List of Archived Posts

2000 Newsgroup Postings (05/14 - 07/11)

Financial Stnadards Work group?

A note on the culture of database

Financial Stnadards Work group?

RISC Reference?

TF-1

TF-1

TF-1

A most delicious (non-folkloric) thought.

IBM Linux

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

IBM 1460

IBM 1460

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

Gif images: Database or filesystem?

thread scheduling and cache coherence traffic

Hard disks, one year ago today

Hard disks, one year ago today

write rings

IBM 1460

Hard disks, one year ago today

IBM 1460

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

optimal cpu : mem <-> 9:2 ?

Hard disks, one year ago today

Hard disks, one year ago today

The first "internet" companies?

The first "internet" companies?

The first "internet" companies?

The first "internet" companies?

internal corporate network, misc.

The first "internet" companies?

Request for review of "secure" storage scheme

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.

Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

Domainatrix - the final word

Domainatrix - the final word

Domainatrix - the final word

Any Series/1 fans?

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Any Series/1 fans?

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

Java and Multos

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Definitive SSL explanation please...

Disincentives for MVS & future of MVS systems programmers

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Disincentives for MVS & future of MVS systems programmers

TF-1

ANSI X9.62 and X9.63

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

Is a VAX a mainframe?

IBM's "ASCI White" and "Big Blue" architecture?

Free RT monitors/keyboards

Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons

Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons

Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons

Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons

Is a VAX a mainframe?

Is a VAX a mainframe?

V-Man's Patton Quote (LONG) (Pronafity)

Financial Stnadards Work group?

Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 10:28:21 -0700
To: ietf@ietf.org
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: re: Financial Stnadards Work group?

Musandu writes:

It may just be time for the IETF to develop a financial standards
work group separate from the applications work group.  I can even
forsee a Simple Cash Transfer Protocol? any objections?

There is an ANSI Financial Standards body (X9) which is also chair of
the ISO Financial Standards group.

The electronic commerce payments working group (X9A10) has a draft
standard for all electronic retail payments (debit, credit, pre-paid,
electronic cash, etc) .. X9.59.

misc. ref

http://www.x9.org/
http://www.x9.org/main_organization.html
http://www.x9.org/subcomms/x9a/general/public/general.html
http://www.tc68.org/
http://www.x9.org/n20.html
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#224
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/8583flow.htm
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/draft-wheeler-ipki-aads-01.txt

& of course my rfc index is also at:

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

as well as ietf, payments, security, X9F, and financial glossaries

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler      lynn@garlic.com
  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

A note on the culture of database

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A note on the culture of database
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 04:53:53 GMT

ehrice@his.com (Edward Rice) writes

In addition, unless the system is 100% reliable (and we're just closing in
on that now, we certainly didn't achieve it in the 1970's or 1980's!), you
run into update anomalies, interrupted updates, and the serious performance
problems that can occur when you get a fully-normalized database and go to
make changes in it.

Even when Third Normal was the standard, we usually settled for about
90-95% "compliant" -- we accepted some failure to normalize as a cost of
doing business.  We usually made at least a mental note that there was a
reason for stopping our normalization of design before it was complete, and
might note in the code /and/ the documentation exactly what the reasons
were.

One of the largest online libraries (been around since the late 60s)
attemped to load their indexing schema into a relational database and
keep it updated. It hired a large outside organization to do the
initial project and then to provide updates every 9 months ... based
on 9 months of additions to the indexing infrastructure.

The indexing schema is large ... running to over hundred thousand
terms with extremely complicated inter-term relationships. A valent
effort got maybe half the terms into a partial relational schema
... but most of the data sat around in totally unnormalized tables ...
and even at that the attempted "normalization" efforts were falling
behind in real-time ... nine months of new articles and publications
with new terms and categorization ... was impacting schedule by more
than 29=18 months (delay).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Financial Stnadards Work group?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 23:28:06 -0700
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: re: Financial Stnadards Work group?

X9.59 is a financial industry standard for all account-based
electronic retail transactions.

In the AADS strawman chip scenerio for X9.59 ... whether debit,
credit, prepaid, etc. , the chip would sign a X9.59 transaction and
work identical whether it was at person's PC or at point-of-sale (it
works the same whether any ietf internet infrastructure is involved or
existing financial network infrastructure)

Such an AADS strawman chip scenerio for X9.59 would work the same
regardless of internet, no-internet, point-of-sale, debit, credit,
pre-paid, bank, subscriber, isp. (the AADS strawman chip scenerio also
works the same for non-X9.59 AADS scenerios like AADS radius, ISP
authenticated access, webserver authenticated access, VPN
authentication operation, etc).

There are some issues for the AADS strawman chip scnerio for X9.59,
like contact or contactless. Contact would be standard existing
chipcard standard and would be useable in existing chipcard contact
readers. The contactless standards are less well accepted ... but
establishing a contactless accepted standard would free up the AADS
strawman chip to become form-factor agnostic (i.e. an AADS strawman
chip could imbedded into almost any shape and be able to operate).

The AADS chip strawman scenerio for X9.59 not only proposes that it is
the same regardless of whether it is Internet or non-internet, but
also whether it is credit, debit, pre-paid, authenticated access,
existing financial infrastructure, point-of-sale, who the bank is,
face-to-face physical, who the service provider is, as well as what
country that it might operate in

At 08:06 AM 5/16/2000 +0300, Musandu wrote:

I do not quiet agree with the current standards, they are a pain in the
neck.  E.g ( Just one example ) I want the internet debit card and the
devices for charging them to be standard hardware available in any computer
store.  This will allow one to chose any bank or service provider ( instead
of your money going proprietory ): imagine buying a new modem or router
every time you change ISPs or buying different kinds of printers for
printing from different web sites.  That is the position of debit card
recharging buying a new device each time you change the service provider.
The IETF can help or do you hold alternative views  ( give me some
recharging devices that allow change overs )??

Yours sincerely,
Nyagudi Musandu

At 10:28 14/05/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Musandu writes
>
> >It may just be time for the IETF to develop a financial standards
> >work group separate from the applications work group.  I can even >forsee
>a Simple Cash Transfer Protocol? any objections?
>
>There is an ANSI Financial Standards body (X9) which is also chair of the
>ISO Financial Standards group.
>
>The electronic commerce payments working group (X9A10) has a draft standard
>for all electronic retail payments (debit, credit, pre-paid, electronic
>cash, etc) .. X9.59.
>
>
>misc. ref
>
>http://www.x9.org/
>http://www.x9.org/main_organization.html
>http://www.x9.org/subcomms/x9a/general/public/general.html
>http://www.tc68.org/
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#224
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/8583flow.htm
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/draft-wheeler-ipki-aads-01.txt
>
>& of course my rfc index is also at:
>
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
>
>as well as ietf, payments, security, X9F, and financial glossaries
>
>--
>Anne & Lynn Wheeler      lynn@garlic.com
>   http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler      lynn@garlic.com
  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

RISC Reference?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: RISC Reference?
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 14:14:32 GMT

eugene@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) writes

Just saw Ditzel at the Asilomar meeting.  Tredenick was there, too.
Nick apepars to be interested in small planes.

how small?, we were out there and saw (denver's) small plane go down
... didn't know what was going on tho until later in the evening when
we heard it on the news.

misc. 801 ref;

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#5
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#11

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

TF-1

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TF-1
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 18:14:54 GMT

"Al Grant" writes:

Fair enough.  I was particularly interested in the CPU design
though.  It predates the release of POWER (1990 IIRC).
Were IBM using early POWERs in custom computers or
was this something quite different?

RIOS predated POWERPC. RIOS was used in number of things. ROMP
predated RIOS (as was targeted for a number of things). I have little
plastic case on my desk with six chips embedded in it with title IBM
AWD Austin & GTD Burlington, "POWER (aka RIOS) Architecture", 150 million
ops, 60 million flops, 7 million transistors.

