List of Archived Posts

2007 Newsgroup Postings (05/03 - 05/13)

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
2741s, was Even worse than UNIX
Newbie question on table design
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Even worse than UNIX
Even worse than UNIX
MTS *FS tape format?
Newbie question on table design
Newbie question on table design
Newbie question on table design
Disc Drives
Newbie question on table design
Newbie question on table design
Interrupts
Newbie question on table design
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newbie question on table design
Newbie question on table design
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newbie question on table design
a little dbms folklore
Even worse than UNIX
Even worse than UNIX
Even worse than UNIX
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Display Technologies Evolution
strange FTP problem--transatlantic asymmetry
Problem with TCP connection close
Newbie question on table design
Disc Drives
z/VM usability
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
z/VM usability
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ?
Using rexx to send an email
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Using rexx to send an email
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
Disc Drives
Help settle a job title/role debate
Help settle a job title/role debate
open source voting
Disc Drives
Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
Using rexx to send an email
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler
IBM Unionization
IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
VLIW pre-history
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
IBM Unionization
VLIW pre-history
VLIW pre-history
VLIW pre-history

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 08:33:33 -0600
Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
Sarbanes-Oxley? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act

But AFAIK that hasn't been eliminated (though businesses would like for it to be). That law (stemming from Enron et al.) does things like stiffen requirements for financial reporting of corporations (and hold executives liable for fraudulent reports)..


in the financial area there was new qualitative section of basel II ... but that pretty much eliminated before basel II was adopted.

i gave a talk at european finance conference a couple yrs ago that SOX couldn't prevent/eliminate the ENRON type stuff ... since the criminal activity was already criminal ... that about the only part of SOX that was really new was the section at the end on informants.

past posts mentioning basel ii &/or sox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#xmlvch implementations of "XML Voucher: Generic Voucher Language" ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#50 glossary
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#29 CIOs Must Be Involved In Controlling Risk In Financial Services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#smallpay3 Small/Secure Payment Business Models
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#cfppki19 CFP: PKI research workshop
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#50 E-banking is board-level Issue, Says Basel Committee
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#52 Committee calls for better e-banking security management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm16.htm#7 The Digital Insider: Backdoor Trojans ... fyi
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm19.htm#10 Security as a "Consumer Choice" model or as a sales (SANS) model?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm21.htm#3 Is there any future for smartcards?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm22.htm#26 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#10 PGP "master keys"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#12 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#13 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#14 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#15 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#26 Fraudwatch - how much a Brit costs, how to be a 419-er, Sarbanes-Oxley rises as fraud rises, the real Piracy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#43 Audit Follies - Atlantic differences, branding UnTrust, thunbs on Sarbanes-Oxley, alternates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#2 Audit Follies - Atlantic differences, branding UnTrust, thunbs on Sarbanes-Oxley, alternates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#41 An Understanding Database Theory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#23 More on garbage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#26 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#33 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#58 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#1 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#28 Password Complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#22 AOS: The next big thing in data storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#63 Is Silicon Valley strangeled by SOX?

2741s, was Even worse than UNIX

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: 2741s, was Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 09:44:47 -0600
johnl@iecc.com (John L) writes:
The only problem with 2741s was that they were extremely unreliable. The Selectric mechanism wasn't intended to be driven at full speed page after page. In the terminal room at Princeton I used, I don't ever remember all of the dozen or so 2741s working at the same time. KSR 33's, on the other hand, just kept on working.

depends on the duty cycle they were manufactured for ... 1052-7 operator's consoles used essentially same golf ball mechanism ... but were manufactured for significantly heavier duty cycle. in fact most of the 1052 models were built for significantly heavier duty than 2741s.

i had 2741s for personal use (one at office and one at home for several yrs w/o problems).

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 10:10:10 -0600
"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
I know practically nothing of CDC culture, but quite a bit about DEC culture, going way back. My impression of CDC culture, gleaned indirectly from what Niklaus Wirth had to say about the CDCmachines, is that CDC culture discovered interactive development later than DEC culture did. I'm just about certain that IBM culture discovered interactive development later than DEC culture did. This is somewhat related to the topic at hand.

I've often commented that it wasn't that IBM culture didn't have interactive development ... which was comparable to features/size of most other vendors (that might be considered interactive) ... it was that in the 60s, 70s & much of the 80s, the batch market size dwarfed the interactive.

in afc ng ... i've often mentioned that the number of vm/43xx customer installs were larger than vax/vms installs ... in part because some number of large customers would order then in blocks of 100s at a time (i don't believer there were ever any single vax/vms orders for 1000 machines ... until possibly you got to microvax). misc. old email discussing 43xx activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx

internally ... all the original relational/sql work was done on vm ... lots of past system/r posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and the internal network was larger than the (whole) internet/arpanet from just about the beginning until sometime mid-85 ... and was nearly all vm machines. misc. past internal network postings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

one of my hobbies was building and supporting highly modified custom operating system for internal distribution. i've periodically joked that the number of customer batch systems were much larger than the number of customer vm systems. the number of customer vm systems were much larger than the total number of internal vm systems. the total number of internal vm systems were much larger than the peak number of internal vm systems that i provided distribution and support for. however, that peak number (that i directly built, distributed, etc) was still as large as the total number of multics systems that ever existed. this comparison was somewhat because the vm stuff had started on the 4th flr of 545 tech sq ... and the multics stuff was on the 5th flr ... misc. past posts about science center and 545 tech sq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

in the early 80s ... bitnet/earn for a time was comparable in size to internet. bitnet/earn was based on similar vm technology used in the internal network ... but totally different network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

it wasn't that the IBM culture involved in interactive was smaller than other vendors interactive activity ... it was that the batch market acitivty was so much larger, that skewed perception.

for some topic drift ... post mentioning recent news article
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#68 A tribute to Jim Gray

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 11:12:48 -0600
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
No, I'm assuming that virtual payments mean I will need to instruct some entity to transfer money from one account to another. Some identifying information will need to be made public, or how will I tell the money where to go?

