List of Archived Posts

2001 Newsgroup Postings (10/08 - 10/31)

Disappointed

Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?

Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?

SUNW at $8 good buy?

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

E-commerce security????

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

Security Classifications? (Where to Find Info)

Disappointed

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

Web of Trust

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer

Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

mainframe question

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

mainframe question

mainframe question

Processor Modes

Processor Modes

History

mainframe question

is this correct ? OS/360 became MVS and MVS >> OS/390

is this correct ? OS/360 became MVS and MVS >> OS/390

MVS History (all parts)

mainframe question

is this correct ? OS/360 became MVS and MVS >> OS/390

QTAM (was: MVS History)

QTAM (was: MVS History)

Processor Modes

MVS History (all parts)

five-nines

redhat 7.2 & gnome/nautilus

Virus propagation risks

What makes a mainframe?

Security standards for banks and other institution

Security standards for banks and other institution

mainframe question

mainframe question

mainframe question

hammer

mainframe question

hammer

Windows XP on quad DPS 8/70M?

RSA SecurID: public key cryptography?

MVS History (all parts)

ASR33/35 Controls

MVS History (all parts)

Disappointed

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disappointed
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 18:43:49 GMT

also, check the

 [l/m 10/1/2001] news group dynamics comp.parallel (8/28) FAQ

posted today to comp.parallel & comp.sys.super newsgroup in the section
that starts:

HOMEWORK: (academic students, undergrad, grads, post-grads)
-----------------------------------------------------------

If you are a student, in particular US/Canadian, or have an instructor,
homework places a quandary on the knowledgeable people in this group.
Students are supposed to do exercises, not have the readers of this group
do exercises for them.  Where the line between a homework query ends and
a serious research query begins is sometimes hard to define.

Point the following out to your instructor (this is one of the reasons
why you should read and be aware of news.announce.newusers (or de.newusers
or similar groups))

The best canned answer from another FAQ is:

>1A.  What about "I've got a school assignment...."
>
>Recently, I've been made aware of a USENET policy about posting news
>articles requsting info for a school assignment.  Michael Chui at Indiana
>University sent me the following info, which I have included
>verbatum and will try to stick to (since I agree with it)
>
>--------begin included text--------
>        From Michael Chui mchui@cs.indiana.edu
>

reference the rest yourself

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

Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?
Newsgroups: comp.security.unix
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 20:18:07 GMT

Barry Margolin writes:

And also don't forget about the old conflict between security and ease of
use.  While it's possible to make a system more secure without
significantly impacting its ease of use, in many cases it can be pretty
difficult.  Much of the explanation for all the security problems in OE can
be traced to giving higher priority to ease of use than security: it
executes attachments automatically for the benefit of users who wouldn't
know how to do this manually (curiously, though, AOL, which is probably
used by the most naive users, still requires users to click on the
"Attachment" button and save the attachment to disk and open it up with a
separate program).

sometimes you can change the paradigm so that ease of use goes way up,
the security goes way up, and simplicity goes way up (KISS)

misc. ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#cryptofree

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

Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Why is UNIX semi-immune to viral infection?
Newsgroups: comp.security.unix
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 22:39:56 GMT

Barry Margolin writes:

404 Not Found.  There's an aadsm6.htm, but no aadsm7.htm.

oops, sorry about that ... fixed now.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#cryptofree

the reference is related to discussion about security proportional to
risk (thread from comp.security.misc)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61

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

SUNW at $8 good buy?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: SUNW at $8 good buy?
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,misc.invest.stocks
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2001 12:12:27 GMT

peter@abbnm.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

I didn't mean "dumb" as a derogatory term. I think I've seen you on the net
long enough that you might remember the "dumb terminal" ads Lear Seigler
used to run (20 years ago) advertising the ADM3A. Sometimes it's smart to be
dumb. :->

sometimes KISS works also ...

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 17:12:18 GMT

"Axl" writes:

First, I want to apologise if this question is totally out of line for
this newsgroup.  I am writing (attempting) a paper comparing and
contrasting mainframes and PC's.  High level stuff - a couple of
pages.  But, I have grown up in the PC world and have no clue about
mainframes.  There seems to be little information about them on the
Internet, and absolutely nothing at the bookstore.  If one of you kind
gurus could just give me some comparison bullet points to research, I
would be eternally grateful.

mainframe has taken on a number of attributes; one or more centralized
resources "shared" by a number of parties ... also "batch" versus
"interactive".

A lot of mainframe work consists of "batch", non-interactive oriented
activity ... which the majority of industry, business, economy,
people, etc are dependent upon. For instance, much of the payroll in
the united states is a batch activity that happens on a mainframe at a
predictable time & place .... isolated from the vagaries of actually
needing some specific person to have sat down at some keyboard and
performed some operation.

in fact, many people that are very orientated towards "interactive"
computing would be very upset if a lot of the day-in, day-out things
that they take for granted were to be moved out of an industrial
strength envrionment to some interactive-oriented platform that was
subject to the vagaries of human interaction.

misc reference to 100% uptime for 6+ years (from a couple years ago)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#71

i.e. people errors have become a significant percent of failure modes
for industrial-strength applications that much of the economy id based
on (and there is strong correlary that platforms that have evolved
from desktop &/or interactive oriented platforms have a much toughter
time adopted to the requirements of industrial strength computing
... aka, frequently not having implicit design points that require
some sort of human action results in poorer dependability).

random mainframe ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindx2.html#mainframe
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#mainframe

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 13:18:12 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

The kludgy way of doing thing that were trivial for TSS.  Another OS would simply
be another task running under TSS.  No partitions needed.  Those were a primitive
methos desined for the old OS/360.

Gene Pallat

tss/360 paid for it ... at point when there were 30+ users on 360/67
with 30 users doing fortran edit/compiles/execute with subsecond
response under cp/67 (& CMS), tss/360 on the same hardware with four
users doing the same exact fortran/compiles/execute operations had 4-6
second response.

