List of Archived Posts

1999 Newsgroup Postings

Early tcp development?

Early tcp development?

IBM S/360

IBM S/360

IBM S/360

3330 Disk Drives

IBM S/360

IBM S/360

IBM S/360

IBM S/360

Old Computers

Old Computers

Old Computers

Old Computers

Glass Rooms (was Re: drum memory (was: Re: IBM S/360))

Old Computers

Old Computers

Old Computers

Most embarrassing email?

APL/360

Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

You count as an old-timer if (was Re: Origin of the phrase

IBM S/360

Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese

IBM S/360

You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase

You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase

Old Computers

Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solve

why is there an "@" key?

why is there an "@" key?

why is there an "@" key?

why is there an "@" key?

why is there an "@" key?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

1968 release of APL\360 wanted

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

[netz] History and vision for the future of Internet - Public Question

A word processor from 1960

Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

Living legends

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

Internet and/or ARPANET?

Fault Tolerance

Modem history [was ba.b: Re: Gender Gap's Wildest Show!!! Tonight!!!]

Living legends

Living legends

When did IBM go object only

Living legends

Living legends

Living legends

Living legends

System/1 ?

Old naked woman ASCII art

Old naked woman ASCII art

System/1 ?

System/1 ?

The Melissa Virus or War on Microsoft?

System/1 ?

Series/1 as NCP (was: Re: System/1 ?)

High Availabilty on S/390

IBM/computer chronology

The Chronology

Read if over 40 and have Mainframe background

Read if over 40 and have Mainframe background

Mainframes at Universities

Are mainframes relevant ??

Mainframes Relevant?

Authentication in eCommerce applications

Authentication in eCommerce applications

Perfect Code

"Pirates" -- what about Paul Allen?

"Adventure" (early '80s) who wrote it?

"Adventure" (early '80s) who wrote it?

Perfect Code

1401 Wordmark?

1401 Wordmark?

FIne-grained locking

FIne-grained locking

CPU's directly executing HLL's (was Which programming languages)

Documentation query

MVS vs HASP vs JES (was 2821)

MVS vs HASP vs JES (was 2821)

MVS vs HASP vs JES (was 2821)

Early interupts on mainframes

IEFBR14 cookie from www.ibm.com

Power4 = 2 cpu's on die?

Early interupts on mainframes

The Translate (TR) instruction

Why won't the AS/400 die? Or, It's 1999 why do I have to learn how to use

Future Cryptology

IBM 9020 computers used by FAA (was Re: EPO stories (was: HELP IT'S HOT!!!!!))

IBM 9020 computers used by FAA (was Re: EPO stories (was: HELP IT'S HOT!!!!!))

Fixed Head Drive (Was: Re:Power distribution (Was: Re: A primeval C compiler)

Fixed Head Drive (Was: Re:Power distribution (Was: Re: A primeval C compiler)

IBM Mainframe Model Numbers--then and now?

Computer History

IBM 9020 computers used by FAA (was Re: EPO stories (was: HELP IT'S HOT!!!!!))

OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

The Translate (TR) instruction

OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

What is the use of OSI Reference Model?

What is the use of OSI Reference Model?

IBM S/360 microcode (was Re: CPU taxonomy (misunderstood RISC))

OS390 bundling and version numbers -Reply

Schneier/Publsied Algorithms

Computer, supercomputers & related

atomic History

Painting machines (the colour the customer wants)

Computer supersitions [was Re: Speaking of USB ( was Re: ASR 33 Typing Element)]

Speaking of USB ( was Re: ASR 33 Typing Element)

Speaking of USB ( was Re: ASR 33 Typing Element)

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

Dispute about Internet's origins

Dispute about Internet's origins

Examples of non-relational databases

High Performance PowerPC

early hardware

early hardware

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

EBCDIC binary Conversion Question

Computer supersitions [was Re: Speaking of USB ( was Re: ASR 33

sysprog shortage - what questions would you ask?

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

Mainframe emulation

Dispute about Internet's origins

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

Dispute about Internet's origins

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

Dispute about Internet's origins

Dispute about Internet's origins

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

Q: S/390 on PowerPC?

Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)

Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)

Are there any really large commercial databases?

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)

Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?

What is "Firmware"

IBM Assembler 101

Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

Crowther (pre-Woods) "Colossal Cave"

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

S/360 history

amusing source code comments (was Re: Testing job applicants)

S/360 history

S/360 history

checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)

S/360 history

The Watsons vs Bill Gates? (PC hardware design)

Merced Processor Support at it again

Clustering systems

Clustering systems

Clustering systems

Clustering systems

Clustering systems

Merced Processor Support at it again

Merced Processor Support at it again

Internet Credit Card Security

Merced Processor Support at it again

Merced Processor Support at it again

offline RFCs (RFC439)

Back to the original mainframe model?

1403 printer on a 1401?

Anti trust suits--IBMs' compared to Microsoft

Anti trust suits--IBMs' compared to Mi

Computing As She Really Is. Was: Re: Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

amusing source code comments (was Re: Testing job applicants)

Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Middleware - where did that come from?

Middleware - where did that come from?

Non-blocking synch

Core (word usage) was anti-equipment etc

Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Computing As She Really Is. Was: Re: Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Computing As She Really Is. Was: Re: Life-Advancing Work of Timothy Berners-Lee

Core (word usage) was anti-equipment etc

AES cyphers leak information like sieves

How did you learn to program?

GEOPLEX

Why is Pascal no longer a leading development Language?

Ask about Certification-less Public Key

Ask about Certification-less Public Key

Ask about Certification-less Public Key

AADS/X9.59 demo & standards at BAI (world-wide retail banking) show

Mainframe acronyms: how do you pronounce them?

Study says buffer overflow is most common security bug

VM History

VM History

Looking for a (working) PERQ

Paradigm Shifted (was: Re: BBSs vs. The Internet)

X9.59/AADS announcement at BAI this week

BBSs vs. The Internet

Attacks on a PKI

Why couldn't others compete against IBM?

Attacks on a PKI

Digital Signature on SmartCards

Radius Help help!!!

Why couldn't others compete against IBM?

Need Unix system call to get the CPU time taken by a thread

Computer of the century

Computer of the century

Attacks on a PKI

Attacks on a PKI

I can't believe this newsgroup still exists

Attacks on a PKI

IBM UC info

Attacks on a PKI

Early tcp development?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Early tcp development?
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains,alt.folklore.computers,alt.culture.internet,alt.culture.usenet
Date: 03 Jan 1999 16:15:25 -0800

it is even more interesting using TCP for HTTP transactions ...  which
(if i remember right) requires for reliable transmission a minimum of
7 packet exchange compared to five packet minimum for VMTP (rfc1045)
http://www.ca.sandia.gov/xtp/
http://web.archive.org/web/20020209014400/http://www.ca.sandia.gov/xtp/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Early tcp development?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Early tcp development?
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains,alt.folklore.computers,alt.culture.internet,alt.culture.usenet
Date: 07 Jan 1999 11:45:07 -0800

also ... while huge images might dominate in terms of bandwidth there
is still a significant large number of short HTTP/TCP session. An
early issue was the enormous number of dangling FINWAITs ... and
design assumptions that since FINWAITs are only associated with
long-running activity ... there would never be more than a couple on
the list at any time ... and therefor it was acceptable to do a serial
searh of the list (some webservers circa '95 were spending 90% of
processing running FINWAIT list).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 08 Jan 1999 08:55:26 -0800

I think it was somebody at Princeton that did a port of Unix to
370. There were two people in IBM that tried to hire him when he
graduated ... but were not able to get authorization. Amdahl hired him
and produced gold (aka Au, amdahl unix) which became UTS.

AT&T & IBM had an effort that had unix running on top a modified
TSS/370 kernel.

I believe that the AT&T and Amdhal efforts were pretty much unrelated.

AIX/370 was a Locus port that included AIX/PS2 in the package.

About 85/86, at one of the science centers, IBM had a project to port
BSD to 370 ... but part way thru the activity ... the effort got
redirected to porting BSD to the IBM PC/RT.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 09 Jan 1999 15:08:10 -0800

current description:

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-in/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/CCONTENTS

.. specifically

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/13.0

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/14.0

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/15.0

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/16.0

http://ppdbooks.pok.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr/bookmgr.cmd/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/17.0

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 10 Jan 1999 09:32:13 -0800

simplex 67 was single ported memory .... the two-processor 67 had a
channel controller with dual-ported memory. Heavy load had a
"half-duplex" 67 (i.e. single processor with channel controller and
dual-ported memory) outperformed simplex 67.

anyway from the alt.folklore.computers and comp.arch archives ...

