top executives stiffled any criticsm), there was mad rush to get stuff back into product pipelines. 303x & 3081 Q&D efforts kicked off at the same time. 3031 was repackaged 158-3, 3032 was repackaged 168-3, 3033 started out 168-3 logic mapped to 20% faster chips. 3081 was some warmed over FS technology ... much more longer winded analysis: http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys I continued to work on 360/370 all during the FS period ... periodically ridiculing FS ... including drawing comparisions with long-running cult film down in central sq. ... which wasn't exactly career enhancing activity. late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at world-wide, annual, internal communication group conference, supposedly on 3174 performance but opened the talk with the satement 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 crossed the datacenter walls and were fiercely fighting off distributed computing and client/server trying to preserve their (emulated) dumb terminal paradigm and install base. The disk division was seeing data fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had some up with a number of solutions that were constantly being veoted by the communication group. a few short years later, the company had gone into the red and was being reorganized in preparation for breaking up into the 13 "baby blues" -- 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