One thing I consider big difference between ROMP/RIOS & POWERPC ... was
POWERPC allowed for cache consistency (aka SMP). all the ROMP/RIOS
designs (that I know of) had no provisions for cache consistency
operation (ROMP/RIOS would be involved in various parallel machine
designs ... in part because they couldn't be used in cache consistency
SMP machines ... aka if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a
nail?).

random references:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#49
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#129

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

TF-1

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TF-1
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 21:27:21 GMT

pontius@btv.MBI.com.invalid (Dale Pontius) writes:

If there's any value to this reply, it's tying the TF1 to the GF11 -
that at least gives you another search point. It's also worth knowing
that to the best of my knowledge, both were one-of-a-kind research
machines, and probably spend their entire service lifetimes in
Yorktown Heights, New York.

I think that some of this was sponsored out of a lab in Kingston that
started out with a whole load of FPS boxes (attached to a couple IBM
mainframes) ... working on various chemical & atomic calculations, I
vaguely remember them announcing along the way various calculation
thresholds in the gflops range in the mid to late '80s. Then there
were upgrades with FPS boxes in combination with IBM 3090s with vector
facility.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

TF-1

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TF-1
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 21:41:08 GMT

a URL for references to both GF11 and RP3

http://www.research.ibm.com/compsci/arch_os/abs.html

with respect to RP3 comment:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#136a

my wife had been assigned the task to review RP3 to decide whether it
should continue to receive funding.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

A most delicious (non-folkloric) thought.

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A most delicious (non-folkloric) thought.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 18:33:35 GMT

TJ Edmister writes

When I first started hearing stuff about emails containing viruses and
causing trouble I knew it must have had something to do with MS. I'm
immune since I use old web browsers and things. The only time I ever had
a virus was when I got a darn bootsector bug on some 360k disks from a
BBS I used to call with an 8086.

i think we first ran into situation where email could contain an
executable that might be a virus (or actually a trojan horse) around
'71 or '72 (i.e. executable is accepted into the system ... and turn
out to have something embedded that would compromise the
infrastructure).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

IBM Linux

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Linux
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 00:06:37 GMT

jones@cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:

IBM ran a full page add in today's NY Times touting their 390 Mainframes
as the ideal Linux server boxen.

Of course, Amdahl ported Unix to the 470 (the Amdahl clone of the 370)
back in the 1970's, so running a Unix variant on the current descendant
of that architecture is no real surprise, but still, I find the thought
of "Big Blue" embracing Linux to be more than a little strange (even
though I agree with the strategy).

Doug Jones
jones@cs.uiowa.edu

from:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#62

posted here a month ago ... from a posting that had been originally
made to ibm mainframe group in Feb. of this year ... the number of
separate, distinct copies of Linux running simultaneously on a single
mainframe.

My test LPAR finally ran out of gas (no resources available) at:

41,400

separate Linux images. Yes, FORTY-ONE THOUSAND WWW servers on a single
physical system.  The last few hundred were painful as CP was fighting for
resources against a LPAR cap, but it did it. I finally ran out of storage
at 41K and change.

a LPAR is a physical resource partitioning of the real mainframe into
multiple logical partions/machines (i.e. a LPAR ... or logical
partition is a subset of the total machine resources).

there were ports of Unix to ibm mainframes prior the gold port (aka
amdahl unix, or Au) ... including the telco port to TSS/370 platform
and various university ports. There were also non-standard unix ports
like the Locus port ... for aix/370.

misc. other URLs

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 12:56:20 GMT

nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) writes

The point is that non-coherent SMP hardware is simple to design,
cheap to make, and very scalable - in fact, it is nothing more than
a distributed data system with global addressing.  The (actual but
inefficient) implementations of HPF and the (efficient but purported)
implementations of OpenMP for distributed memory systems are exactly
the same technology, but the with addressing itself in software.

Data coherent SMP has none of those advantages, but is much easier
to program for.

funny you should mention that ... the 16-way (in the following
reference on 801, circa '76)

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#11
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#40

was big mainframes crammed into a box w/o cross-cache signaling for
consistency. we did some slight of hand with virtual memory and
simulated messaging to support a broad range of applications. the
business problem was getting people that were accustom to very strong
memory consistency to put it out as a standard product.

when my wife & I were doing cluster scaleup for RIOS ... we didn't
make that mistake ... but created a couple of other problems. the
interconnect fabric we were using ... not only supported
processor-to-processor messaging ... but also processor-to-device, so
instead of confining ourselves to only doing processor to processor
message solutions ... we also looked at using the same fabric in other
ways for device interconnect also, misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15

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

IBM 1460

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 1460
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 06:15:47 GMT

jmaynard@thebrain.conmicro.cx (Jay Maynard) writes

HASP (the Houston Automatic Spooling Program) was written by IBMers at the
Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center), for OS/360 MVT (I
don't think it ran on MFT, anyway). I don't know if the SPOOL acronym was
invented by those folks, though.

I ran hasp on MFT-11 and MFT-14;

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#13
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#55
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#76

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

IBM 1460

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 1460
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 15:47:02 GMT

Nick Spalding writes

Yes, for just the reasons you give.  They often had a 1401 alongside
and spooled to/from it via tapes.

my first summer programming job was re-implementing the 1401 "MPIO"
program (that did the tape<->reader/printer/punch for 709 at school)
on a 360/30 (at least the 1401 binary deck that was loaded & performed
the function had "MPIO" written in magic marker across the top ... and
is what I was informed that I was implementing).

The 360/30 could be run in 1401 emulation mode ... and the original
MPIO (multiprogramming input/output?) program could be run w/o needing
a port. The source for my 360 assembler implementation ran to about
2500 cards (slightly larger than would fit in a card box ... but still
small enuf to fit in a card tray) ... this included both the ability
to run "stand-alone" (i.e. my own monitor, interrupt handler, storage
allocation, scheduling, i/o supervisor, etc) and under os/pcp-6 (with
DCB & get/put macros).

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#17
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#21
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#9

and for 360 similar (but more generalized UR not specific 70xx
front-end)

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#15

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 16:08:08 GMT

John McCalpin writes

IBM built such a machine in the early 1990's.  It was a short-lived project
that I think went under the name "PowerParallel", and was available (IIRC)
by special order only.  The two boxes that I knew of were at Florida State
and at Dupont.

The system had 4 POWER CPUs, each with their own "local" memory.  A portion
of the address space accessed a physically shared memory array in the top
of the box.  The POWER architecture has a segmented memory addressing scheme
that makes this approach very easy to do.

it was oak ... it had a feature where segments could be flagged as
cached or not-cached. storage that needed to be consistent was
allocated in a segment flagged non/never-cached. an issue was
developing programming paradigms that could use non-standard
hardware. work was done on using simulated message passing. they
needed tweak to the processor (custom chips) even to do that bit
(chips were referred to as rios 0.9).

part of the issue was that we could demonstrate 16-way and quick path
to 128-way (and above) using standard existing chips & motherboards
with interconnect fabric (even demonstrate interconnect fabric on
existing workstations in racks ... but some additional manufacturing
cost savings by packaging standard mother boards for high-density rack
mounting ... racks had to have some cooling characteristics to achieve
the high-density packaging of the mother boards).

even tho oak had a lot of similarities with the mid-70s effort with
ibm mainframe ... points on the trade-off curves regarding commodity
standard parts were different between the mid-70s and late 80s/early
90s (in part, oak was stuck with non-standard chip part and memory
bus)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Gif images: Database or filesystem?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gif images: Database or filesystem?
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 17:00:08 GMT

"Adam Ruth" writes:

I have to disagree with you.  I created a directory on my sever containing
6,000 8k jpg images each in 100 sub-directories (600,000 images total).  The
time it took to access any one at random was indiscernible from accessing a
file where it is alone in the directory.  This has to do with 2 things:

1)  The file system can cache it's directory and file structure.  Accessing
a single node can be almost instantaneous.

2)  The web server is tuned for maximum bandwidth when accessing files from
the file system, such as web pages or images.

A web interface is going to need random access to single files more than
it will need to grab 50,000 all at once.  If you have files that need to be
used through a web interface, it's almost always best to store them in the
file system, at least by my experience.