 Subject: Re: Virtual Memory (A return to the past?)
 From: lynn@garlic.garlic.com (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
 Date: 1995/09/27
 Newsgroups: comp.arch

.. some of you are probably getting tired of seeing this ... but a
typical '68 hardware configuration and a typical configuration 15
years later

machine         360/67  3081K
mips            .3      14       47*
pageable pages  105     7000     66*
users           80      320      4*
channels        6       24       4*
drums           12meg   72meg    6*
page I/O        150     600      4*
user I/O        100     300      3*
disk arms       45      32       4*?perform
bytes/arm       29meg   630meg   23*
avg. arm access 60mill  16mill   3.7*
transfer rate   .3meg   3meg     10*
total data      1.2gig  20.1gig  18*

Comparison of 3.1L 67 and HPO 3081k

========================================

360/65 is nominal rated at something over .5mips (reg<->reg slightly
under 1mic, reg<->storage start around 1.5mic and go up).  running
relocate increases 67 memory bus cycle 20% from 750ns to 900ns (with
similar decrease in mip rate). 67 was non-cached machine and high I/O
rate resulted in heavy memory bus (single-ported) contention with
processor.

drums are ibm'ese for fixed head disks.

disk access is avg. seek time plus avg. rotational delay.

the 3.1l software is actually circa late 70 or earlier 71 (late in the
hardware life but allowing more mature software). the 3081k software
is the vm/hpo direct descendant of the cp/67 system.

90th percentile trivial response for the 67 system was well under a
second, the 90th percential trivial response for the 3081k was .11
seconds (well under instantaneous observable threshold for majority of
the people).

the page i/o numbers is sustained average under heavy load. actual
paging activity at the micro-level shows very bursty behavior with
processes generating page-faults at device service intervals during
startup and then slowing down to contention rates during normal
running. the 3081k system had pre/block page-in support (i.e.  more
akin to swap-in/swap-out of list of pages rather than having to
individually page fault).

big change between 68 and 83 ... which continues today is that
processor has gotten much faster than disk tech. has gotten
faster. real memory sizes and program sizes have gotten much bigger
than disk has gotten faster (programs have gotten 10-20 larger, disk
get twice as fast, sequentially page faulting a memmap'ed region 4k
bytes at a time takes 5-10 times longer). Also while current PCs are
significantly more powerful than mainframe of late '60s and the
individual disks are 5-10 times faster, the aggregate I/O thruput of
todays PCs tend to be less than the aggregate I/O thruput of the
mainframe systems.

In any case, when I started showing this trend in the late '70s that
disk relative system performance was declining (i.e.  rate of getting
better was less than the getting better rate for the rest of the
system) nobody believed it. A simple measure was that if everything
kept pace, the 3081K system would have been supporting 2000-3000 users
instead of 320.

Somewhat bottom line is that even fixed head disks haven't kept up
with the relative system performance. Strategy today is whenever
possible do data transfers in much bigger chunks than 4k bytes,
attempt to come up with asynchronous programming models (analogous to
weak memory consistency & out-of-order execution for processor
models), and minimize as much as possible individual 4k byte at a
time, synchronous page fault activity.

3330 Disk Drives

From: lynn@garlic.garlic.com (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: 3330 Disk Drives
Date: 18 Jun 1995 17:10:56 GMT

following from report i originally did in '81 ... part of the numbers
were excerpted in postings in this group early last year (archived at
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ly/lynn). 3330 numbers for 3330-ii. overall
system numbers showed that 3380 technology had a relative decline in
system performance by at least a factor of five compared to 2314
relative system performance. also 4k acc/sec/meg declined by more than
an order of magnitude (absolute).

Some of the numbers were done in late '70s where it was shown that
upgrading from 3330-ii to 3350 only improved performance if allocated
data was limited to approx. same as on 3330-ii. The 3380 are the
original (single density) 3380.

		2305	2314	3310	3330	3350	3370	3380

data
cap, mb		11.2	29	64	200	317	285	630
avg. arm
acc, ms		0	60	27	30	25	20	16
avg. rot
del. ms		5	12.5	9.6	8.4	8.4	10.1	8.3
data
rate mb		1.5	.3	1	.8	1.2	1.8	3
4k blk
acc, ms		7.67	85.8	40.6	43.4	36.7	32.3	25.6
4k acc.
per sec		130	11.6	24.6	23	27	31	39
40k acc
per sec		31.6	4.9	13.	11.3	15.	19.1	26.6
4k acc
per sec
per meg		11.6	.4	.38	.11	.08	.11	.06

======================================================================

slightly different table ... assuming a uniform access distribution,
loading the indicated max. data on the drive (i.e. not filling the
whole thing) gives the resulting 4kbyte-block-access/sec/mbyte
(i.e. 3380 with only 40mbyte loaded gives approx. the same performance
as 2314).

		2305	2314	3310	3330	3350	3370	3380
data
cap, mb		11.2	29	64	200	317	285	630
4k acc.
per sec		130	11.6	24.6	23	27	31	39
20 meg		-	.041	.091	.082	.098.	.122	.152
40 meg		-	-	.023	.021	.025	.031	.039
60 meg		-	-	-	.009	.011	.014	.017
80 meg		-	-	-	.005	.006	.008	.010

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 10 Jan 1999 15:05:45 -0800

370s were  115, 125, 135, 145, 155, 165 (and sort of 195)

initial 155 & 165 had no virtual memory (relocation) hardware

it was possible to open the front panel of the 155 and disable the
cache ... and the thruput of the machine dropped to that of about a
145.

to announce virtual memory ... the 155s & 165s in customer shops
needed a hardware retrofit. Turns out for the full virtual memory
announcement ... an extra hardware line thru much of the 165 would
have had to be designed and built ... and would have delayed virtual
memory announcement by an additional six months. Since SVS
(effectively MVT remapped to a virtual memory space) stated that they
had no need for the full architecture ... they would be perfectly
happy to go with abbreviated virtual memory hardware roll-out.  The
other machines shipped day one with the virtual memory support built
in ... but had to wait for 155/165 & software before it was turned on.

155s and 165s were upgraded with 158s & 168s ... and 135s and 145s
then with 138s and 148s.

The 168-1 had an interim upgrade to a 168-3 which doubled the size of
its cache (although there were a couple shops who installed the 168-3
field upgrade and saw performance decline).

The 158s&168s were then upgraded by 3031, 3032, and 3033. The big
feature of the 303x line was the channel director (somewhat analogous
to the channel director on the 360/67 duplex configurations ... and
actually a separate stripped down 158 processer with a different
microcode load).  The 3031s and 3032s were 158s and 168s repackaged
with I/O support going thru the channel director. The 3033 started out
as a 168 wiring diagram remapped to a faster chip technology.

The 138s & 148s were upgraded to 4331 and 4341 ... and then to 4361
and 4381.

The internal network was tagentially involved in the 145 support. The
internal network was larger than the arpanet/csnet pretty much from
the start up thru sometime in the mid-80s. One of the first links in
the internal network (besides those running between machines in the
same building) was between cambridge (mass) and endicott (ny).

Most of the virtual machine work was done in cambridge and the 370/145
work was being done in endicott. Endicott came to cambridge and
proposed a joint project to build a 370 virtual machine capability
... which ran within a CP/67 (i.e. 360/67) virtual machine
... simulating the features that were different between the 360 and
370. A version of CP/67 was created that would provide 370 virtual
machine architecture (this was reference to as 3.1h). Then a version
of CP/67 was modified so that it ran on the 370 relate architecture
(referred to as 3.1i).