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#0 360/67, was Re: IBM's Project F/S ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#23 MTS & LLMPS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#25 MTS & LLMPS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#0 Multitasking question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#1 Multitasking question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#2 Schedulers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#12 360 "OS" & "TSS" assemblers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#20 CP/67 & OS MFT14
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#46 Rethinking Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#53 How Do the Old Mainframes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#54 How Do the Old Mainframes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#1 pathlengths
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#26 System/360 Model 30
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#12 OSes commerical, history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#22 Pre S/360 IBM Operating Systems?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#28 IA64 Self Virtualizable?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#10 OS with no distinction between RAM a
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#11 S/360 operating systems geneaology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#12 S/360 operating systems geneaology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#13 S/360 operating systems geneaology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#17 S/360 operating systems geneaology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#21 Reviving the OS/360 thread (Questions about OS/360)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#47 Multics and the PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#2 IBM S/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#37 why is there an "@" key?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#39 Internet and/or ARPANET?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#41 A word processor from 1960
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#64 Old naked woman ASCII art
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#76 Mainframes at Universities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#93 MVS vs HASP vs JES (was 2821)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#119 Computer, supercomputers & related
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#126 Dispute about Internet's origins
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#127 Dispute about Internet's origins
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#130 early hardware
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#142 OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#174 S/360 history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#209 Core (word usage) was anti-equipment etc.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#237 I can't believe this newsgroup still exists.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#1 Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64 distributed locking patents
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#81 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#91 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#92 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#54 Multics dual-page-size scheme
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#61 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#8 IBM Linux
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#10 IBM 1460
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#30 internal corporate network, misc.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#50 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#79 Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#30 Secure Operating Systems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#36 Assembly language formatting on IBM systems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#50 Navy orders supercomputer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#0 What good and old text formatter are there ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#16 First OS with 'User' concept?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#20 Is Al Gore The Father of the Internet?^
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#18 OT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#30 OT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#52 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC?  designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#53 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#56 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#63 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#78 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#0 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#2 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#3 virtualizable 360, was TSS ancient history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#4 virtualizable 360, was TSS ancient history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#6 virtualizable 360, was TSS ancient history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#12 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#26 Disk caching and file systems.  Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#18 Linux IA-64 interrupts [was Re: Itanium benchmarks ...]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#35 John Mashey's greatest hits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#54 VM & VSE news
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#77 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#19 SIMTICS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#69 line length (was Re: Babble from "JD" <dyson@jdyson.com>)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#2 Mysterious Prefixes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#20 VM-CMS emulator
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#22 Early AIX including AIX/370
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#23 MERT Operating System & Microkernels
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#26 Price of core memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984??
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#47 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercomputers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#48 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercomputers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#22 Golden Era of Compilers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#24 XML: No More CICS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#29 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's  supercomputers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#33 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#35 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#45 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#9 VM: checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#10 VM: checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#12 checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#17 IBM 9020 FAA/ATC Systems from 1960's
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#26 TECO Critique
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#34 D
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#46 Whom Do Programmers Admire Now???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#59 Blinkenlights
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#76 Other oddball IBM System 360's ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#2 Most complex instructions (was Re: IBM 9020 FAA/ATC Systems from 1960's)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#3 Most complex instructions (was Re: IBM 9020 FAA/ATC Systems from 1960's)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#13 GETMAIN R/RU (was: An IEABRC Adventure)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#30 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#34 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#37 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#38 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#39 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#23 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#10 HP-UX will not be ported to Alpha (no surprise)exit
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#31 Is anybody out there still writting BAL 370.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#37 Is anybody out there still writting BAL 370.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#51 Is anybody out there still writting BAL 370.

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 14:25:34 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

tss/360 paid for it ... at point when there were 30+ users on 360/67
with 30 users doing fortran edit/compiles/execute with subsecond
response under cp/67 (& CMS), tss/360 on the same hardware with four
users doing the same exact fortran/compiles/execute operations had 4-6
second response.

then the trick was to get system optimization up so that it CP/67-CMS
would support 75-80 users, still with subsecound response while the
real storage stayed at 768kbytes i.e. 30-35 user CP/67 workload and 4
user TSS/360 workload cited was on 768kbyte 360/67 ... further
optimization was able to hit 75 users in 768kbyte real storage while
still keeping subsecond response ... and expanding workload type to
include some memory hungry apps like cms/apl (apl/360 ported to CMS
... but instead of typical 32kbyte workspaces ... 1mbyte workspaces or
larger). With 75-80 users on 768kbyte real storage ... there was
actually only 104 4k "pages" left after fixed kernel and other
requirements (out of the 768/4 = 198 total).

Part of the additional optimization showed up in the comparison of
genoble science center changes for "working set dispatcher" to CP/67
which got almost the same exact performance on the same workload for
35 users on a 1mbyte (256 4k page, 155 4k pages after fixed storage
requirements) 360/67 as cambridge machine did (with my dispatcher and
memory management, & lots of other stuff) for cp/67 on 768kbyte
360/67 with 75 users (104 4k pages after fixed storage requirements
vis-a-vis grenoble 155 4k pages after fixed storage requirements)

misc. ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#4 360/67, was Re: IBM's Project F/S ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#7 HELP: Algorithm for Working Sets (Virtual Memory)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#1 Multitasking question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#18 Old Computers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#10 Memory management - Page replacement
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#26 TECO Critique

random ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 19:23:04 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

It appears that something on that copy of TSS was royally screwed up.
At NASA, we could run 70+ users with FAST response.  The dynamic
scheduler algorithm may have been badly set up.  Or ..... They may
have wtitten very bad code.  The dynamic scheduler was interesting in
that it rewarded good programming practice and punished bad users.

I/O had fast allocation.  All the task dis was issue an I/O call and
had to wait for the interrupt while others would run.  If you thrashed
with page exceptions, you got dumped to the bottom of the queue.
Compute bound jobs might get bypassed 10 to 20 times, but when they
got dispatched, they would run 10 to 20 times as long.

The average FORTRAN programmer would average 200 page exceptions per
second.  With a little effort it would drop down to about 100.
Knowing about hoe TSS worked internally, I would average between 17 to
20 page exceptions per second.

In short, sloppy coding practice was punished.  Good efficient
techniques were rewarded.  We typically ran 60 to 80 interactive tasks
plus lots of concurrent background tasks.  On the 1110 with EXEC 8,
the UNIVAC people thought is was doing well with 8 to 10 tasks running
concurrently.

issue was at what release are you talking, what year, and what
machine?  However, working on os/360 internals, cp/67 internals, and
tss/360 internals duing my undergraduate years in the 60s ... I made a
lot more performance improvements in os/360 and cp/67 than i did on
tss/360.

there was a lot of performance optimization done on tss (for tss/370)
later in the '70s but in the '60s it was really abysmal
over-all. furthermore, tss/360 was (by comparison) a real-storage
hog. there was some benchmark that tss/360 on a 2mbyte, dual processer
360/67 had almost four times the thruput as a 1mbyte, single processor
360/67 (running the same workload mix) i.e. fixed storage requirements
for basic tss/360 was nearing 768kbytes ... in theory, the two
processor configuration should have had slightly less than twice the
single processor configuration (all other things being equal
... basically penalty of SMP protocols in the multiprocessor machine).
Getting nearly four times the thruput was a characteristic that
tss/360 was severely real storage constrained even in a single
processor, 1mbyte configuration. A dual-processor configuration,
shared the same fixed kenel and storage ... so going from 1mbyte
storage to 2mbyte storage probably increased storage available for
applications by nearly four times or more (after accounting for kernel
& other fixed storage requirements).

one of the reasons comparing tss/360 thruput on 768kbyte 360/67
against cp/67 on the same hardware was problem for tss/360 because tss
kernel & other fixed storage requirements took up most of the
machine. tss/370 had less of a problem later on on the larger 370s
since its larger kernel & other fixed storage requirements was
much less of an issue (i.e. both being small percentage of total real
storage rather than tss/360 case of well over 50 percent of total real
storage).

However, I was always able to benchmark higher thruput with either
CP/67 or VM/370 thruput the lifetime of tss/370 (except for some
relatively minor situations that the tss/370 group heavily optimized
for ... and I might need to do a tweak or two to beat).

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 19:36:23 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

I forgot to mention that there was a 360/67 running UNIX that ran 5
times as many conncurent tasks as any other /67 running UNIX.  The
reason is that the core system was TSS which ran UNIX as a task.