Either I need to provide my account number to the person I want to give money to so that they can withdraw the money, or the person I want to give money to needs to give me his or her account number so that I can send the money. Alternately, we could both give our account numbers to a trusted third party. But you can't get around needing to give out the account number or other personally identifying information.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#65 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

the issue isn't so much that you divulge the account number ... it is that the account number (and other "static" information) is sufficient to authenticate and perform a transactions .... making the infrastructure vulnerable to replay attacks.

some recent posts about authentication independent of the transaction and authentication tied to the transaction (i.e. when they are separate, it is possible that the infrastructure becomes vulnerable to other kinds of attacks ... like man-in-the-middle attacks):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#73 public key pas>sword authentication
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#74 public key password authentication
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#65 Public key encrypt-then-sign or sign-then-encrypt?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#66 More Tipping Point evidence -POS vendors sued

in the past, i've mentioned that one-time account numbers (good for one use only) have been tried as countermeasure to replay attacks:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#36 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#43 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?

this week ... there was announcement of a different kind of one-time value (as countermeasure to replay attacks):

VeriSign to use one-time passwords for bank cards
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/060607-vendors-seek-unity-on-identity.html
VeriSign looks to offer bank cards with one-time passwords
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9018518
VeriSign will ship two-factor authentication for debit cards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/verisign_twofactor_authentication/
VeriSign to offer passwords on bank card
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2007-05-01-verisign-passwords_N.htm?csp=34

note that just having unique per transaction information ... aka or "dynamic data" ... while it may be countermeasure to replay attacks ... it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't vulnerable to things like man-in-the-middle attacks ... it depends on details of the implemenation. for example, in the posts about yes cards ... "dynamic data" is suggested as countermeasure to the yes card replay attack vulnerability. However, the "dynamic data" implementation may still be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

in posts about the "naked transaction" metaphor ... the countermeasure integrates the authentication and integrity operations with the actual transaction ... in effect "armoring" the transaction ... as countermeasure to wide range of attacks (including replay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments

and misc. posts mentioning man-in-the-middle attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm

now, there may some additional confusion about two-factor authentication ... referenced in one of the articles.

nominally, 3-factor authentication refers to
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor

... now, normally, multi-factor authentication is assumed to be more secure because the different factors are subject to different threats and exploits ... for example PINs (i.e. something you know) are considered countermeasure to lost/stolen cards (i.e. something you have) ... modulo writing the PIN on the card.

dynamic data built into the card ... isn't considered multi-factor authentication ... i.e. providing different countermeasures to a single threat ... like lost/stolen card. dynamic data built into the card is more secure form of a single mode of authentication ... providing countermeasure to replay attacks ... but can still vulnerable to single threat from a lost/stolen card.

Even worse than UNIX

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 11:48:59 -0600
timcaffrey@aol.com (Tim McCaffrey) writes:
Of course, with IDE drives looking to move to 4K sectors, the side-effect of a single sector failure for databases can be all that more annoying.

all other things being equal, any specific 4k record might have 8times the probability of failing as 512 byte record (being 8times as large ... also comes up in things like yield when manufacturing large sized chips).

however, the better FEC may reduce the overall number of record hard failures that a disk might have i.e. improves the overall reliability of a drive while increasing the probability of any specific record failure by something less than 8times. raid has become much more common place as countermeasure to both drive and record failures.

in the 80s ... when we were doing HSDT project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

we were working with a company called cyclotomics that specialized in reed-solomon error correcting codes ... for some of our high-speed links. cyclotomics had also been active in FEC for cdrom standard (with 2k byte blocks) ... and were eventually bought by Kodak.

some of this was because some of the links where high-speed satellite links (i.e. on a link getting 10**-9 bit-error-rate, 15/16ths reed-solomon FEC could provide the effective equivalent of 10**-15 bit-error-rate ... i.e. about six orders of magnitude improvement). we also had somebody that was considered one of the five best satellite RF engineers in the world and who also happened to be a graduate student of reed's at caltech. but then ... he would also say that his favorite instructor at mit in his undergraduate days had been my wife's father.

in any case, i was trying to really push the envolope (at the time) ... trying to do an interface that would sustain up to 3mbytes/sec ... do reed-solomon FEC and do crypto (along with being able to handle changing crypto key on every packet ... i.e. stepup from raw link encryptor).

past posts mentioning reed-solomon and/or other FEC work:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#28 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#115 What is the use of OSI Reference Model?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#210 AES cyphers leak information like sieves
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#38 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#1 4M pages are a bad idea (was Re: AMD 64bit Hammer CPU and VM)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#80 Disks size growing while disk count shrinking = bad performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#71 Encryption + Error Correction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#53 Free Desktop Cyber emulation on PC before Christmas
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#27 shirts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#3 Calculations involing very large decimals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#73 1950s AT&T/IBM lack of collaboration?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#37 Why doesn't Infiniband supports RDMA multicast
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#11 Mainframes (etc.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#43 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#25 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#27 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#52 Go-Back-N protocol?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#44 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#45 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#29 Just another example of mainframe costs

Even worse than UNIX

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 15:56:43 -0600
"David Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
Linux already will do record orientated I/O thats why C has two I/O paradigms.Looking for an <LF> character seems pretty trivial compared to the overhead of MVS variable length i/o which has logical ecord sizes on the front of each record. Even worse if you are doing variable block size on tape where you have the block size in the front as well. Also note that MVS disks (usually known as DASD) can have each track formatted with a different block size. In practice a given file will usually have the same block size for all blocks, so for cards sized records they will often be blocked 800 or 8000, whereas for a file with longer records bigger blocks will be used. Thats why you need tables like this to "allocate" a file:-


http://sdisw.com/vm/dasd_capacity.html

Thank goodness for fixed block disks...


vm & cms used logical fixed-block from the start ... even on ckd disks. normal os/360 genre would dynamically physically format dasd track. vm/cms would initialize dasd tracks to standard format.

these days i believe all "DASD" is physically some form of fixed-block ... with controller providing the magic emulation of CKD.

x-over post with old formulas for calculating overhead number of records per physical track ... for various tracks and tecnologies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#5 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#8 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#13 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion

... i.e. from q&d conversion of old gcard ios3270 to html
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html#26.3

MTS *FS tape format?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: MTS *FS tape format?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 16:08:59 -0600
"David Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
I only ever used MTS on the pre 3270 (I forget the model) displays. I seem to recall that the screen was buffered in controller memory. How I wish I had kept the manuals from then...

2260? ... here is mts reference mentioning 2260
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery8.html

above also mentions reference to 2703 terminal controller and designing something better from pdp with pointer to here:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery7.html

when i was an undergraduate ... i was involved in doing something similar ... but building a "better" terminal controller out of interdata/3 (which evolved into combination of interdata/4 and interdata/3s). there was some subsequent article about getting blameed for contributing to the clone controller business .... lots of past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

later interdata was bought and the boxes marketed under the perkin/elmer brand. within the past decade ... i even ran into installation with still operating perkin/elmer box handling a lot of traffic in a large transaction processing datacenter.

