[email protected] (Timothy Sipples) writes: > I probably disagree with Binyamin about who implemented 31-bit support > when. Wikipedia Japan says that VOS3/ES1, the first 31-bit version of VOS3, > shipped in March, 1985. IBM's MVS/XA shipped at least as early as 1982. (It > was announced in October, 1981.)
In the early 80s, I had full set of all the "Registered Confidential" documents for unannounced/unshipped 370/xa architecture (which would eventually show up on 3081) ... referred to as "811" for their Nov1978 publication dates For some reason, I got a call from head hunter asking me to interview for job of technical assistant to president of clone 370 processor company (that resold machines manufactured on the other side of the pacific). During the interview there were hints dropped that they were interested in new 370/xa architecture. I politely mentioned that I had submitted changes to IBM Employee ethics booklet because I didn't think that it had strong enough ethics guidelines. The interview ended shortly later ... and I never heard from them again. Later the overseas company was involved in federal court case about industrial espionage and because I was listed on the US company's lobby checkin, I had 3hr interview with FBI agent. Afterwards, I wondered who had leaked the information (that I had full copy of the XA documents) ... that likely resulted in the job interview. Note IBM later also unloaded the disk division on them. Trivia ... during the Future System period in the 70s, 370 efforts were being shutdown (credited with giving clone makers market foothold) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys then when FS imploded in mid-70s, there was made rush to get things back into 370 product pipelines ... 3033, 3081, & 370/xa being kicked off in parallel ... reference: http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm Head of POK also managed to convince corporate to kill VM370, shutdown the development group and have all the people to transfer to POK to work on MVS/XA (claim that otherwise MVS/XA wouldn't ship on time quite a few years later). Note: Endicott eventually manages to save the VM370 product mission, but have to reconstruct a development group from scratch. Some of the people do a virtual machine tool supporting MVS/XA development ... but was never intended to ship to customers. However, when customers weren't installing MVS/XA as POK planned, they decide to release the tool as the VM/MA (migration aid) ... allowing customers to run MVS & MVS/XA concurrently as aid in migration to MVS/XA. Later they have large development plan to bring VM/MA up to feature/function level compareable to VM370. Endicott already had VM370 supporting full 370/xa ... done by system support programmer at IBM Rochester. However, internal politics resulted in the POK large development plan for VM/MA to win out. -- 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