For various security reasons ... partly because there were people like
MIT students that had access to the Cambridge CP/67 service ... the
environment looked like:

   standard CP/67 running on real 360/67
    providing 360/65 and 360/67 virtual machine service
     a 3.1h operating system running in a 360/67 virtual machine
      providing 370/145 (both relocate and non-relocate) virtual machines
       a 3.1i operating system running in a 370/145 relocate virtual machine
        providing 370/145 (both relocate and non-relocate) virtual machines
         cms running in a 370/145 non-relocate virtual machine

This evironment had been running for a year before the very first
370/145 engineering machine (of any kind) was up to the point that it
could be tested. The first time that the "3.1i" system was booted on
the first engineering 370/145 machine ... it failed. After some quick
diagnostic, it turned out that the engineers had implemented some of
the architecture wrong. The operating system was quickly patched to
correspond to the incorrect hardware implementation ... and the
testing then proceeding succesfully.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 11 Jan 1999 08:45:42 -0800

drums are ibm'ese for fixed head disks.

well ... alright ... i added it to the '95 posting after getting
questions from the posting in early '90s seemingly coming from no
knowledge of either DASD nor drums ... "fixed head disks" seemed to be
the simplest throw-away to get over that bit.

i tried to get a separate read/write data path (ala 2505 device
"exposures") to the 3350 but it got shot down by the vulcan crowd.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 12 Jan 1999 10:30:45 -0800

cp/67 started out being less than a single tray of "binary" cards.

vm/370 simulated card decks got much larger ... not only because there
was much more code ... but also typically upwards of half the cards in
any particular txt/binary deck was the source code tracking
information (PTFs, macro libraries, updates, source libraries, etc).

the output of such a load was printed output of all the entry points
in each module ... plus all the source code tracking information.

I remember being in madrid in the mid-80s ... and going to a theater
showing some 30? minute drama "short" done at the university ... in
several shots there was a wall of TV sets (20-30?) all "scrolling" the
same information at around 1200 baud. I felt funny being able to
recognize it was the VM/370 "loadmap" (i.e. output from the binary
program load) ... i felt even funnier being able to recognize the year
& month of the system based on the source code information scrolling
past at 1200 baud.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 12 Jan 1999 23:36:17 -0800

cp/67 originated with people from cambridge science center and some
work being down by people from lincoln labs ... summer of 68 ... a
couple of the people left and formed NCSS offering enhanced CP/67
online service ... another group left and formed IDC (interactive
data) ... NCSS was down in Stanford Conn ... IDC was out in waltham
mass. I was undergraduate ... there was an IBM sponsored class on
CP/67 that summer down someplace in LA ... I got pressed into
teaching part of the CP/67 class ... possibly because one or more
of the IBM'ers had left and gone to NCSS.

back then you could get CP/67 from IBM ... sort of like you can get
linux today ... all the source and do whatever you wanted with
it. Lots of places ... including universities got copies with source
... and large numbers (well not large numbers by today's standards)
... but still significant numbers ... took the system & source and did
various things with it.

all of this well before VM/370. Tymshare later used VM/370 to offer
online service ... mid-70s

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Jan 1999 22:31:07 -0800

found green cards ... GX20-1703-7
yellow cards are GX20-1850-3 ... 1976
and the blue cards are 229-3174-0

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Jan 1999 18:07:48 -0800

I was involved in getting Interdata3 (and later array of interdata3s
with an interdata4) to simulate an IBM mainframe communication
control unit (bus&tag channel card, etc) ... I've been told that this
activity was documented as having originated the IBM "OEM" (other
equipment manaufacter) control unit business. Somewhere along
the line interdata was bought by Perkin/Elmer. Recently somebody
told me that they were selling Perkin/Elmer boxes in the early 80s
with 360/370 bus&tag wire-wrap channel board ... potentially
the same board design that we had done something like 15 years
earlier.

If you look at other threads in this newsgroup ... the interdata 7?
from the late 70s was one of the early efforts making Unix portable.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Jan 1999 19:11:16 -0800

360 had 8 bit bytes and standard i/o read a card column into single
8-bit byte. ... since a card column could contain up to 12 bits of
information (12 rows) ... 360 defined a restricted subset of possible
card punch combinations.

1401 supported binary .... to support processing 1401 binary decks
(with more than 8 bits punched per column) ... 360 card punch controller
had a "column binary" mode which read 80 columns into 160 byte positions
... in order to represent all information. From 360 green card 2540
operation:

read, feed, select stacker SS:             SSD00010

where SS: 00 stacker R1
          01 stacker R2
          10 stacker RP3

       D: 0  EBCDIC
          1  column binary

character mode on 1401 was BCD 6bit code and almost proper subset
of EBCDIC in punch card definition.

it was possible to read/punch BCD cards using standard EBCDIC mode,
but required column binary to read/punch 1401 binary cards.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 19 Jan 1999 10:50:03 -0800

yep ... there was very little structural integrity left in
a card that you had bunched all 80x12 holes ... didn't
even necessarily require high speed reader.

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Glass Rooms (was Re: drum memory (was: Re: IBM S/360))

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Glass Rooms (was Re: drum memory (was: Re: IBM S/360))
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 20 Jan 1999 19:58:58 -0800

my wife was UMich engineering graduate school ... and remembers blockades
and riots ... having to cross picket lines to classes; once being in
engineering lab with nose pressed to the window watching the rioters
came thru the square trashing everything in their wake ... and
somewhat surprised afterwards that they had broken out every window
facing the square except the one she had her nose pressed to.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 23 Jan 1999 07:46:46 -0800

there is another place that batch systems have worked ... almost any
server deployment. the platforms that have grown out of
interactive&desktop have paradigm that if something goes wrong
... they've tended to assume a human there to recognize and take
action.

the batch paradigms have tended to provide extensive trap & recovery
features to the application level (default to system define recovery
and/or operator message ... but 7x24 applications could implement
extensive support if that level of availability was required).

for the first webserver doing payments/e-commerce ... after they had
done the straight-line and stress testing ... i went back with a
failure-mode array (something like 40+ failure modes and 5-6 states),
webserver code had to demonstrate automatic recovery ... and/or
sufficient logging that on a trouble call ... the trouble desk could
diagnose the problem within five minutes (none of this NTF on the
trouble ticket after 2-3 hrs). Application couldn't inline trap
on something like ICMP host not reachable ... and so had to
do some contortions to produce something even approaching 7x24.
I had to browbeat to even get multiple A-record support.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 23 Jan 1999 11:58:29 -0800

my view point is that the old computers hosted both sequential
batch as well as almost all of the major online applications
currently in existance (airline res, payroll, banking, financial,
insurance, securities, etc).

In some cases there have web gateways done to access those
online capabilities.

as mention in prior note ... the old computers tended to follow
the paradigm that things ran w/o people present (except for
operators doing tape mounts) ... this has led to a rich
set of semantics for trapping failures and being able
to automate various recover strategies ... even up thru
the application layer.

the desktop&interactive systems (and their derivatives) have
tended to operate with a paradigm that person was issuing a
"command" ... and therefor could determine a recovery
strategy.

the legacy stuff ... has assumed that people weren't
interactively determining the execution strategy
(either in batch or in the big OLTP systems) ... and
so sophisticated automated processes were developed.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 23 Jan 1999 19:54:25 -0800

following from posting to alt.folklore.computers made here in 94mar.
there was issue in early '80s regarding stanford PhD thesis on "clock"
algorithms for page replacement ... meeting severe resistance because
it talked about stuff that wasn't local LRU and/or as defined per true
"working-set". I had done the global "clock" global LRU in the late 68
time-frame with a dynamic adaptive thrashing control that worked
significantly better than working set (as found in the literature of
the time). the following direct comparison ... same processor, same
I/O, similar workload and configurations ... was instrumental in
removing objections to thesis and PhD.

Genoble Science Center published a paper in CACM sometime in the early
'70s describing their implementation of a "working-set" dispatcher on
CP/67 (effectively faithful implementation described in Denning's
article). They had a 1mbyte 360/67 (which left 154 4k "pageable-pages"
after fixed kernel requirements). They provided about the same level
of performance for 30 users as we did for 70 user on a 768k 360/67
(104 4k pageable pages).

The differences (circa '70-71):

                      grenoble                  cambridge
machine               360/67                    360/67
# users               30-35                      70-75
real store             1mbyte                     768k
p'pages               154 4k                     104 4k
replacement          local LRU               "clock" global LRU
thrashing            working-set             dynamic adaptive
priority             cpu aging               dynamic adaptive

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Most embarrassing email?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Most embarrassing email?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 07 Feb 1999 14:28:22 -0800

late 80s, i agreed to forward a "farewall" email written by my former
boss saying that he was leaving the company and moving on to other
opportunities. I selected the wrong distribution list and it went out
to some 23,000 people inside the company. got quite a bit of flack
back from around the world about who was I and why was I sending them
the email.