If you are talking about the tss kernel that UNIX was ported to
... you are talking about tss/370 and most of the UNIX deployments
were on 370/168 (or larger configurations).

somewhat random, unrelated ... unix ports to 370 machine came
something like 10 years after 360/67 period that the mentioned tss/360
& cp/67 comparisons were done. first there was the port to late
model interdata that had similar instruction set to 370 ... which came
before actual port to real 370. At the time-frame of the tss/360 &
cp/67 performance comparisions there was interdata/3 ... in another
undergraduate project, used to build the first 360 plug compatable
clone (originating the ibm 360 pcm industry)

360 pcm refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

random interdata refs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#30 interdata and perkin/elmer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#37 interdata & perkin/elmer machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#39 Mainframes & Unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#12 Old Computers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#234 Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#49 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort)
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.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#48 WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#54 WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#80 Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#81 Unisys vs IBM mainframe comparisons
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#6 History of ASCII (was Re: Why Not! Why not???)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#68 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#5 Sv: First video terminal?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#17 IBM 1142 reader/punch (Re: First video terminal?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#75 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#34 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#35 Imitation...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#53 Pre ARPAnet email?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#44 Golden Era of Compilers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#48 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercomputers?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#30 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#32 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#50 Flip the bits in a byte

random tss & unix refs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#0 Multitasking question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#54 How Do the Old Mainframes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64 distributed locking patents
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#92 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#61 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#8 IBM Linux
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#68 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#70 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#77 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#19 SIMTICS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#20 VM-CMS emulator
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#22 Early AIX including AIX/370
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#23 MERT Operating System & Microkernels

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 19:47:25 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

It appears that something on that copy of TSS was royally screwed up.
At NASA, we could run 70+ users with FAST response.  The dynamic
scheduler algorithm may have been badly set up.  Or ..... They may
have wtitten very bad code.  The dynamic scheduler was interesting in
that it rewarded good programming practice and punished bad users.

when they came up with the (new) tss/370 scheduler ... I used to kid
the person that if it was really dynamic adaptive ... then it wouldn't
need setting up ... it should be able to figure it out by itself;
something that I had done for fairshare dynamic adaptive feedback
scheduling ... originally when I was undergraduate ... and then later
shipped in both cp/67 and vm/370

random ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

although there was an in-joke for the resource manager:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#23 MTS & LLMPS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#2 Schedulers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#5 Schedulers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#7 IBM 7090 (360s, 370s, apl, etc)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#52 Measuring Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#155 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#45 VM/370 Resource Manager
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#73 CS instruction, when introducted ?

where somebody in product marketing thot that there should be tuning
knobs for the fairshare dynamic adaptive feedback scheduler (aka
resource manager ... 25 years young earlier this year).

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

E-commerce security????

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: E-commerce security????
Newsgroups: comp.security,comp.security.pgp,alt.computer.security,alt.security,comp.security.unix,comp.security.linux
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 19:54:01 GMT

"Ron Alexander" writes:

Do you ever order over the phone? If you do, you might want to
understand about scanners. You are MANY orders of magnitude more
secure on a secure web server than on your phone.

issue hasn't been the transactions in flight ... it is the exposure
with web merchants to gain access to the merchant transaction master
file (something that is a little bit harder to obtain with
non-web-based merchants).

misc. refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fraud Risk, Fraud, Exploits

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm2.htm#keyl2 On leaving the 56-bit key length limitation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm6.htm#terror [FYI] Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm6.htm#terror3 [FYI] Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm6.htm#terror7 [FYI] Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#cryptofree Erst-Freedom: Sic Semper Political Cryptography
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#setjava javasoft SET - NO!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ansiepay.htm#breach Security breach raises questions about Internet shopping
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#59 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#25 SSL as model of security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#33 does CA need the proof of acceptance of key binding ?

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 20:12:53 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

when they came up with the (new) tss/370 scheduler ... I used to kid
the person that if it was really dynamic adaptive ... then it wouldn't
need setting up ... it should be able to figure it out by itself;
something that I had done for fairshare dynamic adaptive feedback
scheduling ... originally when I was undergraduate ... and then later
shipped in both cp/67 and vm/370

the tss (& mvs ... there is some mvs story in the archive
someplace) adaptive scheduler was a "table-driven" scheduler ... you
set up all the entries in the table telling the scheduler what to do
under any given cicumstance, process could come into the table with
no-prior history and eventually get to some entry ... then once in
some entry there were lots of avenues that might be taken given that
you were at some entry and various things happened. it was dynamically
adaptive in the sense that scheduling decisions weren't just made on
what some current state or even happened to be ... but also what
current scheduling table entry a process might occupy (which was in
some sense an aggregation of sequence of prior events)

both MVS & TSS groups had huge benchmark activities which had a
variety of different workloads that were then performed under a
semi-random walk of different table configurations ... searching for
optimal table settings for the various workloads.

by the comparison, the cp/67 & vm/370 (fairshare, dynamic
adaptive, feedback) schedulers that I produced ... modified their own
values (effectively) based on success of previous periods (although
the structure didn't look like either the MVS or TSS table
schedulers).  This genre of schedulers had policies objectives that
could be specified, and then the internals managed dynamically (based
on dynamic system & process-specific activity) the structures that
were analogous to the MVS & TSS (static) scheduling table
structures ... aka when I talked about dynamic adaptive and when TSS
talked about dynamic adaptive we were talking at totally different
level of dynamic adaptive.

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 00:12:13 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

OS/360 desperately needed improvements.  Much of TSS and improvements
were made at NASA Lewis.  If you worked with TSS then you should have
known Hugh DeVore, Steve Kiseli, Gale Ames (think gale pages), etc.
Hugh was quite a character.  He was one of the few people I knew who I
would consider a genius in systems software.

should i tell some of my hugh stories ... while i was still in school
(i think early TSS release levels starting around 0.50 and up) ... or
after i graduated and joined cambridge. i worked with some of the YKT
people then on their installation.

I was part of the cp/67 announcement (although still an undergraduate)
at spring Share '68 in Houston ... but also active in os/360 and some
TSS. Hugh and I got into real good argument one night after having
spent most of the night drinking at SCIDS ... it came very close to
turning physical. We met at the astrodome the next day (on neutral
turf?).

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 11:21:39 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

There was one time where he was near NAPA valley and no one could find
him.  One time he disappeared for a whole month.  When he resurfaced,
he had completely written disk I/O and error recovery and it WORKED!
It was a tragedy that he died so young.

it took me longer than a month to rewrite IOS and various error
recovery for the disk engineering lab ... so they could use operating
system for testing engineering models under development (nominal
mean-time-to-failure of MVS with single test cell was 10-15 minutes,
objective was to be able to support a dozen or so test cells
concurrently).

random ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:10:14 GMT

jcmorris@mitre.org (Joe Morris) writes:

How about an operational definition: a mainframe is a computer
operated and maintained by people hired full-time for that purpose,
and who are not the persons (plural) who use its services for data
processing?

This definition deliberately includes X86 systems in server farms.  If
you want to exclude such small fry, you'll have to restrict the
definition further by requiring that the machines be too expensive for
most companies to own more than one or two, but such a restiction
would be very subjective.

some of the "mainframe" issues could be considered cultural ... for
instance, a single installation's disaster recovery plan ... might
have more documentation than some non-mainframe operating system total
documentation ... whole series of cultural industrial strength
computing issues that many people don't even know that they don't
know.

another simple example is industry-wide error reporting service
... i.e. capturing the detailed error statistics for every machine at
every installation and reporting summaries comparing different
mainframes from different vendors.

I had somewhat run afoul of such an issue ... a particular new
mainframe model was projected to have a total of 3-5 errors of a
certain kind of I/O error (somewhat akin to a SCSI bus error) for a
period of a year across all machines of that model shipped (i.e. not
3-5 per day or month ... and not 3-5 per machine ... but 3-5 total for
all machines over a period of a year).

The industry wide reporting service showed up with something like 15
such errors being recorded total for a whole year across all machines
of that new model (i.e. original 3090). This resulted in a big
investigation which turned out that some software that I had designed
sometime previously for channel extension over telco T1 simulated that
kind of error in place of a telco transmission error.

Now, how many non-mainframe machines have all errors that occur on the
machine recorded and kept and the reports reviewed by data processing
staff at regularly scheduled daily, weekly, and monthly basis for all
such machines at the installation. Furthermore, what other
non-mainframe machine markets have a industry-wide service that
collects all such reports from all customers from all machines and
produces regular reports of the summaries.