FYI, my testing server is a 433 Celeron Dell Dimension, with 256 MB RAM,
running Red Hat Linux 6.1 and Apache 1.3.9.

the issue isn't whether a single file open in a simple structure is
slower or faster than a file open in a complex structure. The issue is
whether generalized file open/close pathlength for relatively trivial
objects is significantly larger than DBMS overhead interface and its
access infrastructure overhead (which has tended to
pre-open/pre-access disk at database startup).

most often dbms transactions have been compared to batch processing
...  where they both (in effect) have had single set of file
open/close operations for the whole set of transactions. The web
scenerio tends to be transaction oriented ... with file open/close per
operation (that pathlength nominally is greater than a dbms single
transaction pathlength).

dbms has some additional fixed cost ... both in terms of program setup
and ongoing maint. this has tended to be recovered as activity scales
up ... including infrastructure overhead for better update&change
control & shorter aggregate pathlength for peak/saturated cpu
operation.

In any event, there tends to be a cross-over point where the
additional upfront complexity of dbms is net benefit to environment.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

thread scheduling and cache coherence traffic

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: thread scheduling and cache coherence traffic
Newsgroups: comp.programming.threads
Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 18:32:07 GMT

Jan Hoogerbrugge writes:

Hi,

I am developing a thread scheduler that runs on a SMP machine
(own creating, no silicon, just simulation at the moment, 8-16
processors, 20-40 threads, very frequent thread switching).

I am worried about threads that are moving to fast from processor
to processor and causing lots of cache coherence traffic. Does
anyone knows literature or techniques on how to prevent this.

I am thinking about one thread queue per processor and processors
can steal threads from other processors when all their own
threads are blocked for a 'long' time. Questions that I have is
how to define long, and which thread to steal.

As an alternative I am thinking about a system with private
thread queues and no stealing. A migration thread
runs once in a while to migrate threads in order to balance load.
This migrator uses load statistics of the threads.

Comments are welcome.

Cheers,
Jan
--
Jan Hoogerbrugge
Philips Research Laboratories

basically VM put in processor affinity for virtual memory in the late
'70s to early '80s. Problem wasn't just threads ... but the memory
that they used ... i.e. if group of threads had very high clustering
on the same memory locations ... then if those threads ran on
different processors (even w/affinity) there would be lots of
cache-chatter ... thread affinity to a processor cache is one order
indirection from the problem ... it is memory cache affinity that is
under consideration ... multiple threads with high clustering/locality
to the same locations can be actually worse for cache-chatter than
thread switching (aka threads sharing same memory as opposed to
processes that have private memory).

related discussion ... where lock-out interval (duration that thread
might be dedicated to a processor) was selected for processor type based
on trade-off benefits of cache locality & cache locality loss.

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#98

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Hard disks, one year ago today

From lynn@adcomsys.net Sat Jun 03 21:03:39 2000
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hard disks, one year ago today
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 13:56:01 GMT

"Stephen Fuld" writes:

to produce drives with less than one platter :-)  (Actually, it is easy to
use less than one platter by short stroking the actuator, but it isn't
economical.  The cost is the same and you a lower price for it)

there has been work in the past on (large mainframe) offerings with
both a full-stroke and a short-stroke actuator ... where they charged
more for the short-stroke actuator as an "enhanced performance"
feature (the same thing could have been accomplished using full-stroke
actuator with judicious data allocation, but few customers were
capable of such restraint ... it was easier to pay more for a
short-stroke feature).

Hard disks, one year ago today

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com, finger for pgp key
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
From lynn@adcomsys.net Sat Jun 03 21:03:42 2000
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hard disks, one year ago today
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 14:36:03 GMT

misc. ref

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#8

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

write rings

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: write rings
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 14:29:12 GMT

Tom Van Vleck writes

We evolved a theory of crashing, recovery, and salvage that
comtemporary operating systems still lack.  This margin is too
small to describe the whole thing though.

slightly related ... not only with respect to recovery done by humans
(system programmers) ... but also with respect to normal system
operations and commands issued by humans in general

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#71

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

IBM 1460

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 1460
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 14:47:36 GMT

nospam@nowhere.com   (Steve Myers) writes:

My recollection is no MFT release had a true SQA, though there was storage
reserved for some shared control blocks, like the ENQ/DEQ control blocks.
Far too many integrity critical control blocks were in the partition, and
completely unprotected from applications.  Examples. TIOT, TCB (I think),
the DEBs.  The storage management free space chain was readily available
for corruption.

simple thing was that storage protect wasn't turned and so for
HASP to take-over the system ... it just saved the system supervisor
new PSW & overlaid supervisor new PSW location with a pointer to HASP
code. When the HASP code intercept got control ... it was then able to
act as supervisor/kernel function. It also was able to create
intercept for I/O interrupts.

When storage protection was supported ... it was no longer possible
(easy) to just create supervisor/kernel intercept just modifying
certain storage locations. System did support a "customer" defined SVC
(supervisor call) ... it was possible to build a system with a
customer defined/added SVC which did execute with kernel
authority. HASP shipped a SVC call that the customer installed into
the system library as part of the HASP installed. HASP then executed
that SVC at startup ... which validated that it was being called by
HASP ... and then did the appropriate things to create the interrupt
intercepts.

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

Hard disks, one year ago today

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hard disks, one year ago today
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 14:51:58 GMT

"Stephen Fuld" writes:

Sure, but drives like the 3380-J and 3390-1 didn't sell very well.  And even
IBM has realized that it is a losing idea and none of their more recent
drives offer this.

it originally was a facetious suggestion (controller microcode change
for short stroke actuator so that not all portions of a platter could
be accessed ... different than standard support with multiple
actuators accessing different portions of the same platter) ... part
of assertion that relative system performance of disk infrastructure
had degraded by factor of five over 10-15 year period (aka memory/cpu
got 50 faster but disks only got 10 faster during the period). for
large complex infrastructure the improvement in overall system thruput
(as percentage of overall total system value) totally dominanted any
loss in value not using all available disk surface.

original report motivated large effort to show it wasn't true ... but
detailed evaluations eventually supported the idea as well as other
innovative uses of disk technology to improve overall system thruput.

the other activity was activity monitoring (& disk access traces) for
1) load-balance the high-activity stuff across available actuators 2)
clustering for large block transfers and 3) recognizing that access
patterns (as mentioned) wasn't actually homogeneous and judicious
combination of high activity and low activity data allocation across
available actuators. many of these infrastructures ran 30-300
actuators.

all of that was different from more recent migration of dedicated "big
iron" disk implementations to implementations that could share a lot
of commodity volume parts.

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

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

IBM 1460

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 1460
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 14:38:10 GMT

jsaum@world.std.com (Jim Saum) writes:

I don't remember HASP's memory requirements, but it tended to be
embraced first at large installations because it required a dedicated
HASP partition.

misc. ref (posted a couple times a year for the past several years):

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#93

& others:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#14
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18

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

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 15:24:40 GMT

Greg Pfister writes:

I never heard anybody say 128-way, and I was somewhat in the
middle of this. What I saw was that it was always intended as an
SMP replacement (yes, SMP, don't ask, some people's heads were in
a strange place then). The software bill, not the hardware, was
always the sticking point. Anyway, the SP became by definition
the "right" solution, and Live Oak was not resurrected again.

you weren't at the following meeting:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

yes it was live oak ... jsut finger abbreviation.

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

Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.super,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 15:42:47 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

you weren't at the following meeting:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

a couple months earlier (than above mentioned meeting) ... there were
demos/presentations of the "<4" (high) rack-mount motherboard housing
with pair of fiber-channnel connectors and special cooling channels
built into the rack that provided cooling to the motherboards (cool
air from the rack cooling channels in one side of the motherboard
housing, across the motherboard and out the otherside to return path
cooling channel built into the otherside of the rack).

Fabric interconnect was based on cascaded ancor 64way non-blocking
switch (replicated fabric infrastructure to the pair of fiber-channel
connectors on each motherboard). Relatively few racks would house 128
processors with associated interconnect switches and associated disk
drives.