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 17:58:42 -0600
paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
also, not sure if you could even buy them then or around 1965 when the 360's made their splash, the price was nominal to satisfy accountants, either or both corporate or governmental and leasing was the only way to acquire. the even bigger money was in maintenance fees and buyer lock-in.

much smaller world then. around 1990, i asked some knowledgeable hardware types how many mainframes there were in the world and how many were sold per year, of 3033 class (speed of what was called a "couple of mips") and the general concensus seemed to be several thousand, with a big sales year for Hitachi, Amdahl and IBM consisting of several hundred boxes sold. i know some 4341/4381's approached that mip rating, but find it hard to believe that there were many customers who ordered hundreds of them.

Multiply those numbers by a few dozen or a hundred real programmers for each cpu and it's not hard to see why brain-washed oldtimers wax nostalgic or why there is so much commercial chaos now, with hundreds of thousands of accomplished programmers who have an equal right to believe they have seen the truth.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design.

4341 was around mip (early models slightly less, later ones more).

both vax/vms and 43xx machines appeared to drop below threshhold and started trend towards department machines. by the mid-80s and 4381 time-frame ... workstations and larger PCs were started to take over that market segment.

posting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers
with old email reference to a customer upgrading/changing order from 20 to a couple hundred over a period of approx. six months.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404b

internally the explosion in the machines as departmental machines had a large number of the conference rooms (like in STL and other locations) being taken over for 43xx departmental machines

major market segment that were early into ordering hundreds at a time was chip industry (for running chip design tools ... things that would eventually migrate to the emerging high-end workstations).

old post with a decade of vax/vms machines sliced & diced by model, year, us/non-us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction

43xx ... aka 4331 (follow-on to 135/138) and 4341 (follow-on to 145/148) shipped more in that mid-range market than DEC. both 43xx follow-on and dec vax/vms show the effect of workstations and large PCs starting to take over that mid-range market in the mid-80s.

six 4341s would provide higher aggregate performance than 3033 at lower cost ... and were easier to justify and easier to house. some of the old 43xx email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx

includes discussions working with the disk division on moving various disk design and development tools to clusters of 43xx machines ... that resided in various locations outside the datacenter (and off of the large mainframes that required extensive faciilties, cooling, and space requirements in large datacenters). part of the discussion was that there was never going to be any way that they were going to be able to cost justify and/or provide physical facilities ... for the amount of processing that was going to be needed (assuming the high-end mainframes).

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 18:10:41 -0600
paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
Lynn, Thanks, have you any sales numbers?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design.

old post with a decade of vax/vms machines sliced & diced by model, year, us/non-us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction

i.e. a decade of vax/vms machines "sales", sliced & diced by model, year, us/non-us

and 43xx shipped more to customers than vax/vms.

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 20:14:20 -0600
paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
coming back now, i think it was the 2321. with any luck, i'll blow a valve before everybody else gets sick of this tripe.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design.

x-over thread from mainframe newsgroup mentioning 2321:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#51 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#63 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#64 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#0 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#3 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#5 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#12 FBA rant

Disc Drives

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disc Drives
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 06:39:07 -0600
isw <isw@witzend.com> writes:
Drive manufacturers often quote something like a "five year" service lifetime for drives. I am led to believe that it's due to bearing failure. Is that not correct?

recent post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#13 Question on DASD Hardware

with a few references to report published by google on detailed statistics on disk drive failures

and a couple other references ...

Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131168-c,harddrives/article.html

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 06:57:10 -0600
"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
Fair enough. IBM culture was big enough, at the time, so it could accommodate a large number of internal subcultures. The part of IBM culture that was visible to me was definitely not into interactive development.

Even though they had interactive terminals, on line editing, etc. etc. compiling a source program was a batch job. And that affected the workflow.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design

no, the comment was the "customer" market size for interactive computing was comparable to other vendor's interactive computing market size.

that is separate from the comment that the internal interactive use was extensive.

however, the observation was that the batch market size was so much larger (than either) ... that it skewed a lot of perception.

there were several internal battles over feature/function of 3270 terminals ... with product managers frequently claiming the 3270 major market was for "data entry" (related to batch environments) as opposed to interactive computing (in part ... again ... because the "data entry" market size was so much larger than the interactive computing market size).

for some topic drift ... part of it was resolved with the introduction of ibm/pc. i've frequently commented that a big part of the uptake for ibm/pc was that there was large business volume in 3270 desktop terminals. ibm/pc cost about the same as 3270 terminal ... and it could emulate a 3270 terminal with some local application software capability ... in a single desktop footprint. it would be an easy business justification no-brainer to switch the 3270 terminal allocated budget from real 3270s to ibm/pc. lots of past posts related to terminal emulation and market uptake for ibm/pc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

the ("original") virtual machine system was cp40 developed at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

on a specially modified 360/40 with virtual memory hardware ... and "CMS" (cambridge monitor system) for interactive computing. When standard 360/67 with virtual memory became available, cp40 was ported and renamed cp67. later with the introduction of virtual memory standard on all 370s, cp67 morphed into vm370 (and cms was renamed to the conversational monitor system).

the really big volumes in vm370 started to appear with 4341s ... with the explosion in the mid-range market segment (also seen by DEC with vax/vms). subsequently in the mid-80s, this market segment started moving to workstations and large PCs.

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 07:16:04 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
on a specially modified 360/40 with virtual memory hardware ... and "CMS" (cambridge monitor system) for interactive computing. When standard 360/67 with virtual memory became available, cp40 was ported and renamed cp67. later with the introduction of virtual memory standard on all 370s, cp67 morphed into vm370 (and cms was renamed to the conversational monitor system).

the really big volumes in vm370 started to appear with 4341s ... with the explosion in the mid-range market segment (also seen by DEC with vax/vms). subsequently in the mid-80s, this market segment started moving to workstations and large PCs.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design

for other topic drift ... the original relational/sql implementation was done at SJR on vm370 (in the late 70s, backus office was about six doors down from mine, and codd's office was upstairs from mine). lots of past references to system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

then there was system/r technology transfer from SJR to Endicott for SQL/DS (i.e. vm370, vs/e, 4341s, etc).

for some other drift ... one of the people in the meeting mentioned here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15

claimed to have handled majority of the technology transfer from Endicott back to STL for DB2 (even tho SJR and STL were only about 10 miles apart). This was all "mainframe" and mostly implemented in PLS. (DB2 on the corporation's mainframe "batch" platform, MVS)

Later there was "SHELBY" project done in Toronto to do a relational DBMS implementation for OS2 implemented in C. This became available on a number of (non-mainframe) platforms and is also marketed as DB2. a few past posts mentioning shelby:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#1 Foreign key in Oracle Sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#41 Mainframe Applications and Records Keeping?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#13 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones

Interrupts

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Interrupts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 09:24:17 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
And the Computer Center has a Cray for you. It has never failed before when you've used it for your long runtime calculations. Are you, the researcher, going to spend your valuable time writing checkpoint software or are you going to work on the numerical analysis code?