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APL/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: APL/360.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 09 Feb 1999 13:27:52 -0800

big problem with apl/360 was its relatively small workspace ...
typically 32k or less. when we ported to CMS (71?) we opened
up the workspace to full virtual machine size (up to 16mbytes).
One of the biggest problems with apl/360 was storage allocation
... every assignment (even to existing variables) went to
new storage location. Instruction traces of apl/360 showed
stair-step use of storage until it reached end of memory
... and then a sharp drop back by garpage collection
moving everything down to lowest available address ... and
then the stair-step use again. The storage allocation
plus garbage collection created very saw-tooth pattern of
storage usage. In a real storage environment it wasn't
a problem ..... but in a virtual memory environment it
was guarenteed to touch every virtual page ... and have
very poor LRU characteristics (i.e. if you used it recently
... it might get re-assigned to totally new location and
not be re-used). One of the things that had to be done
for the apl/360 port to apl/cms was a storage management
rewrite to make it useful for real-world problems.

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Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,sci.skeptic,alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.military
Date: 10 Feb 1999 11:44:27 -0800

i've noticed what appear to be taxi way leading off into the
trees at various places on roads in sweden.

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Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,sci.skeptic,alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.military
Date: 11 Feb 1999 08:31:25 -0800

resilliance of runways needed to handle repeated
impact of landing ... something that didn't need
to be considered for roads.

even at that ... there was story about early
landing approach signal at SeaTac ... and
they noticed 747s landing within six
feet of each other and the runway was starting
to crack under the beating ... so they introduced
randomization in the signal which spread
touch-downs over 100 foot area.

on the other hand ... when I first drove on
interstate on the east coast I noticed some
with frost heave problems that was significantly
worse than mountain county roads out west.
the natives of the eastern state commented
that it was a characteristic of the road
industry in the state ... if they had
actually done a 6'+ road bed initially
... then they wouldn't get paid to go
out every year and repair the frost heaves.

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Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve    Y2K)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,sci.skeptic,alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.military
Date: 12 Feb 1999 12:34:50 -0800

I've been told that highways may need up to 6' roadbed ... especially
in frost heave situations.

A couple years ago I was at some road seminar that claimed 95+% of
road and interstate wear & tear is by 18 wheelers ... that passenger
cars don't exert enuf poinds per sq. inch to affect road
materials ... but compression/decrompression of 18 wheelers on
surface and roadbed was measurable ... and that was where almost
all road wear came from (exceptions scenerios with frost heave
and inadequate roadbed).

The net was that once roads were built ... almost all highway
tax dollars is for repair ... and shouldn't the tax rate for
repair be proportional to damage caused (<5% of total highway
taxes spread across all non-18 wheeler use ... and 95+%
of all highway taxes solely levied on 18-wheelers).

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BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.computers
Date: 12 Feb 1999 14:20:17 -0800

date problems posted by somebody to a newsgroup in 1984:


Date: 7 December 1984, 14:35:02 CST

1.In 1969, Continental Airlines was the first (insisted on being the
first) customer to install PARS.  Rushed things a bit, or so I hear.  On
February 29, 1972, ALL of the PARS systems cancelled certain
reservations automatically, but unintentionally.  There were (and still
are) creatures called "coverage programmers" who deal with such
situations.

2.A bit of "cute" code I saw once operated on a year by loading a
byte of packed data into a register (using INSERT CHAR), then used LA
R,1(R) to bump the year.  Got into a bit of trouble when the year 196A
followed 1969.  I guess the problem is not everyone is aware of the odd
math in calendars.  People even set up new religions when they discover
new calendars (sometimes).

3.We have an interesting calendar problem in Houston.  The Shuttle
Orbiter carries a box called an MTU (Master Timing Unit).  The MTU gives
yyyyddd for the date.  That's ok, but it runs out to ddd=400  before it
rolls over.  Mainly to keep the ongoing orbit calculations smooth.  Our
simulator (hardware part) handles a date out to ddd=999.  Our simulator
(software part) handles a date out to ddd=399.  What we need to do, I
guess, is not ever have any 5-week long missions that start on New
Year's Eve.  I wrote a requirements change once to try to straighten
this out, but chickened out when I started getting odd looks and
snickers (and enormous cost estimates).

... snip ... top of post, old email index

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You count as an old-timer if (was Re: Origin of the phrase

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: You count as an old-timer if (was Re: Origin of the phrase
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 13 Feb 1999 11:03:29 -0800

• could whistle and get a 110 acoustic modem to talk back to you
• had AJ(?) "portable terminal" in two 30lb(?) cases at home
• have had uninterrupted computer access at home for more than 25 years
• bought golden's Fortran IV programming and computing ('65) new.
• programmed on (709 or other) tube machine

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IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 15 Feb 1999 05:46:55 -0800

3270s operate analogous to restricted version of HTTP
forms. There is control format for writing things to a page/screen
.. output only areas, input areas, output&input areas, etc.
Imagine early version of web/tv ... initially no color and no
graphics, 25+ years ago, and interface between processor and
controller ran at 640kbytes/sec.

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Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 15 Feb 1999 14:40:38 -0800

I thot I remember being told that unpowered a 727 has absolutely
no aerodynamic characterisitcs at all ... drops like a rock ... in
fact there was something about early on having to change to
"powered" landings for 727 because of stall danger.

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IBM S/360

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM S/360
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 16 Feb 1999 04:47:03 -0800

the original 3270 was 3272 controller and the 3277 (24x80) terminal
which had keyboard & other logic in the head. The 3274 controller
moved much of the head logic back into the controller ... reducing the
per terminal costs and introduced the 3278 (43x80 & other modes), 3279
(color and graphics), 3290(?) (flat panel).

The 3270 terminals had and annoying habit of dropping characters and
locking the keyboard if you happened to be typing a character at the
very moment that there was a write to the screen. Repeat and cursor
positioning speeds were also maddening slow. On the 3277, because
the logic was in the head ... some user modifications were possible
...

1) little soldering on the board inside the keyboard and you adjust
the repeat delay, repeat rate, and cursor positioning speeds. It was
actually possible to overdrive the repeat rate so that the screen
update fell behind the keyboard repeat ... it took a little practice
to position the cursor under a specific character ... since the
cursor would continue to move for several positions after you
lifted the cursor positioning key.

2) FIFO box inserted between where the keyboard plugs into the head
which eliminates drop character and keyboard lockup.

It wasn't possible to fix the 3274-based terminals because the
logic had moved back into the controller.

The 3270 card for the IBM/PC offerred the opportunity to do
some creative programming to enhance the user interface
characteristics.

In the early 80s my brother was a regional apple sales rep. I attended
dinners with the mac developers during the early mac period ... and
getting into heated arguments about tainting the "kitchen table only"
machine with something as unthinkable as a terminal emulator (3270)
adapter

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You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Feb 1999 07:06:52 -0800

highly skilled programmers working closely with the customer
on day to day basis over extended period of time ... developing
software that exactly met the needs and refining as necessary
in live production work ... frequently resulted in solutions
that better met customer requirements than something done
at some central site by people hypothesising what the
actual requirements might be.

the crux with the vast amounts of IBM people in the field
doing customer software apps was June 23rd, 1969 ....
what was that date?

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You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: You count as an old-timer if (was Re: origin of the phrase
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Feb 1999 14:16:55 -0800

june 23rd, 1969

government got ibm to unbundle hardware, software, services, etc.
... now if somebody was at customer site or doing something for a
customer it was billed time to the customer , phone calls became
billed time, everything, pretty much got broken out into billed time.
all the friendly people helping the customer disappeared and replaced
with cash registers that kept going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

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Old Computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Old Computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Feb 1999 16:44:56 -0800

worked with the engineers over the the disk development lab in the
late 70s ... they were running standalone environment and using OLTEP
and other stuff to exercise disks that they were developing.

problem was that typical mean-time between failures in that
environment was something like 15 minutes for MVS. Environment was
dozen or so disk engineering "test cells" (each engineering device was
inside a steel wire cage that contained combination lock ... dozen of
these cages on the machine room floor, each with own engineering
device).