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

optimal cpu : mem <-> 9:2 ?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: optimal cpu : mem <-> 9:2 ?
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2000 21:13:04 GMT

"Bill Todd" writes

A possibly naive analysis would suggest that any memory speed less than the
processor speed is sub-optimal, in an approximately continuous
'desirability' function lacking any conspicuous threshold points (e.g.,
9:1).

caching, deep pipelines, asynchronous execution, out of order
execution, etc ... could all be considered toolkit suite for masking
memory latencies.  The more you can mask memory latencies ... the more
you can tolerate memory latencies (up to totally saturating memory
bandwidth) there are also application sensitivities to the degree that
various memory latency masking techniques are effective.

turns out for system thruput ... something similar might be stated for
disk access latencies ... a side drift in the "hard disks" thread

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

Hard disks, one year ago today

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hard disks, one year ago today
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2000 21:17:23 GMT

Bernd Paysan writes:

The best strategy is probably having redundand hard disks (e.g. RAID 5)
to be save against hardware failure, and a log-structured filesystem to
take care of software failure (rotten files). But most of the time, hard

part of discussion a couple months ago on thinking twice about
log structured filesystems

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#93

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

Hard disks, one year ago today

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Hard disks, one year ago today
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 17:13:14 GMT

Edward Wolfgram writes

PC users recoil at the thought that in order to back up data reliably they may
need to buy an inconceivably expensive $50,000 tape drive, and rightly so.  A
device that makes eminent sense in a large mainframe shop shared by thousands of

a large percentage of PCs (desktops & laptops) are corporate property,
connected to corporate networks and frequently containing valuable
corporate owned information. while corporations may not buy $50,000
drives for every PC (although some PCs might, in fact, be repositories
for data justifying such expense) ... they may make policies regarding
backup of data ... whether it is locally attached devices or with
network backup (which may ultimately involve a large mainframe and
expensive tape drives).

To some extent the degree of backup sophistication is proportional to
the value of the data ... one value factor may be the number of users
sharing it ... but there are also instances of very valuable unique
data residing on single PC/workstations (justifying advanced backup
technology).

There was some statistic published that 50% of the companies that had
a disk crash w/o backup went backrupt within a month after the crash
(i.e. typically this includes small-to-medium PC-based businesses
.. with things like computerized invoices & billing operations where
the information wasn't replicated anywhere else; loosing a month or
more of cash flow can be very debilitating).

home/personal use machines (using the same hardware) are less likely
to contain unique data that might have significant value. The
justified backup costs is not necessarily proportional to the cost of
the PC hardware ... but proportional to the value of the data that
could be lost.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

The first "internet" companies?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first "internet" companies?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 17:08:49 GMT

Chris Baird writes

A friend asked me yesterday who the "first" Internet company would
have been, in the context of a commercial organisation specifically
created to supply data over the modern Internet (and not primarily as
an access provider like UUNET), and I had to answer that to my best
immediate recollection that would have been Clari.Net from Brad
Templeton & co. (I'll consider UUCP networking as the practical origin
of the Net as we know it today.)

From another perspective, there were various companies &
consoritums that bid on NSFNET backbone (&/or were involved in
regional networks that connected to the backbone) ... a spin-off of
the Merrit, IBM, MCI, et. al that operated the NSFNET backbone was ANS
... Advanced Network & Services, Inc. It was initially non-profit
but then split into a profit side and a non-profit side.

MCI also formed a number of organizations that were directed at
providing internet related-services (one of them was the first
involved with Mosiac ... aka Netscape in something that would be
referred to today as electronic commerce server).

misc. organizations that had acceptable use policies

ans.policy
barrnet.policy
cerfnet.policy
cicnet.policy
cren.policy
farnet.policy
fricc.policy
jvnc.policy
los-nettos.policy
michnet.policy
nearnet.policy
northwestnet.policy
nsfnet.policy
nysernet.policy
oarnet.policy
onet.policy
prepnet.policy
uninet.policy

actual text of some of the policies

                                    ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY
                                             of
                              Advanced Network & Services, Inc.

              Preamble.

              Advanced Network & Services, Inc. ("ANS") is a
not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the advancement of education
and research in the interest of improving competitiveness and
productivity in the global economic environment.  Accordingly, ANS'
objectives are to help expand access toand interchange of information
technology resources among academic, government and industry users,
provide state-of-the-art high speed data networks and related
services, engage in related research and development work, and improve
the ways that information is created and used for education and
research purposes.  ANS aims to support the academic and research
communities, enhance education and research at all levels, and
contribute to improving the quality of education and research.

 NYSERNet, Inc.
ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

NYSERNet, Inc. recognizes as acceptable all forms of data
communications across its network, except where federal subsidy of
connections may require limitations.  In such cases use of the
network should adhere to the general principle of advancing
research and education through interexchange of information among
research and educational institutions in New York State.

In cases where data communications are addressed to recipients
outside of the NYSERNet regional network and are carried across
other regional networks or the Internet, NYSERNet users are advised
that acceptable use policies of those other networks apply and may,
in fact, limit use.

The President of NYSERNet, Inc. and his designees may at any time
make determinations that particular uses are or are not consistent
with the purposes of NYSERNet, Inc. which determinations will be
binding on NYSERNet users.

                        CERFnet - ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

Purpose of CERFnet

The purpose of the California Education and Research Federation is
to advance research and education in general by assisting in the
interchange of information among research and educational
institutions by means of high speed data communications and related
telecommunications techniques.

               NORTHWESTNET ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

NorthWestNet is a regional data communications network serving a
consortium of universities and research groups in the northwest-
ern part of the United States.  Its goals are summarized in the
Articles of Incorporation for the Northwest Academic Computing
Consortium, Inc.  All use of NorthWestNet facilities must be
consistent with the goals and purposes of NorthWestNet.  The
intent of this statement is to describe certain uses which are
consistent with the purposes of NorthWestNet, not to exhaustively
enumerate all such possible uses.

        Los Nettos Acceptable Use Guidelines
        ------------------------------------

A member may send any type of data over the Los Nettos network.

If data from any source leaves Los Nettos and enters another network
that data must follow the acceptable use rules of the entered network
(including member networks, regional, or backbone networks).  It is the
responsibility of the member where this traffic enters Los Nettos to
meet this requirement.

Any traffic which is disruptive from any source is prohibited.

NEARnet - ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

This statement represents a guide to the acceptable use of NEARnet for data
communications.  It is only intended to address the issue of NEARnet use.  In
those cases where data communications are carried across other regional
networks or the Internet, NEARnet users are advised that acceptable use
policies of those other networks apply and may limit use.

NEARnet member organizations are expected to inform their users of both the
NEARnet and the NSFnet acceptable use policies.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

The first "internet" companies?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first "internet" companies?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 19:03:12 GMT

"David E. Fox" writes

What OSes (if any) would have been better suited ca. 1970? Multics,
maybe. IBM 360 OS? One wonders.

note the internal (360-based) corporate network was larger than the
arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime around
mid-80s (change in large part because of the introduction of
workstation & pc based tcp/ip nodes).

misc. refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#39
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#113
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#74
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

The first "internet" companies?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first "internet" companies?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 19:11:27 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#39
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#113
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#74
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

oops ... that needs a ~lynn

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#39
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#113
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#74
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

The first "internet" companies?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first "internet" companies?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 23:23:32 GMT

Jim Thomas writes

But the original question had "" around "internet".  Does that allow
earlier RJE services to qualify?

the internal corporate network was primarily email, file transfer &
remote terminal simulation for online interactive users (on CP, VM,
CMS, etc) ... very little RJE & (JES2) NJE/NJI.

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#39
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#113
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#74
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

The internal corporate network exceeded 2000 hosts about the same time
the "internet" exceeded 1000 hosts ...  but the internet saw very
rapid growth in the '84 to '87 timeframe.

also from

http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/

1974 - 1981

The general public gets its first vague hint of how networked computers can
be used in daily life as the commercial version of the ARPANET goes
online. The ARPANET starts to move away from its military/research roots.