I know what the chocie will be...and it ain't checkpointing for a system that has never been known to crash.


in much of the 70s, SJR ran MVT 370/195 service ... that a lot of organizations used, however, backlog & turn around could be measured in months.

one of the things i've mentioned before is when bldg. 15 (disk product test lab) got 3033 ... we were able to move air bearing simulation application (part of designing floating thin-film heads) move the 195 across the street to the 3033 ... getting significantly better turn-around ... a couple recent posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#46 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#83 Disc Drives

the 3033 had about half the thruput of the peak 195 thruput ... however a 3033 with effectively zero percent utilized would have much better turn-around than waiting weeks for 195 turn around.

palo alto science center also was getting lengthy turn-arounds on some of their numerical intensive workload being run by sjr's 370/195. they had a 370/145 running vm (they had done both the morph from cms\apl to apl\cms as well as the apl microcode assist on the machine) ... which had about 1/30th the thruput of 195. The 370/195 batch workload ran 24hrs/day 7day/week. Palo Alto's vm interactive service was primarily first shift and the machine was mostly unloaded 2nd, 3rd and weekends. Palo Alto did some checkpoint support and started the application on their 145 in the background ... so it got whatever spare cycles were available 1st shift and much of the off-shift processing cycles. While it might take the application several weeks to complete on the 145 ... that was better turn-around than they were getting from the sjr 195.

misc. past posts mentioning palo alto moving numerical intensive application from sjr 195 to their own 145 (that only had about 1/30 the processing rate)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#22 Golden Era of Compilers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was: Movies with source code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#63 Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#27 Beyond 8+3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#77 COMTEN- IBM networking boxes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#54 Filesystems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#69 Multics Concepts For the Contemporary Computing World
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#21 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on 7 Apr 2004
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#34 August 23, 1957
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#4 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#44 Intel engineer discusses their dual-core design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#34 Power5 and Cell, new issue of IBM Journal of R&D
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#8 Free to good home: IBM RT UNIX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#0 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#4 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#16 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#27 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 09:59:58 -0600
"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
You are absolutely right. I can back that up from my own experience. At about the 1969 time frame, I had been using interactive timesharing systems for a while, and I knew how to use the debugger and the text editor amazingly well. But my ability to design a piece of software that was logically correct (barring minor errors) at the outset was, in retrospect, less than it might otherwise have been.

Between 1969 and 1980, due to a series of job changes and outlook changes, I migrated from assembler to Pascal. Pascal was the first language that I learned thoroughly before writing any programs. And, in the Pascal learning materials, there was a great deal about designing a program correctly.

Wirth had the attitude that there was no reason why a carefully written program shouldn't compile on the first try. I never got as rigid as that. But Pascal ended up being the main reason I never learned the VAX debugger. The VAX debugger was, by all accounts, much more powerful than the earlier more primitive tools I had used (DDT for example).


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design

for other topic drift ... mention that system/r, sql/ds and (mainframe) DB2 was primarily PLS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design

slight drift with some past comments about PLS in relationship to System/R implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing

however, i've mentioned also working on a "relational" DBMS implementation for the Los Gatos VLSI tool group (that had some participation from some people in STL). This was relational in the sense that all the relations were directly instantiated ... rather than a data dictionary that applied to a uniform table structure. It shared characteristics with System/R that the "relations" were abstracted with indexes under the covers (and not exposed as part of the data).

The tools group had been doing extensive work on various kinds of languages using Metaware's TWS ... misc. past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#0 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns

and developed a Pascal implementation that was used extensively for numerous tools ... including the (tools group) DBMS implementation ... recent reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#61 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings

it was also eventually released as vs/pascal language product.

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 10:28:08 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
Study: Signature Debit Fraud Runs 15 Times Higher Than on PIN Debit
http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=738


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#58 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#59 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

slightly related article:

The T.J. Maxx Hack Illuminates Reality Credit Card Companies Want to Hide from Online Merchants, Says Payment Service Provider
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/5/prweb522888.htm

and old post on security proportional to risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61

and reference to attackers frequently are easily able to outspend defenders:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#26 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#20 T.J. Maxx data theft worse than first reported
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#56 T.J. Maxx data theft worse than first reported
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#64 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

lots of general posts mentioning fraud, risks, threats, vulnerabilities, and/or exploits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 12:13:01 -0600
paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
Nit: I think this should have said "typical" IBM culture. I once worked in an atypical IBM shop where, for example, very few programmers knew any JCL, that included assembler programmers. Nearly everybody used TSO and TSOTEST exclusively for compiles and assemblies, so-called "link-edits" and debugging. There was no waiting for batch jobs to start. Typical IBM installations usually forbade this for cost reasons but a few bought enough hardware to allow it. I found it just as productive as using the early Borland "Turbo" integrated environments on a dedicated PC. Very few people needed to understand how to write tso "clist" scripts, just as very few Borland customers needed to modify the standard "workflow". One could expect several thousand lines to assemble and link with other code in as little as ten seconds and usually compiles too. One typically was dealing with several hundred thousand lines in any given component, but things were arranged so that usually only a handful of modules needed to re-compiled.

for much of the seventies, SJR ran batch MVT service on 370/195. There was some numerical intensive "JOBs" that could have several week turn around. recent post with reference to palo alto science center moving one of their jobs to background on their vm/145 (still talking several weeks to complete ... but turn around was shorter/less than what they were getting on the 195 ... peak performance of 195 was about 30times that of 145):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts

with respect to pascal comments in previous post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design.

this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings

mentions much later when the corporation had decided to transition to some number of COTS VLSI tools ... as part of that transition they were providing some of the VLSI tool vendors copies of some of the internal applications.

by that time, vs/pascal was supported for both mainframe operation and rs/6000 (aix) operation. however, as part of the COTS tools transition, various of internal tools had to also run on other vendor workstations. I had opportunity to port one 60,000 line pascal application to other platforms ... however, it seemed like these other implementations had never gotten much past the student programming application stage (and never dealt with a 60,000 line application).