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm2.htm#architecture A different architecture? (was Re: certificate path
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmail.htm#parsim parsimonious
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay6.htm#erictalk2 Announce: Eric Hughes giving Stanford EE380 talk this
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#23 CP spooling & programming technology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#24 CP spooling & programming technology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#43 Bloat, elegance, simplicity and other irrelevant concepts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#55 How Do the Old Mainframes Compare to Today's Micros?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#14 mainframe tcp/ip
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#27 Mainframes & Unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#4 VSE or MVS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#119 Computer, supercomputers & related
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#29 20th March 2000
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#38 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#65 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#66 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#67 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#68 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#12 4341 was "Is a VAX a mainframe?"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#30 OT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#31 OT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#4 Sv: First video terminal?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#19 Disk caching and file systems.  Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#20 Disk caching and file systems.  Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#21 Disk caching and file systems.  Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#22 Disk caching and file systems.  Disk history...people forget
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#55 FBA History Question (was: RE: What's the meaning of track overfl ow?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#63 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#70 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#52 Pre ARPAnet email?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#49 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercompu
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#33 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#34 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#1 Alpha:  an invitation to communicate
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#22 ESCON Channel Limits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#46 3270 protocol

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

Security Classifications? (Where to Find Info)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Security Classifications? (Where to Find Info)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 18:32:43 GMT

Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> writes:

Addendum: The following is a relevant URL:

http://www.commoncriteria.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/20020124205623/http://www.commoncriteria.org/

somewhat aside, i've done a security glossary merge from orange book,
common criteria 1.0, 2., several internet RFCs, and a number of other
sources
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glossary

Security Terms merged from: AFSEC, AJP, CC1, CC2, FCv1, FIPS140, IATF
      IEEE610, ITSEC, Intel, JTC1/SC27/N734, KeyAll, MSC, NCSC/TG004,
      NIAP, RFC1983, RFC2504, RFC2828, TCSEC, TDI, TNI, and
      misc. Updated 20010729 with glossary from IATF V3.

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

Disappointed

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disappointed
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:27:04 GMT

"Bill Todd" writes:

I do, since I well remember 15 - 20 people logged onto a PDP-11/45 with 248
KB of memory assembling, playing games, word-processing (if you consider
TECO to be a word processor, anyway)...  Though it didn't take more than 3
concurrent COBOL compiles for response times to dive.

we were able to get 70-80 on 786kbyte 360/67, edit, assembling,
word-processing (GML ... precursor to SGML, HTML, XML, etc), APL/360,
fortran compile, virtual operating systems, etc. ... & subsecond
response time for trivial interactive.

random refs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech 545 tech sq, camb. sci cntr
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone  APL & HONE
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare performance, scheduling
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock  working set, paging

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 12:47:59 GMT

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

I was under the impression that there were (are?) two versions of Linux/390,
one which needs VM-assists to run and the other which will run native, and
Amdahl's IBM-alikes run their own flavour of UNIX without any issues.  Not
that I can see what difference running UNIX (or similar) makes, other than
operating system snobbery (UNICOS, anyone?)

there was also UNIX kernel that was severely modified to run in the
tss/370 kernel ... that saw pretty extensive deployment inside AT&T
(aka much of the UNIX kernel was replaced with tss/370 kernel). if it
was at&t ... was it unix?

ibm also had aix/370 (& aix/ps2) which was actually locus kernel
running on both 370 and ps2 (sort of unix flavor of SAA)

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#2 IBM S/360
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#123 Speaking of USB ( was Re: ASR 33 Typing Element)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64 distributed locking patents
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#8 IBM Linux
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#84 Is a VAX a mainframe?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#68 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#69 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#20 Is Al Gore The Father of the Internet?^
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#27 OCF, PC/SC and GOP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#42 IBM's Workplace OS (Was: .. Pink)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#45 IBM's Workplace OS (Was: .. Pink)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#44 Options for Delivering Mainframe Reports to Outside Organizat ions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#49 Options for Delivering Mainframe Reports to Outside Organizat ions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#20 VM-CMS emulator
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#22 Early AIX including AIX/370
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#21 3745 and SNI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#30 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#16 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#20 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#22 Title Inflation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#19 HP Compaq merger, here we go again.

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 14:41:32 GMT

Wild Bill writes:

Bell Labs devoted many hours of research, testing, and many dollars for
hardware to develop and implement Unix/370. It did indeed run on a stripped
TSS/370 kernel. They could get, at most about 50 users logged in and doing
things. TSS on the same hardware could handle about a hundred. And VM, also
on the same hardware could do 200. (Pesonally, I think it was the fault of
the C compiler someone "threw together" after thay had an "Oh Sht! We
forgot about that!" epiphany.)

After those dismal numbers the Lab abandoned further development.

Then Amdahl showed up with UTS a couple of years later, got it installed in
a half-dozen systems. One of which was even IBM iron!

i had a friend at one of the chip shops in the valley who started with
the bell 370 c compiler to port various bezerkely chip tools to vm/370
... he eventually did (had to do) a total rewrite of the
code-gen/optimizing code (as well as fixing large number of bugs). he
also did a lot of the work on the compiler that was chosen by ibm to
logo as its (first mvs&vm) 370 C compiler.

i believe the uts/gold work can be traced back to a port of unix to
370 at princeton.

misc gold refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#2 IBM S/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#190 Merced Processor Support at it again . . .
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#191 Merced Processor Support at it again . . .
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#8 IBM Linux
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#68 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#70 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 14:58:21 GMT

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

Ages ago, when AIX/370 was still current, I remember hearing a story
that it needed VM assists not for any technical reason, but because
IBM wanted to prevent a version of UNIX running native on their
hardware for various nefarious reasons... any truth in this one?

the story down thru the years (not just unix on mainframes) is that
(quality) device drivers, error recovery, erep, etc are really, really
expensive. there have also been sporadic efforts to consolidate such
components across all the varied operating systems (vm, mvs, vs1,
dos/vs, etc). aix/370 under vm could let vm handle all the really
gorpy stuff.  Little things like if the error analysis & error
prediction (based on soft/recoverable errors) reports aren't done in a
very specific way ... or the sequence of commands weren't just so for
maint.  ... field engineering wouldn't agree to
support/maintain/service the hardware.

there would have to be a very significant customer install base &
revenue to just cover the upfront costs of training & supporting all
the field engineering support/maintain/service (aka RAS) requirements.
Such costs would be significantly larger than all the other costs for
aix/370 port/product combined.

random refs with respect to rewriting in order that disk engineering
development & test could be done under operating system environment:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 15:15:18 GMT

Wild Bill writes:

Bell Labs devoted many hours of research, testing, and many dollars for
hardware to develop and implement Unix/370. It did indeed run on a stripped
TSS/370 kernel. They could get, at most about 50 users logged in and doing
things. TSS on the same hardware could handle about a hundred. And VM, also
on the same hardware could do 200. (Pesonally, I think it was the fault of
the C compiler someone "threw together" after thay had an "Oh Sht! We
forgot about that!" epiphany.)

the question of VM performance has always been a sore spot in some
places. CERN was an early VM installation (side note .. could be
considered significant in the fact that both VM and GML originated at
Cambridge ...  and GML originally on VM, then effectively begate SGML,
HTML, XML, etc).

Circa 1974, CERN did some detailed benchmark comparisons between
VM/CMS, MVS/TSO and some number of other offerings ... that showed
VM/CMS with significant performance & thruput advantage. Reports were
made available to Share ... but the reports made available to IBM were
immediately classified (by the MVS group) Confidential, Restricted
... i.e. only available to employees on a need-to-know basis.

misc. refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#28 Drive letters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#23 Is Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the web?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#61 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#49 any 70's era supercomputers that ran as slow as today's supercompu
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#24 XML: No More CICS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#54 DSRunoff; was Re: TECO Critique
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#11 checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#5 YKYGOW...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#30 IBM OS Timeline?