1974 - Bolt, Beranek & Newman opens Telenet, the first commercial version
of the ARPANET.

1976 - Queen Elizabeth goes online with the first royal email message.

1979 - Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two grad students at Duke University,
and Steve Bellovin at the University of North Carolina establish the first
USENET newsgroups. Users from all over the world join these discussion
groups to talk about the net, politics, religion and thousands of other
subjects.

1981 - ARPANET has 213 hosts. A new host is added approximately once
every 20 days.

1982 - 1987

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf are key members of a team which creates TCP/IP,
the common language of all Internet computers. For the first time the loose
collection of networks which made up the ARPANET is seen as an
"internet", and the Internet as we know it today is born. The mid-80s marks
a boom in the personal computer and super-minicomputer industries. The
combination of inexpensive desktop machines and powerful, network-ready
servers allows many companies to join the Internet for the first time.
Corporations begin to use the Internet to communicate with each other and
with their customers.

1982 - The term "Internet" is used for the first time.

1984 - William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his novel
"Neuromancer." The number of Internet hosts exceeds 1,000.

1986 - Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio creates the
first "Freenet" for the Society for Public Access Computing.

1987 - The number of Internet hosts exceeds 10,000.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

internal corporate network, misc.

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: internal corporate network, misc.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 01:16:48 GMT

Jim Thomas writes

But the original question had "" around "internet".  Does that allow
earlier RJE services to qualify?

the interactive online work, virtual machines, the internal network,
as well as GML (precursor to SGML, HTML, etc) and other stuff went on
at 545 tech. sq (mostly floors 2 & 4, same building as multics). Both
groups (corporate stuff & multics) had people that had worked on CTSS.

One of the applications that was developed on this platfrom was HONE
(for hands-on network envrionment) that provided online support mostly
to salesman and customer support ("field") people.

In 1977, the various US HONE sites were consolicated to Palo Alto onto
eight SMP processors (network id, NONE1, HONE2, ..., HONE8) and a
large disk farm. At that time of the consolidation, Palo Alto HONE
supported something like 40,000 people (total accounts, not logged on
simultaneously).  One of the major applications (besides email,
document preperation, word processing, GML document printing, etc) was
called configurator. Starting with the 370/125 (in the early '70s), it
was no longer possible to order a processor straight from the sales
manual w/o the salesman running the order thru the configurator so
that all feature codes were specified correctly (configurator also
could supply lot of boiler plate for customer contract).

There were other HONE sites in europe, canada, japan, etc (I did
initial hone installs in Europe and Japan in the early '70s). HONE in
Palo Alto was for US support.

The Palo ALto complex also supported a large terminal and network
front-end that included single system image and load balancing
(i.e. if processor complex went down, things were automatically
configured and login was routed to available processors, email and
network activity had a lot of transparency).

The Palo Alto HONE complex was then replicated in Dallas (hone20,
hone21, hone22, etc) to handle things like disastrous earthquake in
Cal. (sites operated concurrently but either could "fall-over" to the
other).  Later this was extended to three sites: Palo Alto, Dallas,
and Boulder.

misc. refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#47
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#3
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#23
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#4
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#16
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#23
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#38
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#149
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#150
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#1
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#8
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#75
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#82

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

The first "internet" companies?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first "internet" companies?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 15:19:59 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

note the internal (360-based) corporate network was larger than the
arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime around
mid-80s (change in large part because of the introduction of
workstation & pc based tcp/ip nodes).

series of (online) status RFCs from the 71-73 period listing arpanet hosts:

http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc252.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc266.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc267.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc287.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc293.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc319.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc326.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc330.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc332.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc376.txt
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc597.txt
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Request for review of "secure" storage scheme

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Request for review of "secure" storage scheme
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 16:24:37 GMT

Baruch Even writes:

A simpler method could be used in my opinion.

Most probably the user has a userid and password, and I assume so
for this scheme.

It should be noted that when you deal with credit card numbers
and any other sensitive infomation you should be carrying this
steps in SSL/TLS (i.e. encrypted by the browser), you should further
note that you can mark cookies to be sent ONLY over encrypted
channels and for a cookie that carries sensitive informations this
should be used.

note on SSL alert for IE:

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-10.html

some misc. discussion excerpted from financial standards retail
payments mailing list (merchant comfort certificates):

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 19:11:41 GMT

glass2 writes:

Oh, but that's where all of the fun is!  :)  I can't count the number of
times that I've been 'ghosted' by an ill behaved channel program on a VM
system.  And, who couldn't love those

DMKUSO361E LOGOFF/FORCE pending for user ########

I fixed that when I rewrote serialization in the early '70s to
eliminate all instances of hung/zombies. There was then an APAR to
DMKDSP (something PTF13xxx) that unfixed it and re-introduced
hung/zombies.

One of the things I did was to go thru all pending operations and
re-assign them to the "SYSTEM".

I then did further cleanup when I was fixing things for the disk
engineering lab and stuck in missing interrupt handler ... and I/O
recovery code (on 370 i/o doing short HDV/CLRIO loop .. which clear
both the channel UCW, controller and device, except for something like
contingent connection on error).

For malfunctioning controllers ... there was also convention that if
you hit every subchannel address on a controller in tight loop with
HDV/CLRIO ... the controller would IMPL (re-boot).

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#0
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#1
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#198

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

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 14:43:56 GMT

ab528@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Heinz W. Wiggeshoff) writes:

It's been 26 years since I played with EXCP, (MVT, 3330s with RPS),
but in my humble opinion the fun seemed to go out of that level of
work when VM and MVS (of necessity) grabbed the given CCWs and 'had
their way' with them.

CP/67 ran MVT (and other things) in virtual machines with paged
virtual memory. The I/O channels on the 360s ran in real (address)
mode. To simulate virtual machine I/O, a module in CP/67, CCWTRANS
created a copy of the virtual machine's CCWs, substituting real
addresses for the virtual address (and pinning the associated virtual
machine pages).

A typical disk EXCP (svc 0) CCW string would be taken by the OS
supervisor and prefixed with seek, set filemask, tic ... and then a
SIO would be issued pointing to the supervisor's seek.  The
(supervisor's) seek command would do the arm/head positioning, the set
filemask would limit the applicatin's program ability to reposition
the arm/head, and the tic would branch to the application program's
CCW string (as specified by the EXCP). The typical disk EXCP would
then be a seek, search, tic -8, read/write. The seek would be repeat
of the supervior's arm/head position command, the search would do a
compare on the track/cylinder for the record desired, the tic -8
would repeat the search command, and then there would be the data
transfer. The search command could either be a single or multitrack
search. It would a compare to see if the record currently under the
head met the application criteria, if not it would "branch" to the
following CCW (a tic which would branch back to the search command),
if the compare was succesful, the search would "branch" to the CCW
after the tic. If the search reached end-of-track (or end-of-cylinder)
w/o a succesful compare, the CCW program would terminate abnormally.

I have some recollection of being in POK 705 3rd shift in the early
'70s where Don Ludlow(?) was cobbling together/testing a version of
MVT & (CP/67's) CCWTRANS for AOS aka SVS (precursor to MVS) to run on
370s.

SVS was single virtual storage ... basically MVT laid out in a single
16mbyte virtual memory (with supervisor in the first 8mbyte of virtual
memory, andthe 2nd 8mbytes used for all application programs). MVS
.. multiple virtual storage ... reworked that so that there could be a
separate (16mbyte) address space for each application (although the
supervisor continued to be shared in common as the first 8mbyte of
each address apace).

performance issue with CKD disks (even w/RPS)

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#35

misc. other ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#18
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#4
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#7
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#20
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#49
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#23
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#11
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#12
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#28
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#7
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html@204
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#68

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What level of computer is needed for a computer to Love?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 16:27:46 GMT

jmaynard@thebrain.conmicro.cx (Jay Maynard) writes:

This may have been true of the original MVS, but by 3.8, the common area in
low core was a couple of meg at most (users' regions started somewhere
around X'180000', depending on lots of things).