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 12:49:39 -0600
"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
Fair enough. IBM culture was big enough, at the time, so it could accommodate a large number of internal subcultures. The part of IBM culture that was visible to me was definitely not into interactive development.

Even though they had interactive terminals, on line editing, etc. etc. compiling a source program was a batch job. And that affected the workflow.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Re: Newbie question on table design.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Re: Newbie question on table design.

one of the things you started to see with cp/cms in the 60s was the appearance of a number of personal computing applications (similar to various of the things that you would later see on PCs. in the 80s).

in the 60s, there were two operations that sort of spun off of the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

to offer commercial time-sharing services. they transitioned to 370 machines when virtual memory became readily available on all 370 machines. they were also joined by tymshare offering commercial vm370-based time-sharing services. lots of post posts mentioning cp/cms and vm/cms based time-sharing services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

for a little dbms tie-in .... in addition to original relational/sql system/r being done on vm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

there was also the ramis, nomad, focus genre that were done on vm/cms ... misc past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#15 CA-RAMIS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#17 CA-RAMIS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#12 Dreaming About Redesigning SQL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#15 Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#44 Shipwrecks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#35 PDP-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#37 PDP-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#37 Quote from comp.object

and a couple wiki refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCUS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramis_software

one of the things that started to show up with interactive computing was games. in the 70s, tymshare had ported the adventure dec fortran source to vm/cms and i obtained a copy for internal corporate distribution. at one point, the executives in STL complained that they thot nearly everybody was spending their days playing adventure on vm/cms (instead of doing dbms development). recent post mentioning adventure:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#0 10 worst PCs

in addition to the local internal corporate datacenters providing local vm/cms users interactive computing ... there was also the world-wide HONE system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

providing online, interactive services for sales, marketing and field people world-wide ... recent reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU

starting out with most of the application written in cms\apl on cp67 and then transitioning to vm370 and apl\cms. Sometime in the early to mid 70s, sales couldn't even submit a 370 order w/o it having first being processed by a HONE "configurator".

To continue the theme that there were a lot of cms personal computing applications ... the type of things you started seeing moving to PCs in the 80s ... there were a lot of APL-based applications doing "what-if" type things ... that you later see implemented with PC-based spreadsheets.

An early one was when the cambridge science center first ported apl\360 to cms for cms\apl. The apl\360 service offerings typically limited workspace sizes to 16kbytes (or in some cases 32k). With cms\apl, the size of the APL workspace could be nearly as large as the virtual address space. This opened up a lot of "what-if" applications using real-world data. Early on, we found corporate business planners shipping tapes to Cambridge with the most sensitive customer and corporate business data ... and using the science center cms\apl facilities to run "what-if" business planning scenarios. a couple recent references mentioning business planners in corporate hdqtrs using the cambridge cms\apl facilities:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 13:16:20 -0600
Greg Menke <gdmnews@toadmail.com> writes:
There is a very big difference between interrupting a cpu and arbitrating writing a cache-line back to ram, the latter being what multiprocessors generally do. When there is no contention between cache-lines, then there is no delay.

maybe there is some reference about cross-cache chatter ... which doesn't show up with processor interrupts visible to software.

the 370 SMPs ... would slow down the processor machine cycle by ten percent ... to allow for cross-cache chatter ... and any actual cross-cache chatter (needing handling) would slow the processors down even further. basically, anytime that cache-line was obtained for alternation (whether store-thru cache implementation or a store-into cache implementation) ... there would have to be cross-cache invalidates to clear cache-line from any other processor.

the cross-cache overhead tripled going from two-processor smp configuration (one other cache to listen for) to four-processor smp (three other caches to listen for). in the 3084 time-frame, major operating systems had some amount of kernel storage re-organization to force kernel storage to be aligned on cache-line boundaries and allocated in multiples of cache-line units. this change supposedly improved overall avg. system thruput by 5-6percent (just eliminating possible kernel storage cache-line trashing, aka two different kernel storage areas overlapping in the same cache-line).

there have been some number of optimizations to eliminate cross-cache chatter overhead and allow better processor scaling. an early one was snoopy caches ... where all caches would watch all memory bus operations ... whenever one cache saw a memory bus operation from some other cache ... that involved a cache-line that it had loaded, it would invalidate it (aka sort of an implicit cross-cache signal).

note this is a cache function ... involving copies of the same data in different physical caches ... not a processor function. when you have multiple processors sharing the same physical cache ... the issue doesn't come up.

lots of past posts mentioning SMP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

a couple recent posts mentioning cross-cache chatter/overhead:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#63 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#16 What's a CPU second?

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:19:06 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
My experience with unions is they order you to work less and less and less. My Dad got severely spoken to (this was a Teamster union) for picking up a broom and sweeping his work area. Only the broom union members were allowed to touch a broom.

I was brought in during summer break as a full-time employee to help setup BCS (boeing computer services) operation (earlier they had talked me into giving a 40hr dataprocessing class during spring break to some of the BCS technical staff).

This was shortly after BCS had been formed ... it was sort of to move all dataprocessing into a separate business unit and change it from expense category and give it profit/loss responsibility (even if it was mostly internal corporate fund transfers ... however, it was also allowed to perform dataprocessing and consulting outside the company).

I ran into a similar situation when I suggested that I was going to install a pencil sharpner on the wall near my desk (this involved driving screws into the wall).

For other topic drift ... later at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

there was the son of one of the DNA guys on assignment ... who was heavy into APL programming at the science center ... after the port of apl\360 to cms\apl had been done ... some recent posts mentioning cms\apl:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#32 IBMLink 2000 Finding ESO levels
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#64 Is computer history taugh now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#31 Wylbur and Paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#62 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#17 Newbie question on table design

he left and joined BCS consulting. I dropped by later and he was explaining how they had a contract with USPS to do the financial modeling justifying postal stamp increase (from 8 to 10?) ... as I've often repeated before ... back then, APL was commoningly used for a lot of things that are currently done with spreadsheets.

for other drift ... a couple recent URLs:

IBM to Layoff Half of Global Services Division
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/04/1826221.shtml
Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_002027.html
IBM will erase 100,000 workers - man with one name
http://www.theregister.com/2007/05/05/ibm_cringely_100k/

Slightly drifting back to the topic ... business trips to various european plant sites in the early 70s ... recent posts with some mention
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#47 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#62 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?

when I noticed beer in the plant site vending machines ... it was explained that it was in the union contract (also wine/beer in various company cafeterias)

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:41:47 -0600
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> writes:
If the company goes under because of the retirement and medical plans the employee isn't helped either.

what i was told in the steel industry case ... was that companies were declaring bankruptcy when they showed that half the cost of a ton of steel was retirement benefits.

the problem seems to drift into the theme of the comptroller general claiming that nobody is able anymore of doing simple middle school arithmetic ... i.e. the benefits were not fully funded ... but were being paid out of the current operating revenue. The problem extended to executives, unions, gov. officials, and employees. Everybody was taking all the money they could at the moment ... and tomorrow was somebody else's problem.