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 19:09:39 GMT

Steve O'Hara-Smith writes:

If the design costs are a significant fraction of the unit price it might be
a mainframe.

if RAS is a significant fraction of the unit price, it might be a mainframe

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

Web of Trust

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Web of Trust
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 01:08:07 GMT

"Roger Schlafly" writes:

I wonder how many systems really worry about this even in a
hierarchial PKI. Eg, suppose Fred buys a ordinary cert from from
Verisign, and uses it to issue a cert to Bill. Bill then has a cert chain
leading back to a trusted root CA. Only closer examination will
reveal that Verisign knows nothing about Bill. Will the commonly
used validity checks catch this?

the main prevalent use of certificate PKI operations (possibly
reaching 99.99999999 percent of certificate PKI operations done in the
world today) involve SSL domain-name server certificates. They contain
the domain name of the server so that the client can cross-check the
domain name in the certificate with what the client specified in their
http specification (i.e. is the server i think i'm talking to really
the server that i expect).

the supposed reason for these domain name server certificates are
concerns regarding the integrity of the domain name infrastructure
(i.e. the domain name infrastructure might not be pointing me at the
correct server).

so, how does domain name server certificates come about? somebody goes
to one of the certification authorities (CAs) and requests a
certificate with that domain name. Since the certification authority
is the authoritative agency for domain names ... the certification
authority must contact the authoritative agency for domain names to
validate that the entity requesting the domain name certificate is
actually responsible for that domain name. Who is the authoritative
agency for domain names that the certification authority needs to
contact??? Well the certification authority has to contact the very
same domain name infrastructure that everybody is concerned about with
regard to its integrity. That leads to a little more concern by the
certification authorities about trusting the authoritative agency for
domain names for their certificates ... even tho this trust issue is
the justification for having those certificates in the first place
(does anybody hear the term catch-22??).

Ok, so one of the proposals to improve the integrity of the domain
name infrastructure is to have people register a public key when they
register their domain name (then any subsequent updates have to be
signed with the corresponding private key). Now this improves many of
the integrity issues and concerns of the certification authorities
(CAs) regarding trusting the domain name infrastructure as the
authoritative agency for domain names.

However, if the integrity of the domain name infrastructure is
improved such that the certification authorities can trust them, then
it is possible that the rest of the world could also ... eliminating
the reason that everybody is getting all these certificates.

Furthermore, if the domain name infrastructure improved their
integrity and also registered public keys ... not only could people
start to have more trust in the domain name infrastructure (not just
the certification authorities) ... but the domain name infrastructure
could start acting as a real-time server of trusted public keys
(effectively using existing domain name infrastructure protocol and
facilities). This would also subsume the second function of
certificates, trusted distribution of keying material.

misc past threads on this subject:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 16:38:01 GMT

genew@mail.ocis.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:

If it has an office inside of it, it might be a mainframe.

if it can simultaneously run 97,000 copies of linux ...

ran across this in a recent announcement for a talk at comdex

Founded in 2000, Sine Nomine Associates, Inc.  (SNA) provides a
comprehensive range of internetworking, telecommunications, strategic,
and training services for organizations in all commercial and
government sectors worldwide.  We are also shaping the cutting edge of
the Linux for System/390 revolution, using Linux for System/390 as a
reliable and stable solution for mission-critical Internet support
services.  Our successful and unsurpassed test of over 97,000 Linux
images on a single System/390 system remains the flagship leading the
industry into the virtual server/virtual network environment.

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 14:07:31 GMT

"Eugene A. Pallat" writes:

That was a unique advantage of TSS.  It was designed to run on up to a 4x4
system - 4 CPUs and 4 channel controllers.  A dead CPU and/or channel didn't
stop the system.  It also degraded gracefully if there were problems in a core
box.

the 360/65 was originally announced as 360/60 (i.e. m30, m40, m50,
m60, etc) and the 360/67 as a 360/62. I believe that the change from
60/62 to 65/67 was an upgrade of the memory technology to 750mics
core. Someplace I had a old SRL for 360/62 showing four processor
configuration, however, I believe that no four processor models were
ever built and I'm only aware of a single three processor being built.

Charlie (responsible for compare&swap ... there was a couple month
effort to come up with that nmenonic which are charlie's initials
... CAS) was the system engineer at the customer (gov. instlallation)
that had the three-processor machine (until it got canceled). The
channel controller for the three-processor (i believe) was unique in
that all possible switches were software programmable (not just
sensing in the control regs ... but also setable). some blue-card ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#15 OS/360 (was LINUS for S/390)

The channel controller (for multiprocessor configurations) disappeared
in 370 (as did >24bit addressing support, 360/67 had support for both
24bit virtual and 32bit virtual address). Much reduced function
re-appeared somewhat as the channel director for the 303x machines
... and >24bit support didn't show-up until 3081 as 31bit addressing
(not 32bit).

It is interesting how much of all of this originated at 545tech sq. in
cambridge. ctss was the mit time-sharing system which begat both
Multics and CP/67 (both projects in 545 tech. sq). The (ibm) boston
programming center was moved to 545 tech sq which was responsible for
CPS (conversational programming system). And of course there is the
stories about Multics being the genesis of unix. out of cp/67 came
vm/370, lpars, etc. Also out of 545 tech. sq came GML which begat
SGML, HTML, XML, etc. A lot of the early work evolving from
performance tuning into capacity planning also came out of CSC work at
545 tech sq.

melinda's history paper with various CTSS & time-sharing lore:
http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/

misc. other 545 tech sq & CSC references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

misc. smp references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

misc. perf references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

project that would have sort-of used portions of the TSS kernel (somewhat similar
to the way the AT&T unix effort did)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#27 VM/SP sites that allow free access
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party

one of the things for the above, I had a program (that I had written
in PLI) that did detailed register useage & control flow analysis of
assembly listing and also produced a high-level language psuedo-code
representation of the listing. One of the differences between standard
os assembly listings (F, H, etc) and TSS listings was that the
addr1/addr2 addresses on the statement line was tag'ed with the
csect/dsect number (making mapping to symbolic pointer-> generation
slightly more deterministic)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#12 360 "OS" & "TSS" assemblers
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#36 Assembly language formatting on IBM systems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#60 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#35 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#59 Blinkenlights
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#76 Other oddball IBM System 360's ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#30 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#5 mainframe question

random other postings:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#38 Mainframes & Unix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#10 OS with no distinction between RAM a
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#13 S/360 operating systems geneaology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#126 Dispute about Internet's origins
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#142 OS/360 (and descendents) VM system?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#177 S/360 history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#222 Looking for a (working) PERQ
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#237 I can't believe this newsgroup still exists.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#1 Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#43 Historically important UNIX or computer things.....
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#52 Correct usage of "Image" ???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#81 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#82 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#89 Ux's good points.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#47 Why are Suns so slow?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#61 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#47 Charging for time-share CPU time
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#30 OT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#53 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#59 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#78 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#2 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC? designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#21 First OS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#71 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#69 line length (was Re: Babble from "JD" <dyson@jdyson.com>)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#9 VM: checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#10 VM: checking some myths.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#46 Whom Do Programmers Admire Now???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#57 Whom Do Programmers Admire Now???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#32 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#34 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#39 IBM OS Timeline?