The user's region ran from there upwards for 8 to 10 MB, depending on lots
more things (most notable, what got stuck in LPA). Tweaking the size of that
private region got to be a full-time job for shops with big CICS regions...

BTW, one thing we've found in playing with MVT 21.8 on Hercules is that,
while MVT itself runs fine in systems with less than 16 MB of real storage
(or VM-supplied virtual storage, I suspect; IEAIPL00 loops if 16 MB is
present), TSO breaks badly if the system has more than 8 MB real. I don't
think anyone's gone hunting that particular bug yet.

my other favorite ... was the guys doing the page replacement
algorithm for SVS/MVS insisted that they should select non-changed
pages before changed pages (regardless of how much you attempted to
object to the idea) ... their thot process was that not having to
write out a page was better performance optimization.

However, this really hosed the implicit LRU-nature of the overall page
replacement concept. It wasn't until way into MVS releases that they
finally realized that (high-use) LPA (shared, R/O, program pages
commonly used by all applications) were being selected for replacement
before private, modified, application-specific (changed) data pages.

"Common" was a big problem and kept getting bigger and bigger (CICS,
JES, etc). cross-memory services (special multi-address space hardware
instructions, i think initially seen on 3033s) was start that allowed
subsystems (like JES) to access data in application memory locations
w/o having to actually reside in the same address space.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 16:37:31 GMT

Will Jennings writes:

OK, a brief history of Interdata, etc.;
Interdata was founded in about 1967 in Oceanport, NJ, and the majority
of the funding was put up by the local jockey club because they wanted

we started with interdata/3 in late '68 or early '69 to implement a
replacement for the 360 2702 control unit ... wrote software for the
interdata/3 and built a channel attached board ... to connect the
interdata/3 to the 360 channel (somewhere this is documented as
originating the 360 "plugged compatible manufactures" (PCM) control
unit business.

Later this was enhanced to be serveral Interdata/3s in the same box
with a Interdata/4 (effectively interdata/3s dedicated to line-scanner
functions and the overall control moved to the interdata/4).

Within the past five years or so ... I had a chance to visit a machine
room where there was a large perkin-elmer box still being used in this
mode.

Also had a chance to talk to somebody that had been installing
Perkin-Elmer boxes at some NASA installation in the early '80 ... and
his comment was that the channel attachment board was still wire-wrap
and could very well have been the same design/implementation that we
had done in the '60s.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000 03:56:46 GMT

other misc. references to early interdata

http://www.si.edu/resource/tours/comphist/vc1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19970503010621/http://www.si.edu/resource/tours/comphist/vc1.html
http://www.rwic.und.edu/~schueler/academics/AtSc370/370-l3.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20000823134627/http://www.rwic.und.edu/~schueler/academics/AtSc370/370-l3.htm
http://www.komkon.org/fms/comp/misc/List.txt
http://www.ccur.com/corporate/history.html

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 21:45:15 GMT

"Simon Bowring" <sbowring+nospam@mpc-data.co.uk> writes:

1.  A very high level of fault tolerance and very low down-time.

close to 10 years ago i remember something about mainframe memory have
64/80 ecc (detect 16 bit errors and correct 15 bit errors) and there
was work looking at reed-solomon error correcting codes. lot of
current PC memory has fake parity ... although on some machines you
can get 8/10 ecc (detect 2 bit errors and correct single bit errors).

in the long distant past there was some documentation on distinction
between calling something 195/370 (even if it wasn't quite all of 370)
vis-a-vis 195/360 ... the distinction was the "370" had a lot more
instruction retry for soft errors ... supposedly going from something
like a couple hrs mean time between soft error failure (given the
total number of components in a large 195 & the failure rate per
component) to weeks or months mean time between soft error failure.

there are also service related issues ... like discussed in mainframe
thread

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#137

where every error on every machine is logged and evaluated. The
reference in the thread was a particular scenerio involving huge
concern about there being 15 total errors (of a particularly kind)
over a 12 month period across several thousand installed machines
... not per machine over 12 month period .. but 15 total aggregate
errors for all machines in 12 month period (many non-mainframe don't
even bother to collect every error that has occured on every machine
built).

misc. references to prior "mainframe" threads here in
alt.folklore.computers over the past 5-6 years:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#mainframe

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

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 18:17:57 GMT

Steve O'Hara-Smith writes:

Ah, that sounds good. It is a mainframe if it needs a specially built
room all to itself.

when I was in school we had a 709 (something like serial number 1, 2,
or 3, pretty sure <5) ... lots & lots of tubes ... and a room
that had a 20ton rated air conditioner.

we tried to interest ibm in it for a museum ... but finally sold it
for scrap. guy that bought it, installed it in a barn and placed
larger blower fans at the barn doors ... and would operate it when it
when outside temp. was cool enuf.

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

Domainatrix - the final word

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Domainatrix - the final word
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 22:03:32 GMT

"David Mitchell" writes:

Amen to that,

There are a number of reasons why OS'es are generally not written in
assembler any more:
1) It's fcking difficult.  Difficult to do, and much harder to debug.
2) The OS is rarely the bottleneck (Windoze excluded ;-).
3) Use of a HLL allows you to use techniques which most assembly language
programmers would balk at because of the difficulty of coding them, and in
general most of the performance improvement in any given algorithm is
achieved through the use of a better algorithm, rather than code
optimisation.
4) As has already been pointed out, most good compilers are as good as a
competent (sometimes excellent) assembly language programmer.

while i've claimed that one of the major internet risk problems has
been due to buffer overruns the majority of which are directly or
indirectly due to the C programming paradigm of implicit string
lengths ... probably the single largest cause of assembler bugs that
I've had to deal with have been some sort of register mis-use
... i.e. either the equivalent of uninitialized variable problem
(especially for address registers) or multiple code threads that join
... and not all code threads consistently leaving expected values in
registers ... automating register management is a definite quality
improvement.

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

Domainatrix - the final word

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Domainatrix - the final word
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 22:17:24 GMT

"Al Grant" writes:

IBM's mainframe operating system VM/CMS was
written in assembler and even comes with source.
Some of it is rather elegant (have a look at the

for an extremely early demo of REX(X) capability I wanted to
re-implement the VM/CMS kernel debug tool (something like 60k bytes of
370 assembler ... maybe 15k-20k instructions) in REX(X). At the time,
the VM/CP kernel was around 250+ assembler programs and
approx. aggregate total of 275k assembler instructions.

The goal of the debug re-implementation was to do it in under 6weeks
of my time and have it run 10 faster and have 5-10 more function.  In
approximately 4weeks of my time I had a REX(X) re-implementation of
the VM/CMS kernel debug tool that had 2 the function and ran 10 faster
than the assembler version. The next couple months, I spent a day or
two off & on writting pattern analysis (in REXX) for VM/CP kernel
storage abend dumps (i.e. analysing & looking for patterns of
kernel failures). These kernel failure pattern analysis applications
... didn't run 10 faster than the original tool ... since they
provided significantly more function.

Part of the pattern analysis was an additional set of PLI programs
that analyzed VM kernel assembler listings for program code flow
looking for possible register assignment problems as well as things
like dead code.

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

Domainatrix - the final word

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Domainatrix - the final word
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 03:12:14 GMT

jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan Stone) writes:

CMS was originally capable of running on bare 360s, though admittedly
later in life it became dependent on "assist" calls into VM/370.  (I'm
sure someone can fill in details on when, though it probably goes back
to the CP/40 at Cambridge(?) or CP/67.)

when i was undergraduate ... i did lot of CP/67 pathlength for running
virtual OS MFT & MVT ... a reference to some of the work:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#93

That work had little or no effect on CMS thruput. For CMS I did a hack
on making the simulated CMS virtual disk I/O "synchronous" rather than
"asynchronous" ... discussed at:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#95

that showed up in CP/67-CMS release 3.1 ... but done as "diagnose" I/O
for reasons discussed in the above reference. CMS still had a "switch"
and would test for running on a real machine or a "virtual" machine
... and based on the switch would use diagnose I/O or SIO. In the
migration of CMS for VM/370 release ... the ability to execute real
disk SIO was removed (for non-virtual/real machine operation).