Supposedly when the company went into the red in 1992 ... they also took a charge-off to move to fully funded retirement program (i.e. since they were already in the red, going further into the red didn't make that much difference). However, a lot of corporations never have bothered to do that ... assuming that it in the worst case, it can be left up to the taxpayers to cover the difference at some point in the future. An issue ... also raised by the comptroller general, is that it assumes the number of taxpayers continue to significantly outnumber the recipients ... there is also a matter of simple middle school arithmetic involved here too.

past posts mentioning comptroller general and his observation about the lack of even middle school arithmetic skills:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#41 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#44 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#61 Health Care

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:56:02 -0600
somewhat tieing together these two posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization

maybe there is requirement to return to using APL for doing financial modeling ... of course it still doesn't really make up for the lack of middle school arithmetic skills ... since it would take some understanding to even write the APL programs.

lots of past posts mentioning APL (and/or HONE):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 10:36:16 -0600
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization

other folklore ... i've seen lots of references ... but haven't actually read the statutes ... claims that in the mid-90s congress passed some legislation that changed some accounting rules, allowing companies to claim funded retirement plans as assets. it doesn't make a whole lot of practical difference to the running of the company ... except for possibly the size of executive bonuses that are tied to such numbers. however, there is the claim that since it is claimed as an asset, if a company were to declare bankruptcy ... assets are available for paying off creditors (possibly even including funded retirement benefits).

for other drift ... in the mid-80s (20+ yrs ago), I spent a summer touring around europe doing market support, giving talks and teaching classes (I wasn't paying close attention to geography and one sequence went boeblingen, stockholm, zurich over 3week period when it would have been much easier to do boeblingen, zurich, stockholm). At one location where i was teaching a 40hr, one week class, i was in the habit of coming in an hr or two early and staying a couple hrs in the evening to login back to the states and do email and some number of other things.

i then asked if i could come in over the weekend to get some work done. i was told that i was creating a significant bureaucratic paper work problem for the local management. It seems that the company benefits had included vacation time that was one week more than the gov. mandated. As a result, the employees had come to think of themselves as priviledge compared to their fellow countrymen.

Recently, the gov. had just increased the mandated vaction time by one week and many employees believed that the company should then also increase its vacation time by a week (to preserve the one week more than gov. mandated for all other workers in the country). Since the company hadn't done that, the unions were taking various work actions. This included the guard union observing that I was spending more than 8hrs/day in the bldg ... and filing various forms with the gov. about work violations (which management had to respond to ... also in writing with the appropriate forms). If I were to (also) come in on the weekend, it would significantly increase the gov. paperwork forms that they would have to file (in response to the anticipated forms that would be filed by the guard union).

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 12:42:16 -0600
Greg Menke <gdmnews@toadmail.com> writes:
Microsoft software runs on single or multiple cpu systems. Win9x and earlier won't take advantage of multiple processors, IIRC extra processors are idle. You seem preoccupied with synchronization methods but few minutes using google will show you that this is a well-solved problem. Yes, its true that if there are no measures taken to serialize access to shared resources that the processors will step on each other's work- but its also true that serializing them is easily done. Google compare and swap insructions.

or check some principles of operation ... from 370 onwards. Charlie invented compare&swap instruction when he was working on fine-grain multiprocessor locks for cp67 at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

the mnemonic CAS comes from charlie's initials ... which then required coming up with the phrase compare and swap, to go with charlie's initials.

as previously mentioned when attempting to first get compare&swap into 370 architecture ... it was rejected based on various assertions that test&set instruction was sufficient for handling multiprocessor synchronizations. the challenge given was that in order to justify compare&swap instruction inclusion in 370 architecture ... there had to be uses that weren't multiprocessor specific; thus were born the descriptions of using compare&swap instruction in multithreaded/multiprogramming applications ... whether or not running in a multiprocessor environment. a few recent post references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#49 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

above post in this thread also includes URL pointer to the description of compare&swap uses in the current principles of operation (some 35yrs later)

lots of past posts mentioning multiprocessor and/or compare&swap instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 13:03:33 -0600
paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
I had the attitude that "batch" was a synonym for "bait and switch". Marketing material would show people getting instant answers to various questions but once the new machinery was installed, customers would complain that there weren't hours in the day to get all their work done. Service rep's would then advise that productivity would improve with better utilization, eg., keeping the expensive cpu 100% busy, eliminate interactive work, make people schedule their machine time in advance and jostle for position in the queue. Soon a scheduling software industry appeared. Accountants saw the opportunity to record and ration machine time. Even when the TRS80's, Apples and PC's appeared, nostalgia for those ways didn't evaporate, maybe even grew. Human nature to preserve the old ways and idiosyncrasies of most fields. It will probably take decades for SQL to go away.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#16 Newbie question on table design.

note as somewhat implied in this previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design.

the development tools used by SJR for system/r and sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray is Missing

weren't nearly as sophisticated or powerful as the tools used by the tools group in the los gatos VLSI lab for their DBMS development. Somewhat as a result, the tools group also had somewhat more experience and sophistication in doing a DBMS language for their implementation.

for topic other drift ... a reference about early on, somebody doing some cms application re-implementation for the TRS80
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"

for slightly other drift ... GML
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml

had been invented at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

in 1969 (aka G, M, and L, are the initials of the three people responsible ... they then had to come up with the phrase "generalized mark-up language" to correspond with their initials). It then took quite awhile for GML to evolve thru SGML, HTML, XML, etc.