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 15:26:40 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

project that would have sort-of used portions of the TSS kernel (somewhat similar
to the way the AT&T unix effort did)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#27 VM/SP sites that allow free access
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party

the above project was to be a interative, rapid-development
micro-kernel effort. when it started to look like the project (not the
kernel) was going for large scale bloat ... i tried another approach.

cp/67 could be considered the original micro-kernel ... but by the
time of the above project there was about 40+klocs in the TSS kernel
and something like 270+klocs in the vm/370 kernel. One of the
unfortunate side-effects of a really well-designed, compact
micro-kernel ... was it was so easy to clutter it up with new
quick&dirty code ... aka since the basic code was so well-designed and
clean that it was trivial to add new stuff w/o getting all tied into
knots over trying to figure out spaghetti code. While it was simpler to
add quick&dirty code this way (rather than do detailed architecture
consistency), over period of 10-20 years, it eventually bloated the
pure micro-kernel into spaghetti code.

part of this can be considered the price of success ... while the
number of TSS customers (and correspondingly the number of developers
working on the code) drastically decreased ... the number of vm/370
customers and developers significantly increased. It is a lot harder
to maintain architecture & design consistency when there are a large
number of developers throwing everything, including the kitchen sink
into the microkernel (especially when large number of the new
developers had traditional operating system background rather than
microkernel orientation ... more in common with hardware processor
engineers of the time than operating system developers).

since ZM activity was floundering under its own weight, i tried an
alternative demo of moving major function out of the existing
kernel. I selected for the demo, the VM spool file subsytem. Part of
the reason for this selection was that the internal network support
had a large part built on the VM spool file subsystem ... and it had
become a major thruput bottleneck for internal high-speed network (&
some HSDT related activities). The activity was suppose to demonstrate
moving major function out of the kernel, increase the spool subsystem
performance by a factor of ten times and also add support for
asynchronous API semantics (in addition to the synchronous API
semnatics).

misc. high-speed data transport (HSDT) refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hsdt

misc. network refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindx2.html#network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#22 CP spooling & programming technology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#29 CP spooling & programming technology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#34 why is there an "@" key?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#36 why is there an "@" key?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#213 Why is Pascal no longer a leading development Language?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#15 Computer of the century
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#42 Why are Suns so slow?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#43 Migrating pages from a paging device (was Re: removal of paging device)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#30 perceived forced conversion from cp/m to ms-dos in late 80's
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#35 How Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Systems make society vulnerable
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#31 High Level Language Systems was Re: computer books/authors (Re: FA:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#76 Stoopidest Hardware Repair Call?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#63 First Workstation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#4 I hate Compaq

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

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 18:53:28 GMT

daw@mozart.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner) writes:

Unfortunately, there are ways to spoof Caller ID.

For instance, I believe various hackers -- Mitnick, Poulsen Masters of
Deception, and so on -- are known to have successfully hacked into phone
switches, which is enough to fake out Caller ID.  I believe there are
other ways, too.

So Caller ID seems like a reasonable thing to add to the pot, in the
time-honored belt-and-suspenders philosophy, but I wouldn't rely on it
alone to defend against motivated attackers.

if you hack into the infrastructure ... you can subvert almost any
authentication scheme ... for instance the server domain-name PKI
certificates can be subverted by hacking the domain name
infrastructure with a domain name hijack  ... and then applying
for a PKI certificate for that domain name. Since CAs have to rely on the
domain name infrastructure as the authoritative agency as to domain name
ownership ... it is then possible to get issued a valid certificate for
that domain name.

misc. refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#seecurevid A proposal for secure videoconferencing and video messaging  over the Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#client1 Client-side revocation checking capability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#client2 Client-side revocation checking capability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#client3 Client-side revocation checking capability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#client4 Client-side revocation checking capability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#pkiart Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsmore.htm#pkiart2 Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm4.htm#3 Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm#dnsinteg1 Domain Name integrity problem
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm#dnsinteg2 Domain Name integrity problem
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#40 Why trust root CAs ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#47 Why trust root CAs ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#51 Why trust root CAs ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#41 solicit advice on purchase of digital certificate
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#39 Can I create my own SSL key?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#40 Can I create my own SSL key?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#19 Root certificates

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

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

Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 22:10:21 GMT

EBIE@PHMINING.COM (Eric Bielefeld) writes:

Very interesting.  Does anyone know why IBM has to go to a Unix box to
make a supercomputer?  Why can't they do it on z/OS?

random ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#52

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

Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Indiana University and IBM Unveil the Nation's LargestUniversity-Owned Supercomputer
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 00:21:40 GMT

sknutson@LANDMARK.COM (Sam Knutson) writes:

Most Super Computers are involved in Numeric Intensive Computing and IBM
mainframes long ago abandoned this ground to the multi-node
UNIX based or specialized systems that handle it better.  z/OS and zSeries
hardware don't handle these kind of workloads well
but then ASCII White is poorly suited to run billing for MCI:-)

i think there are some flex/os installations that are doing just that
type of stuff ... including driving the printers. part of it my be
legacy cobol apps.

Other issues are that some number of these large account based stuff
are vsam and possibly in some cases even bdam (don't translate well
into things like RDBMS that would somewhat level the playing field
with other platforms).

the bigger differentiator isn't so much whether it can run the
application ... but whether or not there is a high level of confidence
that the application runs on schedule each and every time. there is a
significantly larger RAS issue in many of these applications
... extending all the way up into thru most of the application.

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

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 00:46:47 GMT

Paul Rubin <phr-n2001d@nightsong.com> writes:

The analogy is bogus though.  Compromising a CA requires, well,
compromising the CA.  Spoofing Caller ID requires simply plugging a
PBX into the phone system that can generate caller ID codes.  (PBX's
can set the caller ID numbers of outgoing calls, so that when you call
someone from your office phone, the PBX can assign the call to any of
a pool of outgoing phone lines, and the recipient can still see your
office phone number on their Caller ID).  Caller ID doesn't try to be
secure in any nontrivial way.

compromising a CA requires compromising the CA and/or any
infrastructures that the CA is dependent upon for correct operation.

If a CA is critically dependent on some external agency as to the
validity of the information that it is certifying ... and it is
possible to compromise that external agency ... then the internal
operation of the CA can be at the very highest security level ... and
you still can't trust the CA's certification.

For most of the CAs out there they merely attest to having gone thru
some sequence cross-checking some information that they've been asked
to certify. For the most part CAs are not the final authority as to
the information that they've been asked to certify ... aka somebody
comes in and asks a CA to provide a certification as to some claimed
binding. In effect, the CA doesn't actual certify the validity of the
information in the certificate ... they just claim that they have
followed various checking procedures as to the validity of the
information ... but not necessary to the actual validty of the
information itself. In most cases, CAs are dependent on other agencies
who are the authority agency as to the actual validity of the
information.

A trivial example is I ask a CA to certify my caller-ID (i.e. I assert
a caller-ID and ask a CA to manufactur a certificate as to that
caller-ID).  If i've been able to compromise the Caller ID system
... they will check as to the Caller ID and it will come up
good.

Similarly is the situation with SSL domain-name certificates
(previously cited) ... where a CA is dependent on checking with the
domain name infrastructure as to the validity of some claim with
regard to domain name ownership. As to "identity" certificates, they
can be dependent on something like driver's license. There have been
statements by various states as to their ability to prevent identity
theft with regard to false driver's licenses. So, easy question what
is the frequency of caller-id compromise vis-a-vis identity theft
frequency.

A CA isn't infallible, and in fact, they tend to disavow all liability
with what they certify ... possibly in part because for the most part they
have absolutely no control over the information they are placing in
a certificate (and it is likely that very few of the agencies that CAs deal
with regarding the validity of the information that they are certifying are
interesting in accepting liability on the part of the CA).