They tended to have the largest, newest mainframe processor (in
order to test that the cpu worked with the disks)

I worked on building an absolute bullet proof i/o subsystem so that no
single test cell or combination of test cells would crash the
operating system. That allowed them to concurrently test all test
cells ... instead of having to schedule dedicated machine
time. Simultaneous testing of all test cells would utilize maybe 5% of
a processor ... at the most. The rest of the processing power then was
available for working on interesting problems.

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Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solve

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Roads as Runways Was: Re: BA Solve
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 20 Feb 1999 10:24:57 -0800

i did a stint at boeing (during the dawn of BCS) ... back when the
747s were being introduced and the marketing claim that a 747 would
alwas be serviced by at least four jetways ... serial #3 would be
periodically seen flying thru skys of seattle.

the story I remember was that tex barrel-rolled both 707 and 727
coming off of renton field. a "problem" was that these were test
configurations ... 50 gal drums in place of passenger seats; complex
set of pipes and pumps would move water into different drums to test
all sort of weight distribution configurations ... in any case, the
barrel rolls tore a lot of this loose and there was lot of repair that
had to be done.

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why is there an "@" key?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why is there an "@" key?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 26 Feb 1999 08:01:44 -0800

CSC did cpremote ... something like hasp for cp/67 ... and then what
became vnet.  i believe one of the first vnet links was cambridge to
endicott ... in support of the virtual 370 relocate project (modify a
version of cp/67 to provide virtual 370 machines ... which had
different relocate architecture than 360/67, and then do another
modification of cp/67 that ran on 370 relocate hardware ... at
cambridge there was "3.1l" running on the bare hardware ... pretty
vanilla cp/67 ... in part because of security concerns because it had
general users ... even MIT students using the system ... then in a
virtual 67 run "3.1h" ... which ran in virtual 360/67 machine ... but
provided virtual 370 machines ... then in a virtual 370 machine run
"3.1i" ...  which was a modification of cp/67 running on 370 relocate
hardware architecture ... this was all done and in regular use a year
before there was a real 370 engineering hardware that could be
booted/ipled).

i believe the internal vnet was larger than the arpanet/internet from
nearly its start up until sometime in the mid-80s.

i believe that vnet was one of the first things that had a truely
layered architecture and implementation.  This was used extensively to
allows JES systems to participate in the internal network. JES
networking started out mapping network nodes into the HASP 99-entry
table (network nodes had to share entries with spool & real device
entries ... so might only have 30 entries available). Later this was
expanded to 255-entries and then to 999-entries ... however at all
times the internal network had more nodes that could be mapped by JES
table. As a result, JES nodes were regulated to end nodes ... because
they had bad habit of discarding traffic involving nodes (either
source or destination) that weren't in their local table.

The other JES problem is that they confused the network driver with
the rest of the system function. As a result, one release of JES
could cause other releases of JES (and the whole operating system) to
crash by sending data with slightly different headers.

As a result, a VNET system might be deployed with a wide range of
drivers ... standard VNET-to-VNET driver as well as a variety of JES
drivers ... to handle different JES versions as well as doing JES
protocol release-to-release translation to prevent JES subsystems
... and JES based operating sysetms from crash & burn (i.e. instances
of modified JES systems on the west coast causing JES machines in
europe to crash & burn ... because the west coast system had modified
JES and moved a couple header byte definitions around and then tried
to send europe some data).

in the mid-80s my wife and i ran skunk works ... one of the things was
something we called high-speed data transport ... with a backbone that
part of internal traffic was carried over. at the time of NSFNET1 RFP
... we attempted to get permission to bid and weren't allowed. We did
get a technical audit by NSF that said what we were operating was at
least five years ahead of all bid submissions (to build something
new). I had done a number of things in the implementation ... included
rate-based flow & congestion control ... something that they are now
looking at for Internet2 (so maybe it was more than five years ahead).

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why is there an "@" key?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why is there an "@" key?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 26 Feb 1999 08:59:18 -0800

one of the problems with vnet implementation was that it was
store&forward and used the cp/67-vm/370 "spool" file system interface
... which included problems like synchronous filesystem semantics (a
vnet node frequently bottlenecked somewhere between 20kbytes-40kbytes
per second aggregate thruput ... primarily because of synchronous
semantics at the disk interface).

for HSDT did a virtual passthru driver that would support local node
store&forward bypass (i.e. end-to-end transmission). This eliminated
problem with synchronous semantics at intermediate nodes.

for HSDT I also did a port of the "spool" filesystem to a virtual
machine subsystem, completely rewritten in pascal and featured
asynchronous semantics, block/contiguous allocation for large files,
high-level multi-data block pointers (supporting multi-block
read/writes), low-level forward/backward block threading for
filesystem disaster recovery, and multi-device spool filesystem
independence (large installation would have spool filesystem spread
across large number disks ... failure of any single disk would
corrupt/crash whole infrastructure).

hsdt had to deal with both intermediate and end nodes sustaining mbyte
thruput rates ... 50-100 times (or more) what a typical vnet was capable
of.

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why is there an "@" key?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why is there an "@" key?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 26 Feb 1999 09:13:39 -0800

pr*fs had picked up source (about 60klocs of 370 assembler) of
prerelease .8 or so of something called VMSG ... and wrappered their
own command & gui interface around the feature/function ... and then
claimed they had done the whole thing.  One of the stoppers was that
all VMSG based implementations had the author's initials in
comment/unused control fields of all messages.

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why is there an "@" key?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why is there an "@" key?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 26 Feb 1999 10:56:27 -0800

sligthly related

 From: Automatic digest processor <LISTSERV@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU>
 Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 19:21:21 -0800
 From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
 Subject: Re: LINUX on VM (history?).

during early '86 i was talking to one of the two guys that had
originated vs/pascal (the other had left the company to go to a start
up) about doing a C front-end ... so I could have C code on CMS. That
summer, I left on a six week seminar series in europe and when I got
back ... the person I was talking to had left IBM for a small
compiler-compiler company near santa cruz.

about a month later, the academic unit decided to do a BSD port to run
under VM ... and the head of the APL2 group in STL was brought in to
head up the project. I spent the first week with the group looking at
all the issues to get the BSD port done. One of the prime things that
needed to be done was a C compiler for the 370 ... and so I suggested
we go to the santa cruz company and get them to do it ... since the
guy there had effectively already done much of the work..

well into the project ... the academic unit decided that they would
retarget the BSD port to the PC/RT instead of under VM/370 ... calling
it AOS ... but keeping the same santa cruz compiler company as the c
compiler.

A little later ... work began on getting native TCP/IP product support
for vm/370 ... running thru the 8232. Since I had done a lot of other
kinds of VM device drivers ... I did the device driver and pathlength
tuning to support RFC1044. To fully test it ... I had to go to cray
research in minneapolis. I remember the trip because the plane left
SFO about 20 minutes late for Minneapolis ... and what we learned just
before touch done in Minneapolois was that we left the ground five
minutes before the big earthquake. At Cray ... they had a 4341-clone
for me to test the RFC1044 support running to the Cray machine ...
after some tuning we got RFC1044 support running between the
4341-clone and the Cray at sustained thruput rate of the 4341 channel
hardware .... using only a modest amount of CPU utilization on the
4341 clone.  It was a little embarrasing since the 8232 support could
nearly max. out a 3090 processor getting 44kbytes/sec thruput. The
product implementation was done in vs/pascal ... not C ... since we
still didn't have a C compiler product and not a lot of C programmers.

--
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why is there an "@" key?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why is there an "@" key?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 26 Feb 1999 14:23:36 -0800

ctss carried over to 2741 on cms had "@" as the character erase and
"cent-sign" as line erase ... "@" and "cent-sign" were on the same key
... right-most key in the u-i-o-p row ... just above home position ... "@"
as lower-case of the key ... "cent-sign" was upper-case ... so one or
more "@" deleted one or more characters ... upper-case "@" ... i.e.
"cent-sign" deleted the whole line.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subjet: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroup: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 01 Apr 1999

reposted ... originally 31dec1998 alt.folklore.computers

not so much from technical standpoint but

... arpanet/telenet/tymnet -> csnet -> nsfnet -> internet

my wife and I were effectively (a?) red team on both nsfnet1 and nsfnet2
... weren't actually allowed to bid (although nsf technical audit of
backbone my wife and I operated claimed what we were running was at
least five years ahead of submitted bids ... to build something new).