GML language support had been added to the CMS document formating application "SCRIPT". Archeological reference to HTML evolving from the "waterloo" version of CMS script command in use at CERN:
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/

other historical trivia, the first webserver outside europe was on vm/cms system at slac:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

for other trivia ... the current w3c offices are just around the corner from the old science center location at 545 tech. sq.

misc. past posts mentioning the "waterloo" version of the CMS script command:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#46 ... the need for a Museum of Computer Software
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#72 Specifying all biz rules in relational data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#74 Specifying all biz rules in relational data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#34 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#49 Moving assembler programs above the line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005l.html#10 who invented CONFIG/SYS?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#3 winscape?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#12 Flat Query
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#35 Fw: Tax chooses dead language - Austalia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#55 The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#16 Comic Sans was Re: An alternative history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#29 old tapes

a little dbms folklore

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: a little dbms folklore
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 15:34:00 -0600
from recent thread over in comp.databases.theory (with standard amount of topic drift):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#16 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#17 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#24 Newbie question on table design

Even worse than UNIX

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 16:40:19 -0600
ArarghMail705NOSPAM writes:
No. Core dumps don't mean much unless you already have a pretty good clue as to what is where in core.

past posts mentioning dump analyzer program that i wrote in REX(X)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx

objective was in 3mths elapsed time working half-time ... have something with ten times the function and ten times the performance of the existing tool (that had been implemented in assembler). it included some amount of code that searched the dump for specific kinds of failure signatures.

recent posts with references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#30 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#43 Latest Principles of Operation

in cp67, "svc 0" instruction (supervisor call with function code zero) was used to invoke the kernel failure & automatic dump process. they were sprinkled around the kernel to invoked falure/dump when various conditions were encountered. one of the enhancement for cp67 "release 3" was to add automatic reboot/reipl after the dump had been taken. recent posts mentioning cp67 automatic reboot
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#22 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#23 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#44 1960s: IBM mgmt mistrust of SLT for ICs?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#21 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

in the morph from cp67 to vm370, i suggested that each of the svc0 instructions be followed by unique identification codes to facilitate identifying the failure cause. The 1st response to the suggestion was that you can't embed data in an instruction stream ... since there would be an execution failure on return to the svc0 instrucation. Pause ... there was never going to be a return to the svc0 instruction ... since the kernel was going to dump and fail.

Even worse than UNIX

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 17:29:28 -0600
Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
Ten times the function and performance? Usually I've been quite satisfied to get three to four times the performance; while management usually expected only 1.5 to 2 times ... Thus making me look pretty good when the program got finished.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#26 Even worse than UNIX

it was somewhat a given that it might be possible to do ten times the function ... with appropriate higher-level language ... as compared to assembler code implementation ... the trick was also getting ten times the performance out of the interpreted REXX implementation compared to the assembler implementation ... part of the demonstration was to support a claim that freed from having to deal with low-level assembler gorp, it allowed a person to better concentrate on solving the problem ... which also included being able to recognize new ways of optimized implementation.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx

early on in working on cp67 as undergraduate ... i had been known to achieve 100 times performance improvement for some kernel pathlengths. but over the yrs ... as more and more things were optimized ... it became harder and harder to find additional things where it was possible to obtain 100 times performance improvement.

Even worse than UNIX

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 17:42:51 -0600
Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
Ten times the function and performance? Usually I've been quite satisfied to get three to four times the performance; while management usually expected only 1.5 to 2 times ... Thus making me look pretty good when the program got finished.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#26 Even worse than UNIX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#27 Even worse than UNIX

for totally different subject ... about a decade ago, we had been asked to look at ROUTES ... one of the major applications in airline res system ... and given a list of ten things that were then currently impossible to do.

looking at it, completely changed the paradigm of how ROUTES went about being implemented ... and were also able to then implement all ten impossible things. As part of the complete paradigm change ... also speeded up things by a factor of 100 times.

However, also as part of the paradigm change ... three separate person/human transactions were collapsed into a single operation ... and that single operation did quite a bit additional work (compared to what had happened in all three of the previous separate operations) ... so it actually netted out to have only ten times the "transaction" rate as the prior implementation (although the definition of what was now a transaction had dramatically changed).

a couple recent posts mentioning having redone ROUTES:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#22 Bidirectional Binary Self-Joins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#41 US Airways badmouths legacy system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings

note initially ... it was only about 20 times faster ... but careful study of the cache structure and re-arranging a lot of program data structures to better match the machine's cache operation ... got another five times improvement (5*20 ... netted 100 times).

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 08:07:38 -0600
Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btopenworld.com> writes:
I first programmed a double CPU minicomputer in 1979. Ten years later microprocessors had allowed the electronic engineers to get 6 CPUs on the same shelf. Each CPU had its own software. The software to control the radios was definitely different from the software to run the MMI. However they all had to work together to get what we now call email out.

most microprogrammed 360s & 370s had physical separate boxes for different microprocessors ... when there were different microprocessors ... i.e. processors, channels, controllers, devices ... example is 370/158 with microprocessor ... but two different microcode loads ... one for 370 execution and one for integrated channel operation. i've mentioned before that transition to 303x ... involved repackaging a 158 microprocessor engine (this is not so much micro as in small but micro as in microcode) as (dedicated) "channel director" (with only the integrated channel microcode load). Then a 3031 become two 370/158 microprocessors ... one with just the 370 microcode load and the "channel director" with just the integrated channel microcode load.

however, in the early 70s, Boeblingen got into a little trouble (with corporate) doing something different for the 370/115 and 370/125. They created a 9-position shared memory bus (i.e. positions for up to nine processors). A 370/115 was an microengine running 370 microcode load able to execute 370 at about 80kips ... and 2-8 other (identical microengines) with various microcode loads to perform various kinds of i/o controller functions. A 370/125 was identical to a 370/115 ... except the microengine executing 370 microcode load was about 50% faster, able to execute 370 instructions at about 120kips.

The microengines executed an avg. 10 native instructions for every 370 instruction ... so the native performance of the 115 engine was around 800kips and the native performance of the 125 engine was around 1.2mips.

since there was no processor caches (this were slower microprocessors that didn't have the performance mismatch between processor speed and memory speed) ... and the system didn't run similar microcode loads ... there was less problem with multiprocessor coordination ... although the processors executing i/o controller functions were responsible for "executing" channel programs ... which could also be operated on by the processor running 370 microcode.

recent posts mentioning Boeblingen lab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#14 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#47 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#62 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization

recent posts mentioning executing (360/370) "channel programs"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#28 SVCs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#14 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#17 A way to speed up level 1 caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#19 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#27 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#46 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#0 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#4 ISAM and/or self-modifying channel programs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#6 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#20 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#33 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#34 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#3 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#7 The Mainframe in 10 Years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#9 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?

recent posts mentioning 303x channel director
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#18 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#21 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#62 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#32 I/O in Emulated Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#28 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#65 History - Early Green Card
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#17 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#57 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#1 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 08:33:35 -0600
Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btopenworld.com> writes:
BAH we are not talking about a 5 ton Cray from 30 years ago but a single chip smaller than a finger nail. One microprocessor chip containing 80 X86 family CPUs (cores). It is designed to go into standard home PCs in 2 years time.