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 03:33:58 GMT

lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com (lwin) writes:

Unfortunately, IBM was slow in upgrading its tape drives for S/360;
it used mostly warmed over 7000 series units.  Due to anti trust
pressures, IBM unbundled and allowed customers to attach 3rd party
units.  This exploded that marketplace, and vendors such as Memorex
jumped in and sold lots of tape drives with significantly better
price-performance.  (The 1403 printer was also warmed over from
the 1401 (though with more speed); but it was so good and popular
it remained in service and very popular into the S/370 era.)

unbundling was june 23rd, 1969 (basically services). we had started on
project building the first ibm pcm controller prior to that
... somewhat reverse engineering the channel interface and building
our own channel interface board (credited with originating the PCM
controller business). it was into the 370 era before pcm controller &
devices became prevalent.

random pcm ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

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

voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: voice encryption box (STU-III for the masses)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 04:30:29 GMT

daw@mozart.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner) writes:

Then it's not properly implemented.

I'm pretty sure I pointed out the requirement for proper implementation
earlier in the thread.  I really don't understand your point.

in effect, the most prevalent used PKI certificates are SSL
domain-name certificates (possibly representing 99.9999% of PKI
certificate authentication operations that occur in the world today)
... and these certificates effectively are the CAs saying that they've
checked with the domain name infrastructure (responsible for domain
name ownership) and the domain name infrastructure corroporates the
information as to who owns the domain name.

now what would you be suggesting with regard to CAs ...

1) if the domain name infrastructure could possible be wrong then
should CAs stop manufacturing & issuing SSL domain-name certificates?

2) if the domain name infrastructure could possible be wrong, CAs
should check with somebody else that knows nothing about domain
name ownership instead?

3) if the domain name infrastructure could possible be wrong, CAs
should totally cause all existing domain name infrastructures to be
trashed and force everybody instead to register domain names with CAs
instead (where the CAs would then directly control domain name
ownership and wouldn't have to rely on some other agency that could
possibly be wrong)?

My understanding of most of the CA business models is that they can
manufactur a certificate that represents the binding of some
information and that certificate could be trusted to the same level as
if one was directly contacted the agency responsible for the vailidity
of the information (that appears in the certificate; an agency that is
rarely the CA itself). Other than that, I don't believe there is any
fairy godmother that with a wave of the wand can change the trust
level of the original information source because it appears in a
certificate.

Most of the hyper about CA security & trust levels ... is that they
want to be acceptable for certifying a broad range of different
information that might exist at different trust levels. If they were
to ever be involved in certifying some information that nominal has an
extremely high native trust level ... they would prefer that the CA
itself didn't represent the weakest point in the trust chain. However,
I believe that many CAs may tout extremely high internal trust
procedures ... that is significantly higher than the native trust of
lots of information that they are certifying.

Similar to the method of compromising Caller-ID by "attacking" the
origin that generates the Caller-ID ... it is possible to compromise a
PKI system by attacking the source agency responsible for the
information being certified (many such agencies may have significantly
lower trust standards than the internal CA operation involved in
manufacturing of the certificate).

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 20:10:06 GMT

Brian Inglis writes:

Always considered myself a member of the "Chuck Yeager" school of
Tech. Support, and wanted to tell the PHBs where to go and what
to do there, when after a crash, they all rushed into the machine
room to "get someone to do something about it" -- we were already
diagnosing the problem, and their wailing and gnashing of teeth
rising over the roar of the A/C didn't make it any easier to
think about the probable cause.

One particularly nasty series of crashes with no obvious cause
resulted in many occurrences of ranting and raving by PHBs and a
bunch of IBM CEs and CSRs on standby in the machine room for the
next occurrence. It turned out some earlier moron^Wsys prog had
dual allocated VM T-disk (temporary disk) space and page space to
the same minidisk/partition, so the system crashed when a user
ran an application that allocated temporary space and the system
was paging system code!

attached cross-posting (at end) from a recent vm bug question

also ... somewhat akin to the chuck yeager school ref
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#boyd

with respect to I/O ... the 3274/3174 control units were particularly
bad ... compared to the 3277/3272 which could provide subsecond
response (if the sysetm could) ... it was nearly impossible to get
real-subsecond (at the human interface screen/keyboard) response. The
3274/3174 tended to also have operational issues ... for extended
periods of time we would see an average of 1 operator-initiated manual
(BRS) reset per day. However, when we were doing all the I/O
reliability stuff ... we stumbled across the fact that if you did a
HDV/CLRIO instruction sequence in a tight loop to every control unit
address ...  the 3274/3174 would loose their mind and initiate
reboot/reset on their own.

As we were to find out ... some number of hardware units exhibited
that characteristic.

For the transition from 370 to 303x boxes ... one of the big changes
was the channel director. The 370/158 had a hardware engine with two
microprogram personalities ... one was the 370 instruction processor
personality and the other was the channel I/O personality (the 158
hardware engine was responsible for executing both microprograms).

For the 303x line, they created a channel director that consisted only
of a 158 engine with the channel I/O personality microprogram. The
303x processors were effectively

1) 3031 .. a 158 engine that only had the 370 micropogram personality
(and a 2nd 158 engine as a channel director with the channel I/O
microprogram personality). Old 158/3031/4341 LLNL RAIN benchmark
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#0 Is a VAX a mainframe?

2) 3032 ... a 168-3 engine that was reconfigured to use channel directors

3) 3033 ... a 168-3 "wiring" diagram that was remapped to newer chip
   technology. The newer chip technology was about 20% than the 168-3
   technology but also had about ten times the circuits per chip. The
   3033 originally was going to be a simple remapping only using the
   1/10th circuit per chip and getting a 20% performance increase over
   the 168-3. Before product announce&ship, it was decided that the
   3033 needed more like a 50% performance increase over the 168-3
   ... which started a crash program to redo critical sections of the
   168-3 core design to take advantage of the higher chip circuits (and
   performance advantage of doing more on-chip operations with fewer
   off-chip events).

In a manner similar to discovering the magic sequence to getting some
of the control units to do a brain-wipe and reboot ... we found that
it was possible to force the channel directors to perform a similar
wipe/reset/reboot operation if you very quickly & in sequence did a
CLRCH to all of the channel address for a director.

random 303x refs (re-posted attachment follows):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#3 What is an IBM 137/148 ???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#20 Why Mainframes?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#23 Fear of Multiprocessing?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#7 IBM S/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#176 S/360 history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#187 Merced Processor Support at it again . . .
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#78 Mainframe operating systems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#37 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#69 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#7 4341 was "Is a VAX a mainframe?"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#11 4341 was "Is a VAX a mainframe?"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#12 4341 was "Is a VAX a mainframe?"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#21 S/360 development burnout?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#57 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#11 360/370 instruction cycle time
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#37 John Mashey's greatest hits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#39 John Mashey's greatest hits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#69 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#83 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#3 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#6 OS/360 (was LINUS for S/390)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#54 VM & VSE news
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#55 VM & VSE news
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#34 IBM OS Timeline?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#3 YKYGOW...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#14 Parity - why even or odd (was Re: Load Locked (was: IA64 running out of steam))
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#24 mainframe question

================== attachment

... basically over a course of a number of years ... I had the
opportunity (at least three different times/instances) to totally
eliminate all scenerios resulting in hung/zombie and/or the inverse
which was a system crash because of faulty serialization

 From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
 Subject: re: LOGOFF/FORCE PENDING

Typically the problem is some outstanding i/o request that the kernel
is apprehensive about.

Originally VM/370 had lots of "hung" (aka zombie) users as well as
lots of timing failures.