Date: 10/22/82 14:25:57
To: CSNET mailing list
Subject: CSNET PhoneNet connection functional

The IBM San Jose Research Lab is the first IBM site to be registered on
CSNET (node-id is IBM-SJ), and our link to the PhoneNet relay at
University of Delaware has just become operational!  For initial testing
of the link, I would like to have traffic from people who normally use
the ARPANET, and who would be understanding about delays, etc.
If you are such a person, please send me your userid (and nodeid if
not on SJRLVM1), and I'll send instructions on how to use the
connection.  People outside the department or without prior usage of
of ARPANET may also register at this time if there is a pressing need,
such as being on a conference program committee, etc.

CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) is funded by NSF, and is an attempt
to connect all computer science research institutions in the U.S. It
does not have a physical network of its own, but rather is a set of
common protocols used on top of the ARPANET (Department of Defense),
TeleNet (GTE), and PhoneNet (the regular phone system).  The
lowest-cost entry is through PhoneNet, which only requires the
addition of a modem to an existing computer system.  PhoneNet offers
only message transfer (off-line, queued, files).  TeleNet and ARPANET
in allow higher-speed connections and on-line network capabilities
such as remote file lookup and transfer on-line, and remote login.

... snip ... top of post, old email index

--
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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.tcp-ip,alt.culture.internet,comp.org.ieee,alt.amateur-comp
Date: 02 Apr 1999 08:47:54 -0800

jmfbahciv writes:

In article ,

1982?  Just what timespan have we been talking about.  I've
been talking about 1968-1978 or thereabouts.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

i didn't comment about when/what you were talking about ... & I wasn't
commenting about the technical issues. Part of the arpanet/internet
evolution was participation, deployment and funding of different
entities.  CSnet (and NSFNET) was a NSF funded/deployed activity
... while ARPAnet nodes had a lot of funding/control by other
government agencies i.e. there can be facets considered other than
protocol/technology

looking at it from other facet ...

.. misc rfcs:

894 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams over Ethernet
networks 1984/04/01

826 - Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol: Or converting network
protocol addresses to 48 bit Ethernet address for transmission on
Ethernet hardware .. 1982/11/01

791 - Internet Protocol 1981/09/01

761 - DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol 1980/01/01

739 - Assigned Numbers 1977/11/11

.... misc IEN:

IEN#1  - Issues in the Interconnection of Datagram Networks 1977/07/29
IEN#3  - Internet Meeting Notes 1977/08/15
IEN#5  - TCP Version 2 Specification 1977/03/
IEN#10 - Internet Broadcast Protocols 1977/03/07
IEN#11 - Internetting or Beyond NCP 1977/03/21
IEN#14 - Thoughts on Multi-net Control and Data Collection Factilities
         1977/02/28

... and from IEN#16:

IEN # 16
Network Working Group                                         Jon Postel
Request for Comments: 730                                        USC-ISI
NIC: 40400                                                   20 May 1977

Section: 2.2.4.2      Extensible Field Addressing

Introduction

This memo discusses the need for and advantages of the expression of
addresses in a network environment as a set of fields.  The suggestion
is that as the network grows the address can be extended by three
techniques: adding fields on the left, adding fields on the right, and
increasing the size of individual fields.  Carl Sunshine has described
this type of addressing in a paper on source routing [1].

Motivation

Change in the Host-IMP Interface

The revised Host-IMP interface provides for a larger address space for
hosts and IMPs [2].  The old inteface allowed for a 2 bit host field and
a 6 bit IMP field.  The new interface allows a 8 bit host field and a 16
bit IMP field.  In using the old interface it was common practice to
treat the two fields as a single eight bit quantity.  When it was
necessary to refer to a host by number a decimal number was often used.
For example host 1 on IMP 1 was called host 65. Doug Wells has pointed
out some of problems associated with attempting to continue such useage
as the new interface comes into use [3].  If a per field notation had
been used no problems would arise.

Some examples of old and new host numbers are:

  Host Name       Host IMP old #   new #
  --------------------------------------
  SRI-ARC            0   2     2       2
  UCLA-CCN           1   1    65   65537
  ISIA               1  22    86   65558
  ARPA-TIP           2  28   156  131100
  BBNA               3   5   197  196613

Multinetwork Systems

The prospect of interconnections of networks to form a complex
multinetwork system poses additional addressing problems.  The new
Host-IMP interface specification has reserved fields in the leader to
carry network addresses  [2].  There is experimental work in progress on
interconnecting networks [4, 5, 6]. We should be prepared for these
extensions to the address space.

The addressing scheme should be expandable to increase in scope when
interconnections are made between complex systems.

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1968 release of APL\360 wanted

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: 1968 release of APL\360 wanted
Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl,comp.sys.ibm,alt.folklore.computers
Date: 04 Apr 1999 10:44:12 -0700

might find a flavor of it on one of the VM user group archives. Early
'70s, CSC ported APL/360 to CP/67-CMS, eliminated the monitor & other
multi-user stuff (since CP/CMS provided that part), opened up the
workspace to 24bit, rewrote garbage collect (original apl/360 memory
management never re-used storage ... alwas allocated new slot for
assignment, when it got to end of workspace it collapsed everything
back to low-memory (not too bad on 32kbyte workspace but running even
a small program in 16mbyte workspace could be disasterous), and added
stuff to interface to external things (like doing file i/o).

The last kick off big ruckus between cambridge science center and the
phili science center (where falkoff was) ... which eventually lead to
"shared variables" ... as paradigm for accessing external features.

The cms/apl version of apl/360 had significant more useage and wider
distribution than the original apl/360. One of the major applications
was on HONE which not only provided all the online support for field
people (sales, marketing, SEs, CEs, branch, etc) ... but was also main
stay of corporate hdqtrs for planning, forcast, business management,
etc aspects.

--
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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.tcp-ip,alt.culture.internet,comp.org.ieee,alt.amateur-comp
Date: 07 Apr 1999 23:34:58 -0700

re: RFCs available ...

see the RFC index at http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

many of the IENs are available as either IEN files or RFC files.

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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.tcp-ip,alt.culture.internet,comp.org.ieee,alt.amateur-comp
Date: 08 Apr 1999 00:17:37 -0700

re: files

for some related information see rfc2555 just released today

files can be found at ftp.isi.edu ... rfcs in directory in-notes
(which is where my rfc index points to retrieve the actual rfc).
iens can be found in directory in-notes/ien. just checking
ien-index.txt might be of some interest to see the IP evoluation
from 77 to 82.

from ien111:

August 1979
IEN: 111
Replaces:  IENs 80,
54, 44, 41, 28, 26

Internet Protocol Specification

1.  INTRODUCTION

1.1.  Motivation

The Internet Protocol is designed for use in interconnected systems of
packet-switched computer communication networks.  Such a system has
been called a "catenet" [1].  The internet protocol provides for
transmitting blocks of data called datagrams from sources to
destinations, where sources and destinations are hosts identified by
fixed length addresses.  The internet protocol also provides for
fragmentation and reassembly of long datagrams, if necessary, for
transmission through "small packet" networks.

1.2.  Scope

The internet protocol is specifically limited in scope to provide the
functions necessary to deliver a package of bits (an internet
datagram) from a source to a destination over an interconnected system
of networks.  There are no mechanisms to promote data reliability,
flow control, sequencing, or other services commonly found in
host-to-host protocols.

1.3.  Interfaces

This protocol is called on by host-to-host protocols in an internet
environment.  This protocol calls on local network protocols to carry
the internet datagram to the next gateway or destination host.

For example, a TCP module would call on the internet module to take a
TCP segment (including the TCP header and user data) as the data
portion of an internet datagram.  The TCP module would provide the
addresses and other parameters in the internet header to the internet
module as arguments of the call.  The internet module would then
create an internet datagram and call on the local network interface to
transmit the internet datagram.

In the ARPANET case, for example, the internet module would call on a
local net module which would add the 1822 leader [2] to the internet
datagram creating an ARPANET message to transmit to the IMP.  The
ARPANET address would be derived from the internet address by the
local network interface and would be the address of some host in the
ARPANET, that host might be a gateway to other networks.
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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet (TM) and USPTO
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains,misc.int-property,misc.legal,alt.folklore.computers
Date: 08 Apr 1999 13:09:34 -0700

bitnet (and its european cousin, earn) was a corporate sponsored
network for universities ... somewhat similar to nsfnet's sponsored
csnet. bitnet was based on technology from the corporate internal
network ... the courporate internal network was larger than
arpanet/csnet/nsfnet just about from day one thru about mid-80s
(possibly one of the biggest factors in arpanet/csnet/nsfnet exceeding
the corporate internal network in size were workstations that started
to come into vogue in the early '80s ... while the internal corporate
network remained mainframes, thousands of machines with hundreds of
thousands of users).