--
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Any Series/1 fans?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Any Series/1 fans?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 02:49:24 GMT

"George R. Gonzalez" writes:

Any Series/1 fans?

The only comment I've read about them was on the Internet somewhere,
where somebody complained about the user-hostile OS.

misc. s/1 discussions

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#63
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#66
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#69
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#79
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#71
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#29
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#66
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#87

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 15:02:26 GMT

optcamel@ix.netcom.com (Howard and Kelly Lute) writes:

Date Check...??? 1976?! Amdahl anything?

Amdahl had success selling in the university & MTS (michigan terminal
system) market.

In spring of '76 there was a great deal of consternation created when
one of the large financial institutions in Hartford decided to replace
one its many existing mainframes with an Amdahl (i believe it was
consisered to be the first incursion at a "true-blue" customer). I
don't think it was even a technical decision ... there was something
going around about the customer being truely miffed by something the
local branch manager had said or done.

I got involved when somebody dreamed up the idea that the resource
manager (first charged for "kernel" add-on piece of software, up until
then there were charges for application software like compilers ... but
the resource manager was the first kernel software to have a price-tag
... at $999/month license)) might not run as well on an Amdahl
machine.

Since the resource manager replaced existing kernel code with truely
dynamic adaptive stuff ... it was hard to make the case that it faired
better or worse on any hardware.

An example was the unmodified, base kernel had a table of valid
processor identifiers that was used at boot time to adjust various
operating system parameters. The resource manager replaced the table
with some code that timed sequences of instructions ... and operated
based on the observed results.

AMH=AMDAHL        70-10           AMDAHL CORP. STARTS BUSINESS
AMH V/6           75-04?75-06 02  FIRST AMDAHL MACHINE, FIRST  PCM CPU
AMH V6-2          76-10 77-09 11  (1.05-1.15)V6 WITH 32K BUFFER
IBM 3033          77-03 78-03 12  VERY LARGE S/370+EF INSTRUCTIONS
AMH V7            77-03 78-09 18  AMDAHL RESP. TO 3033 (1.5-1.7) V6

... PCM --  plug compatible machine

I remember a seminar that Gene gave at MIT circa '73 or so. He was
roundly bashed by a lot of the audience for where he was getting a lot
of his funding & manufacturing.

misc. ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#188
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#190
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#191

There was another down=s9de to the dynamic nature ... that it could
stick around for years and years as new machines were being introduced
(automagically doing all its dynamic adaptive stuff). misc. ref.

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#14

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 15:37:27 GMT

kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) writes:

So now my question is: how many users could a 1970s mainframe
reasonably support with TSO?  More than 200?  How about a 1980s
mainframe?

in the case of something like CICS & IMS (light-weight sub-monitor) it
was pssible to have something like 30,000-50,000 connected terminal
users in the early '80s. This put strains on other parts of the
system, like if system ever crashed & rebooted (say a major power
outage). The SNA session setup code for terminal connection was a
large monster. Having 30,000 people/terminals trying to connect
simultaneously would drive SNA session setup into page thrashing on
most machines. I think at the 20,000 terminal number the (simultaneou
reconnect) elapsed time was out around 90 minutes (for really large
machines, with really large real memories ... at least for mid '80s).

this turned out to a problem for IMS hot-standby since even tho the
dbms was replicated in case of failure & was instantly took-over,
terminal session re-establishment would take (relatively) forever in
large configurations.

misc. refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#35a
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#40
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#71

part of the following refs was targeted at maintain session state
replication that was critical for infrastructures like ims hot-standby

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#70

in the case of VM/CMS, CMS users tend to be pretty heavy weight since
they are both an address space & thread (as well as the type of work
performed).

there is the 68/83 comparision that I've posted here several times,
 from:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#31

which basically showed that between 68 & 83 the processer and memory
capacity increased by factor of 50-60 times ... but the number of
concurrent CMS users typically only increased by a factor of four
times. the basic conclusion was that typical disk farm thruput between
68 & 83 only increased by a factor of four ... which was the
correlation factor with the number of concurrent users. It was
necessary to start changing disk i/o paradigms in order compensate for
the relatively different rates of change in the different
technologies.

other large complex vm/cms configurations:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#30
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#31

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 17:51:24 GMT

cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk (Chris Hedley) writes:

Hmm, I still wonder why Philips went from Vista to Profs for their
email/diary/noticeboard system... Vista was a nice low-load package
that ran under MVS, Profs was a high-load package that needed a
separate VM for every user; IMHO Vista was also the better system,
being much more tightly integrated, easier to use and much, much
better with system resources.

Chris.

the core of PROFS was VMSG ... with a lot of stuff ... like the PFKEY
converntion and misc. other stuff that didn't perform very well
... wrapped around it).

the source code that the PROFS group used for email was VMSG version
0.9 (effectively a test version before general release ... although in
this case general release was internal corporate ... not for
"customers" ... but since the internal network at the time was larger
than the arpanet/internet ... still a reasonably large population
... and it was nearly all VM/CMS).

there was actually a dispute with the PROFS group where they picked up
the assembler source code ... claiming it wasn't VMSG. However, it
turned out that the primary author of VMSG had placed his initials in
an administrative field on every piece of email handled. His initials
could be found in every email originated by VMSG and every email
originated by PROFS (including those in customer shops anywhere in the
world). My small contribution to VMSG was a little of the CC & mailing
list code; at one point I kept a small nickname file with 25,000 or so
names ... before we did the corporate telephone book stuff (there was
an incident where i accidently invoked the whole nickname file).

Another thing that was done was the internal telephone book support.
There had been a project with dedicated data processing center and
40-50 people that would provide an "internal telephone book"
client/server support function (annual budget of something like
$5m/annum). A couple of us designed an infrastructure that had a goal
of being able to respond to a telephone book lookup in .25 secs
elapsed (with a employee population of several hundred thousand)
... and that it would take less than 1/2 time person for keeping the
data current ... and no dedicated data processing services.

This function was also made available in PROFS (PROFS group wrappered
PROFS around several feature/functions ... not just VMSG/email).

with regard to assembler code & VM/CMS thread over in comp.arch
... VMSG was all 360 assembler while the phone book stuff was mostly
PLS.

random refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#40
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#41
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#42

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 19:41:13 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

part of the following refs was targeted at maintain session state
replication that was critical for infrastructures like ims hot-standby

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#70

in the above reference with 60,000 "logged" in terminals and 2700
terminal messages per second (early '80s actual mainframe
configurations) ... there was second order information gathered from
real-live environment to feed into the HONE 3705 configurator ...
effectively half the terminal 2700 msgs/sec were input that avg. about
125 bytes per message and half the terminal 2700 msgs/sec were output
that avg. about 500 bytes per message.

configurations today would possibly be expected to handle thruput
well over an order of magnitude larger.

misc. HONE configurator ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#30

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 21:11:23 GMT

jsaum@world.std.com (Jim Saum) writes:

had just started delivering CPUs. At that point, there had already
been a plug-compatible manufacturer (PCM) market for mainframe
peripherals (mainly tape and disk drives) for some years, but not for
CPUs. The PCM market for mainframe CPUs, however, was pioneered by
Amdahl Corp.

someplace there is old article crediting the origins of the 360 PCM
controller market with a project I had worked on as an undergraduate
to replace a 2702 telecommunications with an interdata/3 and a
wire-wrap channel attach board (that then grew into a box with an
interdata/4 with multiple interdata/3s). tape & disk PCMs came later
(lots of guys from san jose plant site went off and started them,
similar to gene doing CPU PCM).

there has also been claims that a lot of the characteristics of 3705s,
NCP, and VTAM came about because of the appearance of that box and
market.

random refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#30
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#37
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#12
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#63
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#36
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#37

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 21:46:31 GMT

"GerardS" writes:

Yes, this is true.  When VM  (CP/67) first came out, some (if not most)
operating systems couldn't handle 16 Meg of "real" memory, but
of course, under CP, you just gave the guest   16Meg - 4K.