For the Resource Manager ... I had to do 2000 benchmarks that took
three months elapsed time to run to calibrate all the algorithms. To
do the benchmarks I created an automated benchmark procedure (and
created the original autolog command ... originally for automated
benchmarking ... not originally for automated operations). The
automated benchmark would 1) look at the next benchmark to run, 2)
build the appropriate system, 3) reboot, 4) set the appropriate
parameters, 5) autolog the appropriate simulated users with the
appropriate simulated workload 6) wait for the proscribed amount of
time 7) force off all the users, 8) save the benchmark data, 9) remove
the current benchmark entry 10) loop back to "1".

When I originally started, every couple benchmarks would hang with a
user not being able to be forced or crash the system.

In order to get the benchmarks done so I could get out the resource
manager ... I totally redesigned the logoff/reset processing and
created a new serialization infrastructure. One of the things the new
mechanism would do would queue a serialization request, leave and then
when it returned it would go looking for every pending I/O request
belonging to this user. Whenever one was found, it would be
re-assigned to the "system" userid. I had originally created the
"system" userid in CP/67 for portions of pageable kernel (this was
when I was at BCS). This was never shipped in IBM CP/67 product
... but was incorporated into the initial VM/370 release. This
eliminated all cases of hung/zombie users and system crashes because
of timing serialization problems. Basically the SYSTEM user was
originally designed to be a place-holder for the virtual memory tables
that the kernel was mapped into ... which was used to managed the
non-fixed portion of the kernel.

The resource manager was eventually incorporated into the original HPO
...however, about 80% of the resource manager was retrofitted to the
base (non-HPO product) ... leaving only about 20% of the resource
manager in HPO (the resource manager also contained a lot of the
structure rewrite that I had done for SMP ... and was required to
distributed SMP support in the base product). Effectively, both the
serialization rewrite and the SMP support from the resource manager
was dropped into the base system leaving only about 20% of the
resource manager to become HPO.

For a period of better than a year there was absolutely no cases of
hung/zombie users and/or system crashes because of logoff/reset
serialization problems.

The problem thru the years ... is that 1) some failure is diagnosed
that might be thot to be a serialization problem ... and somebody
creates an APAR that holds a user in suspension on the off-chance that
will fix the problem (has happened every couple years which
re-introduces the problem of hung/zombie users) or 2) somebody adds
some new tweak for some sort of I/O so there is an outstanding request
someplace that the serialization code can't find and can't re-assign
to the "SYSTEM" user (i.e. doesn't update the serialization code to
recognize the tweak to the I/O, again leading to serialization failure
and/or hung/zombie user).

Later, I added the initial MIH ... as part of a generic rewrite of the
I/O subsystem for the disk engineering lab so that they could run 6-12
test cells simultaneously in an operating system environment (at the
time, MTBF for MVS was 15 minutes with just a single test cell
active). This helped with hung devices ... i.e. a user could get
suspended while waiting for a hung device ... but would not be "hung"
in the sense that they would enter zombie state if
forced/logoff/reset.

misc. SMP refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

misc resource manager refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

misc. disk test cell refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

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

mainframe question

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: mainframe question
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 20:23:10 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

also ... somewhat akin to the chuck yeager school ref
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#boyd

for some OT, 40 second boyd (standing bet that he would allow anybody
on his tail and in less than 40 seconds will have reversed the
situation)
http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/coram/catton.htm
http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/coram/prologue1.htm

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

Processor Modes

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Processor Modes
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 19:11:22 GMT

Paul Repacholi writes:

You got the last bit right anyway. But on the early ARPA net, a PDP-10
was 'standard issue' for quite some time. When did the first 360
arrive on the ARPA net?

With the original arpanet turn-on

I knew somebody that was hired as undergraduate at UCSB to do
penetration study of arpanet before its initial turn-on (see extract
from rfc208 attached).

misc. ref
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#45

as previously mentioned ... the internal network (all mainframes) was
larger (in terms of nodes) than the arpa/internet from just about the
beginning up thru possibly 1985 (when the large number of workstations
and PCs started to see a huge explosion in internet nodes).

index of RFCs can be found at:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#network

various RFCs referencing UCSB 360/75
33, 101, 105, 115, 120, 138, 164, 208, 240, 252, 255, 266, 267, 287,
288, 293, 298, 302, 306, 311, 315, 319, 321, 326, 330, 332, 335, 342,
344, 353, 362, 366, 367, 370, 376, 477, 490, 494, 597, 599

various RFCs referencing UCLA 360/91
77, 90, 208, 240, 252, 255, 266, 267, 287, 288, 293, 298, 306, 307,
315, 319, 325, 326, 330, 332, 342, 344, 345, 353, 362, 366, 367, 370,
376, 392, 468, 490, 494, 597, 619

the "arpanet" as of 8/9/71 ... from RFC208

 IMP       SITE        HOST                    NETWORK    SCHEDULED
NUMBER     NAME       NUMBER    HOST           ADDRESS   INSTALLATION
------     ----       ------    ----           -------   ------------
  1        UCLA         0       SIGMA-7              1
                        1       IBM 360/91          65
  2        SRI          0       PDP-10 (NIC)         2
                        1       PDP-10 (Al)         66
  3        UCSB         0       IBM 360/75           3
  4        UTAH         0       PDP-lO               4
  5        BBN          0       DDP-516              5  )   See Note 1
                        1       PDP-10 (A)          69  )
                        2       PDP-1O (B)         133
  6        MIT          0       Honeywell 645        6
                        1       PDP-10              70
  7        RAND         O       360/65               7
                        1       PDP-1O              71
  8        SDC          O       IBM 360/75           8
  9        HARVARD      O       PDP-1O               9
                        1       PDP-1               73
                        2       PDP-11             137
 10        LINCOLN      O       IBM 360/67          10
                        1       TX2                 74
 11        STANFORD     O       PDP-1O              11
 12        ILLINOIS     O       PDP-11              12
 13        CASE         O       PDP-1O              13
 14        CARNEGIE     O       PDP-1O              14
 15        PAOLI        O       B6500               15
 16        NASA/AMES    O       IBM 360/67          16      8/3/71
                        2       TIP                144
 17        MITRE        2       TIP                145      8/31/71
 18        RADC         O       H 635/645           18      10/5/71
                        2       TIP                146
 19        NBS          O       PDP-11              19      11/2/71
 20        ETAC         2       TIP                148      11/30/71
 21        TINKER       O       418 III             21      1/4/71
 22        McCLELLAN    O       418 III             22      2/1/72
 23        USC          0       IBM 360/44          23      2/29/72
                        2       TIP                151
 24        GWC          2       TIP                152      3/14/72
 25        NCAR         O       CDC 7600            25      3/28/72
                        2       TIP                153
 30        BBN/TIP      2       TIP                158

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

Processor Modes

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Processor Modes
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 19:41:00 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

as previously mentioned ... the internal network (all mainframes) was
larger (in terms of nodes) than the arpa/internet from just about the
beginning up thru possibly 1985 (when the large number of workstations
and PCs started to see a huge explosion in internet nodes).

index of RFCs can be found at:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

random refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subindex.html#network

as prevsiously cited before, the other reason for the internal network
being larger than the arpanet/internet up thru something 1985 ... was
that effectively the primary internal network implementation
effectively had gateway function implemented in every node. The
ARPANET had a traditional state-of-the-art design requiring
homogeneous networking thruout the whole infrastructure. The ARPANET
didn't get real "internet" and "gateway" function until the great
cut-over on 1/1/83 (homogeneous uniform network design and
implementation is a huge imhibitor for extensive growth).

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

History

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: History
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 19:53:18 GMT

Daniel.McLaughlin@COTTONSTATES.COM (McLaughlin, Dani