--
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 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.tcp-ip,alt.culture.internet,comp.org.ieee,alt.amateur-comp
Date: 08 Apr 1999 14:58:15 -0700

the IEN documents imply that what they were working on in the 77-80
time-frame was an "internet protocol" (IP) for infrastructures
referred to as multinetwork systems (IEN-16) and catenet (ien-32).

both an "internet protocol" layer (ien-111) and "gateway" (ien-32) are
integral components of being able to accomplish multinetwork systems.

from ien-32 ...

                 CATENET MONITORING AND CONTROL:
                A MODEL FOR THE GATEWAY COMPONENT
                          John Davidson
                  Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.
                             IEN #32
               Internet Notebook Section 2.3.3.12
                         April 28, 1978

                 Catenet Monitoring and Control:
                A Model for the Gateway Component

1.  INTRODUCTION

At the last Internet meeting,  some  concern  was  expressed
that  we don't have a real "model" for what a gateway is, what it
does, and how it does it, and that without such  a  model  it  is
somewhat  dificult  to  describe  the  kinds  of activities which
should be monitored or controlled by  a  Gateway  Monitoring  and
Control  Center  (GMCC).   To  respond  to  that concern, we have
written this note to express our recent thoughts about a  gateway
model.  Although the note centers primarily around the topic of a
gateway  model,  we  have  also  included  a  few  thoughts about
possible  models  for  the  other   components   of   a   general
internetwork structure.

The  note  proceeds  as  follows.   In  Section  2 we try to
establish a reason for wanting a model of  a  given  internetwork
component, and present a brief overview of the potential benefits
of   Monitoring   and  Control.   This  presentation  is  largely
pedagogical since it is assumed that this document  will,  for  a
while  at least, be the only introduction to the topic available.

In Section 3 we discuss the fundamental kinds of  activities
which  must  be  performed  by any internet component if it is to
participate in Monitoring and Control.  This section  establishes
motivation  for  some  of the mechanisms discussed in the rest of
the paper.

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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 12 Apr 1999 15:31:39 -0700

somewhat digression

many/most of the networking protocols seemed to assume a relatively
homogeneous environment ... i.e. arpanet with the IMPs providing
connectivity.

IEN (internet) work in the 77/78 timeframe resulted in gateways and a
"internet" layer (i.e. prior references to various IEN documents).

with ISO defining level3/network and level4/transport ... the internet
layer effectively fit someplace in-between ISO level3/level4.

this is similar to the internal corporate network (corporate
time-sharing product and the corporate network technology ...  which
later was used in bitnet and earn) was done starting in the late 60s
in 545 tech. sq (in some extent shared common heritage with multics
back to ctss) ... which effectively had a gateway layer implemented at
ever node. That in part was responsible for the corporate network
being larger than the arpanet/internet from almost the beginning up
thru mid-80s (the other was the corporate time-sharing system that
also originated at 545 tech. sq. was running on a couple thousand
internal corporate mainframes). One of the things that drove the
arpanet/internet passed the internal corporate network was advent of
workstations as nodes.

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[netz] History and vision for the future of Internet - Public Question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] History and vision for the future of Internet - Public Question
Newsgroups: alt.internet-media-coverage,alt.culture.internet,alt.folklore.computers,news.misc,sci.econ,comp.org.ieee,alt.culture.usenet
Date: 13 Apr 1999 16:07:01 -0700

somewhat conjecture ... is that NSFNET1 contract covered possibly
1/4th to 1/10th the resources put into NSFNET1 ... the rest put in by
commercial corporations. Conjecture on my part is huge amount of dark
fiber laying around ... and necessary to break checken/egg situation
at the time with few apps to use the bandwidth, tariffs at the time
were barrier to new apps that might be evolve to use the
bandwidth. Strategy was to make significant bandwidth available as
seed environment that applications could evolve that would eventually
be able to utilize the excess capacity. While ARPANET activity has
some technology/protocol relationship to current Internet ... the huge
resources provided by commercial entities starting (at least) with
NSFNET1 ... significantly define the current Internet infrastructure
(in that sense ... commercialization happened over ten years ago).

Interop '88 had lots of vendors and loads of academic/arpanet people
that had or were in the process of making transition to commercial
companies.

folklore trivia question .... what was causing floor-net meltdown on
sunday before Interop '88 started (and led to configuration option
that is now required in all tcp/ip implemenations).

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A word processor from 1960

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A word processor from 1960
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 15 Apr 1999 16:20:23 -0700

I did something much simpler and later ... in 1968, I took the 2250
library that lincoln labs had ported to CMS ... and crafted it as
device for the CMS context editor (somewhat evolved from CTSS editor)
to support full screen operation

It was a 2250m1 graphics display ... mainframe channel attached that
ran at a couple hundred kbytes/sec.

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Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 16 Apr 1999 16:53:27 -0700

the precursor of SGML/HTML was GML (generalized markup language
... acronym were actually a hack on the three peoples last names) done
at the cambridge science center and implemented in the cms script
processor in the late 60s and early 70s. the script processor was
ported to a number of other environments and (at least in the ibm
mainframe world) could use output devices like the 3800 and the 6670
(san jose research hacked what was essentially an ibm copier3 with a
computer interface to create the 6670 ... it was the first computer
output device that I used that directly supported printing on both
sides of the paper). There was general deployment of 6670s and the
associated support by at least 1979.

Earlier implementations of font changes on 2741, ibm typerwritters and
ibm word processors was achieved by manual switching of the typeball,
in fact the early 3800/6670 font change processing relied on using the
existing script font/typeball change processing.

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Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 16 Apr 1999 16:53:27 -0700

the precursor of SGML/HTML was GML (generalized markup language
... acronym were actually a hack on the three peoples last names) done
at the cambridge science center and implemented in the cms script
processor in the late 60s and early 70s. the script processor was
ported to a number of other environments and (at least in the ibm
mainframe world) could use output devices like the 3800 and the 6670
(san jose research hacked what was essentially an ibm copier3 with a
computer interface to create the 6670 ... it was the first computer
output device that I used that directly supported printing on both
sides of the paper). There was general deployment of 6670s and the
associated support by at least 1979.

Earlier implementations of font changes on 2741, ibm typerwritters and
ibm word processors was achieved by manual switching of the typeball,
in fact the early 3800/6670 font change processing relied on using the
existing script font/typeball change processing.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Apr 1999 10:16:03 -0700

re: homogeneous/heterogeneous

I was thinking in terms of the networking hardware and the protocol
being homogeneos.  the end-point host machines (might be
heterogeneous) were attached to the IMPs and the IMPs managed the
network protocol. The 360s (lincolns '67 and UCLA's '91) would have an
IBM telecommunication controller (2702 or 2701) which would then talk
to the IMP.

ibm360s had interesting problems interacting with a ascii-based
infrastructure ... in part because of the ebcdic/ascii character
translation.

I had written tty/ascii support for CP/67 while I was an undergraduate
(circa 68) that IBM shipped to customers in CP/67 (VanVleck
immortalizes a y2k-type calculation "bug" at
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/360-67.html, since ttys were limited to 72
characters ... i did message transfer information using one-byte/255
values; since cp/67 was shipped w/source it was relatively
straight-forward to modify it to support devices that did transfers
longer than 255 ... but they didn't change my one byte code stuff
... as a result calculations resulted in bad lengths and resulted in
data operations off the end of the buffer, which corrupted stuff
leading to system failure).

About the same time (late '68) ... a couple of us at the university
built a replacement (using our own minicomputer) to replace the 2702
communication controller (which is supposedly credited with
originating the ibm OEM controller business). One of the reasons was
that we had original thot it was possible to dynamically associate
different line scanners with different lines (i.e. dynamically
determine protocol at time of modem connection on dial-up lines).  It
turned out it almost work except IBM had taken short-cut and hardware
strapped the oscillator to a line ... so dynamic switching of line
scanner worked as long as all protocols operated at the same bit rate.
In any case, one of the things we implemented was strobbing of bit
raise/lower signal to support dynamic speed recognition.