Gerard S.

a slightly different problem was somebody had originally modified the
VM/370 boot image setup routine to use MVCL (aka move character long)
with length of 16mbytes (as part of the conversion from CP/67 to
VM/370). The MVCL insturction could clear memory and give back a
residual length equal to 16mbyte minus actual memory (& the starting
address of the field).

multiple byte 360 instructions and the majority of the 370
instructions were defined as testing the starting and ending address
boundaries and not executing or nullifying the instruction if any of
the address portions violated something (memory not available,
protected, page fault, etc ... also instruction was interruptable for
i/o and other types of interrupts ... storing the updated values for the
portion of the operation not yet performance).

MVCL (& CLCL, aka compare logical character long) 370 instuction
was defined to incrementally perform the operation and update address
pointers and residual length of unexecuted portion. MVCL also allowed
definition of padding character if target length was longer than
origin length.

In any case, 370/125 (and 370/115) as originally shipped to customers
mis-implemented the MVCL (& CLCL) instructions ... prechecking the
ending address (start+length) and not executing the instruction at all
if there was a problem (like exceeding available real storage). This
resulted in a failure of the boot image setup routine (i.e. VM/370
could be booted on a 125 machine if the boot image had been built on a
non-125 machine ... it just wasn't possible to build on a kernel on a
370/125 ...  until they shipped a hardware fix for the bug).

Possibly the largest used application of 16mbyte virtual address space
under CP/67 was numerous APL applications (after cambridge had ported
APL/360 to CMS/APL). All APL/360 installations that I was aware of (at
the time) limited APL workspaces to at most 64kbytes ... and commonly
32kbytes.

With CMS/APL there was something of an explosion in financial modeling
applications, performance modeling applications, configuration
modeling applications, etc (and to some extent gave rise to some of
the origins of data processing capacity planning).

This gave rise to large use of CMS/APL by corporate financial planning
people, product planning people, product forcasting people and
competitive analysis people (filling at least the niche served by a
lot of spreadsheet applications that are seen today).

It also formed the basis for the majority of the applications
delivered to field/customer support people on HONE.

misc ref:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#30

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 22:09:48 GMT

jsaum@world.std.com (Jim Saum) writes:

Which makes me wonder. I know that by the mid-70's IBM developers were
using VM/370 (introduced in 1972) a lot for testing their target OS's,
but CP/67 was available well before that, so why didn't these 16MB
problems get fixed earlier? Because CP/67 was an unofficial (as
opposed to TSS), below-the-radar thing with all the hard feelings and
politics that contrast engendered, or perhaps because the developer
sites didn't have mod 67's to run it?

while CP/67 was used extensively for product development (program
edit, compile, etc) and simple regression testing of the operating
system; very few people thot of using it for memory-size regression
testing (& they didn't really believe their target customers would be
doing a lot of production work under CP/67). Regression testing that
was done was with typically sized (virtual) memory configurations
expected at customer locations (not running CP).

The VM/370 work for ECPS and vs/1 handshaking (basically originally
targetted for 370/138 & 370/148 market place; individual installations
had done earlier "CP sensitivity" work on MVT & VS/1, but it wasn't
being shipped in products) was one of the first major efforts for
production operation of operating systems under CP (and could also be
considered an precursor to existing mainframe LPAR support).

random refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#28
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#35
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#26
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#74
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#8
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#63
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#86
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#50
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#52
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#61
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#62

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 02:47:00 GMT

kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) writes:

In article <uaegan5t5.fsf@mail.adcomsys.net>,
Anne & Lynn Wheeler  wrote:
>there has also been claims that a lot of the characteristics of 3705s,
>NCP, and VTAM came about because of the appearance of that box and
>market.

What characteristics are these?  I read your references (always good
reading) but found no clues.

there was/is a very complex division of function between pu4 (aka ncp)
and pu5 (aka vtam) with complex interface protocol ... significantly
increasing the investment to create a 37xx/pu4/ncp PCM (especially
compared to the interdata-based 270x PCM we created when I was
undergraduate).

the (referenced) implementation on S/1 had a lot more added value
(than straight-forward 37xx PCM) since it did both pu4/ncp & pu5/vtam
and used cross-domain protocol to talk to the mainframe (providing
significant availability and performance improvements)

misc. ref

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#70

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 03:37:51 GMT

kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) writes:

I don't think it requires a heck of a lot of OS support to write a
CICS-style TP monitor; you just need to be able to get event
notifications for I/O, right?

reference earlier post regarding 30,000-60,000 CICS users in early to
mid 80s ... well under 100mip processing power ... doing 1000+
transactions per second. as mentioned there was problem with vtam
session establishment if system cycled and all users attempted to
re-establish their sessions concurrently (i.e. vtam session
establishment page thrashing ... 20,000 simultaneous connection
requests degrading to 90 minutes elapsed time ... it wasn't a problem
with support 30,000-60,000 concurrent sessions ... it was a problem
trying to perform 20,000+ simultaneous session establishments).

this is somewhat analogous (but different) to http web server problems
in the mid-90s ...  most TCP implementations had linear finwait lists
(i.e. prior to http ... telnet, ftp, etc. had long running sessions
... even some larger configurations with 5,000 concurrent sessions
... number of session terminations in the finwait interval was very
small ... so number of items on the finwait list was trivial). tcp has
minimum 7 packet exchange ... with dangling finwaits for session
termination. typical http might add a couple more packets to a tcp
session but web servers doing 50-100 http hits per second sometimes
built finwait list with a couple thousand entries and 98% of the
available cpu sometimes were lost to running finwait list.

does anybody remember when netscape added ftp20.netscape.com, what it
was, and why (compared to ftp1.netscape.com thru ftp?.netscape.com)?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

Any Series/1 fans?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Any Series/1 fans?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 06:19:02 GMT

bbreynolds@aol.comskipthis (Bruce B. Reynolds) writes:

My own systems are linked together multiple connections, one of which is the
Local Communications Controller (LCC) an early implementation of the token-
passing local area network (and similar to the loop controllers used in the IBM

my wife (& 3 others, assigned to ibm) has patent on LCC ... Loop
Configured Data Transmission System ... US4195351

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com
 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/

WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 20:12:57 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:
someplace there is old article crediting the origins of the 360 PCM
controller market with a project I had worked on as an undergraduate
to replace a 2702 telecommunications with an interdata/3 and a
wire-wrap channel attach board (that then grew into a box with an
interdata/4 with multiple interdata/3s). tape & disk PCMs came later
(lots of guys from san jose plant site went off and started them,
similar to gene doing CPU PCM).

there has also been claims that a lot of the characteristics of 3705s,
NCP, and VTAM came about because of the appearance of that box and
market.

random refs:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#30
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#37
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#12
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#63
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#36
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#37

misc. more references on sna, pcm, CICS, some from previous threads
& some repeats

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#15     unit record &amp; other controllers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#16     unit record &amp; other controllers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#52     Measuring Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#54     How Do the Old Mainframes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#14     characters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#30     interdata and perkin/elmer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#37     interdata &amp; perkin/elmer machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#39     Mainframes &amp; Unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#9      cics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#15     OSes commerical, history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#33     cics ... from posting from another list
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#34     cics ... from posting from another list
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#49     Edsger Dijkstra: the blackest week of his professional life
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#106    IBM Mainframe Model Numbers--then and now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#12     Old Computers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#63     System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#64     Old naked woman ASCII art
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#66     System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67     System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#189    Internet Credit Card Security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#195    Anti trust suits--IBMs' compared to Microsoft
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#234    Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#16   Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#50   APPN vs TCP/IP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#90   Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#0   "Mainframe" Usage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#36  Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#37  Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.

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

Java and Multos

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Java and Multos
Newsgroups: alt.technology.smartcards
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 15:38:07 GMT

the issue of java doing binding time authentic