Back to the ebcdic/ascii problem ... ebcdic is a 256bit code and ascii
is a 127bit code ... and even tho ebcdic had more bit positions
... there were also ascii characters that were not defined in ebcdic
(as well as vis-a-versa). Typically, character translation was done at
the 360 from ebcdic->ascii (on outgoing) and ascii->ebcdic (on
incoming) ... so the ascii network didn't have to worry about dealing
with non-ascci machines (it was done in the 360 host). Defining
the in-bound and out-bound character translation tables got to be
tricky.

in any case, the arpanet started out protocol, hardware, and character
set homogeneous ... with some of the end-point hosts (360s, with
different character set) trying to simulate homogeneous operation.

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http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Apr 1999 15:21:59 -0700

... from a slightly different perspective I know somebody that as a
UCSB undergraduate was hired by ARPA to do host/network penetration
studies prior to turning ARPANET on ... a couple years ago she
observed that after nearly 30 years she could still penetrate a number
of todays systems.

unless prepared it is hard to only fake strong-arm tactics.

--
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Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 17 Apr 1999 18:41:17 -0700

... slightly related ... at least with regard to not being able to
trap ICMPs associated with specific sessions at the application
... being a tcp/ip "bug".

Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: 16 Apr 1999 11:26:41 -0700

for service based applications ... where the design point is that
operation runs continuously with no human present ... the exception
code for service operation can easily be 4* as much as the code
supporting traditional straight-forward implementation ... frequently
there are numerous domain specific exceptions and domain specific
exception processing so that it is necessary to handle them in the
application (and not take the default of the infrastructure).

... and of course my motherhood statement ... many of the
infrastructures that grew up out of "batch" systems tend to be richer
in their support of exception since the design point assumption was
there wasn't a person directly connected to the application for
operation (as compared to infrastructures that grew-up out of desk-top
and/or interactive environments that had design point assumptions that
a person might ultimately deal with the situation).

--
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Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: 16 Apr 1999 13:19:41 -0700

... oh yes, trivial example.

in the summer of '95 i got to diagnose an epidemic system failure at a
large service provider. turned out to be the machine(s) were crashing
with resource exhausion because of large number of half-open sessions
(almost exactly to the day, a year prior to the denial of service
attack problem hit the press in the summer of '96).

in any case, ... it reminded me of network services deployed 20+ years
early that trap/caught similar error condition and appropriately
released the resources. However, ... there was no way that I could set
a trap on a tcp/ip half-open session so that all associated ICMP
errors (like port not available and host not reachable) specific for
that half-session. From a service offering stand-point, I consider
that an error in both the tcp/ip implementation as well as in the
protocol (regardless of the architecture purity appearance of the
protocol).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Language based exception handling. (Was: Did Intel pay UGS to kill Alpha port? Or Compaq simply doesn't care?)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: 16 Apr 1999 13:30:17 -0700

oops, 2nd trivial example ... also from '95.

one of the web/browser companies had developed a lot of code that
would support server's doing web financial transactions. they had done
all the straight-line function and extensively stress-tested the code.

I went in with a failure-mode grid of 30-40 conditions and 4-5 states
and required that the server being able to recognize and take some
appropriate action (although as mentioned ... things like half-open
session traps were outside the capability of the infrastructure and
needed recommendations for other approaches for handling).

In any case, there was essentially 4* as much effort to try and turn
the application into a service-quality implementation as went into the
straight-forward base function.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Living legends

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Living legends
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Apr 1999 09:45:31 -0700

well then what are 013, 813, A13 ...

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Apr 1999 09:55:18 -0700

Joel Winett at Lincoln did a number of early RFCs ... somewhat related
to the '67 ... unfortunately most of them aren't online:

109 Level III Server Protocol for the Lincoln Laboratory NIC 360/67
    Host, Winett J., 1971/03/24 (12pp)

110 Conventions for using an IBM 2741 terminal as a user console for
    access to network server hosts, Winett J., 1971/03/25 (4pp)
    (Updated by 135)

147 Definition of a socket, Winett J., 1971/05/07 (2pp) (.txt=6438)
    (Updates 129)

167 Socket conventions reconsidered, Bhushan A., Metcalfe R., Winett
    J., 1971/05/24 (7pp) (.txt=7643)

183 EBCDIC codes and their mapping to ASCII, Winett J., 1971/07/21
    (15pp)

393 Comments on Telnet Protocol changes, Winett J., 1972/10/03 (5pp)
    (.txt=9435)

466 Telnet logger/server for host LL-67, Winett J., 1973/02/27 (8pp)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Apr 1999 13:40:37 -0700

re: 6670 stories & off topic;

in 77/78 time-frame, 2 of the 3 people responsible for GML, the person
responsible for the internal network, and I transfered from 545
tech sq (csc) to sjr.

into the 6670 line-driver went the obvious support using the alternate
paper draw to print the file-seperator page (typically loaded with
green or blue paper). To make the file-seperator page a little more
interesting ... a feature called "6670 sayings" was added ... where
the line driver randomly selected a quotation that was printed
following the file ownership information.

SJR was having a security audit ... and the auditors were roaming
around buildings after hours looking to see if there was classified
information left out. One of the areas of interest was the 6670 output
rooms to see if there was classifed information printed and left out
(not immediately picked up). On the top of one 6670 was a pile of
output ... the top file having a seperator page with the definition of
an auditor being a person that goes around the battlefield after a war
stabbing the wounded. The auditor took it as personal insult & that
somebody had placed it on top the 6670 specifically to make a statment
about the character of auditors. Some amount of time was spent trying
to identify the individual responsible for the insult to auditors.

Lots of stuff used to be sent to me (back in the late '70s when global
networking was new & fresh it was exciting to be processing hundreds
of messages a day, ... as an example somebody had sent me the fortran
source for adventure that compiled on cms ... within three months of
adventure showing up at stanford ... one corporate type once claimed
that they had statistics that for some months they could blame me for
upwards of 30% of all traffic on all links on the whole internal
network).

One year, the last week in march, somebody from an unnamed east coast
location sent me a "corporate memo" dated April 1st (which was on
sunday) that claimed to be a corporate password security memo
outlining 10-15 rules for password selection. The memo concluded that
there was only a single alphanumeric string that met all the criteria
and each individual was to contact their local security officer to
obtain that password. The first thing Monday morning (april 2) ... all
the corporate bulletin boards in the building had a copy of the memo
printed on corporate letterhead (and i wasn't responsible and/or had
prior knowledge).

By noon, quite a storm was brewing ... not withstanding the content of
the memo ... the date of the memo (april 1st) ... or that the date was
sunday (and corporate memos are never issued on sunday) ...  a very
large percentage of people didn't realize it was an april 1st memo,
and got quite angry when it was pointed out. After much investigation,
the final outcome was that all corporate letterhead paper was to be
moved from open shelves in the 6670 print rooms to locked cabinets.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Internet and/or ARPANET?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Internet and/or ARPANET?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 18 Apr 1999 14:39:01 -0700

re: multics/cms ... off topic;

with respect to tom's comments at http://www.multicians.org/thvv/360-67.html
about one of the reasons that multics started on the new file systems
being poor comparison with cp/67 ... taking hour to restart the system
(mostly in recovering the file system) ... while cp could crash 27
times in a single day ...  restart and still have people getting
useful work done.

cms filesystem made all filesystem changes to blocks that were written
to "versioned/new" locations ... and then at periodic syncs the single
MFD block would be rewritten which reflected the new locations for
changed filesystem blocks. Except for one problem ... the filesystem
on disk was alwas consistent ... it was either the old version (before
the MFD was rewritten) or the new version (after the MFD was
rewritten).

There was a file system scramble problem if there was a power failure
exactly at the instant the MFD was being written ... there could be
scrambled bits in the MFD (there were no intermediate disk buffers
... all data being written was coming directly from processor memory,
there would be sufficient power to complete the write ... but not enuf
power to maintain processor memory ... could to result in disk writes
with trailing zeros in a block ... and valid CRC ... i.e. no error
indication on read).

In the 70s, a cms enhanced file system was done that had a pair of MFD
record locations that writes would ping/pong to (that fixed the power
failure write problem). On restart, both MFDs would be read, checked
for consistency and then the consistent MFD for the most recent
version would be used.