... er, almost

Intel pledges 80 cores in five years
http://news.com.com/Intel+pledges+80+cores+in+five+years/2100-1006_3-6119618.html

from above:
Intel's prototype uses 80 floating-point cores, each running at 3.16GHz, Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, said in a speech following Otellini's address. In order to move data in between individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached directly to the bottom of the chip, he said.

... snip ...

the prototype wasn't full x86 processors

The Era of Tera: Intel Reveals more about 80-core CPU
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2925

now Rapport has 256 core and moving to "kilocore" ... i.e. 1024 cores.

IBM, Rapport's Kilocore, and reconfigurable computing
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060407-6556.html

and with a little help from IBM becomes 1025 cores ... with the addition of a single powerpc core.

but as per this post ... there is significant barrier with regard to existing programming paradigms and being able to effectively utilize the cores:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

also had ref to last yrs hotchips ... which had a number of presentations by cellphone companies about high-performance, low-power multicore chips ... able to process highly compressed full-motion video.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 09:35:58 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Starting rate was $29/hour....but I can't recall the year.

which may be the salary ... not the fully loaded rate. i seem to remember something from '90s about usps entry fully loaded rate (salary, taxes, benefits, etc) around $30/hr ... slight topic drift, post mentioning (old) usps financial modeling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization

this gao report
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06285.pdf

has a lot of stuff sliced and diced in a number of different ways for salary/wages, benefits, fully loaded compensation for period 1991 to 2005. For instance, avg total (fully loaded) compensation in 2005 for all workers in companies with >500 workers was $33.48/hr.

so foreign automobile companies did a couple different things when import quotas were instituted. one was move from cars at the low-end to cars at the high-end (i.e. the import quotas were on the number of cars ... so change from selling cars less than domestic vehicles to selling same number of cars at the high-end).

the other tactic was start building cars in the US. one of the comments from the time was that they were use to being able to hire high-school graduates to perform the work. however, in the US they were finding they needed to require at least 2yrs college (junior college degree) in order to get people with at least high-school education.

other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization

misc. past posts mentioning foreign automobiles ... and/or census studies finding that at least half the high-school graduate age people were functionally illiterate
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#43 Foreign Cars (was: Computers in Science Fiction)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#61 TGV in the USA?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#51 [OT] Lockheed puts F-16 manuals online
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#14 In Search of Stupidity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 10:33:35 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Then it's not really an SMP system if there is only one bus. That makes the bus the single-point error.

SMP traditional stands for either 1) Symmetrical MultiProcessing or 2) Shared-Memory Processing (implying multiple processors sharing the same memory).

some vendors would market SMPs (only) with redundant and/or partionable configurations. for instance, in the 60s, for the 360 two-processor SMPs, it was always possible to split them and run as two, independent single processor machines. this continued thru the 370s up until the 3081 ... where they attempted to introduce to the term "dyadic" to differentiate it from the earlier configurations that could be partitioned into independent operations.

whether or not a particular vendors SMP was error-tolerate or not was more by convention than part of the industry definition of SMP.

recent post mentioning DEC press release moving from asymmetrical multiprocessing to symmetrical multiprocessing support (circa spring '88) ... i.e. they may have been SMP in the "shared-memory processing" sense ... but hadn't been SMP in the "symmetrical multiprocessing" sense:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#46 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?

lots of old posts mentioning smp and/or compare&swap instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

not that this was also referred to as "tightly-coupled" in mainframe circles ... to differentiate from "loosely-coupled" (i/o sharing but not memory sharing). tighly-coupled tended to be less fault resistant because common code (in common memory) could result in failures ... recent post mentioning study that indicated starting at least in the early 80s, hardware represented smaller and smaller portion of the cause of failures:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#76 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

as previously mentioned ... at one point, my wife had been conned into going to pok to be in charge of loosely-couple architecture ... where she originated Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

later we did the ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

and coined the terms disaster survivability and geographic survivability (to differentiate from disaster recovery).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

i.e. loosely-coupled and/or cluster implementations are somewhat easier to create geographically distributed failure recovery implementations. Also, as both hardware and software have gotten more reliable ... environmental problems/failures rise to the top of the list of common source of outages ... and as cost of hardware and transmission bandwidth have fallen, more and more services find that they can justify geographic distributed failure recovery (for continuous availability).

other topic drift ... old email referencing working on ha scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:21:40 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Starting rate was $29/hour....but I can't recall the year.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization

oh ... and these posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)

mentions an old article calling for 100percent tax on (massive) unearned profits in the automobile industry in the wake of the import quotas.

the article claimed that the purpose of the import quotas was to give the domestic automobile industry breathing room to remake themselves into a competitive body. the reduction in cheap imports would lesson the downward pressure on prices charged for domestic cars ... giving them increased profits which could be funneled into remaking their business. The article observed that instead, the (significant) increased profits went into increases in workers and executives salaries/bonuses and stock dividends.

There were also secondary effects ... with the foreign importers observing that they could sell as many high-end cars as low-end cars ... totally changed the type of car they sold. This almost totally eliminated the downward pressure on domestic car prices ... supposedly allowing domestic manufacturers to nearly double the price of the same automobile over a period of a few yrs.

There were other secondary effects ... the motivation to the foreign importers to totally change the type of car they sold ... also contributed to changing how they did car development ... cutting the traditional 7-8yrs elapsed time to 2-3yrs. Some of the effects of this could be eventually seen in the early 90s behind the "C4" effort in the domestic car industry, which was targeted at leveraging (primarily) IT/dataprocessing technology to cut the traditional 7-8yrs lead time to come out with a new model (aka yr to yr changes tend to be mostly cosmetic) to 3yrs (in order to finally(?) compete with foreign operations).

one of the issues behind C4 ... is that as long as car buying habits remain relatively static ... there isn't much to differentiate 7-8yr development cycle and 2-3yr development cycle. However, when buying habits go into same amount of flux and change ... being able to respond to what the customers are buying in 2-3yrs (or less) gives a significant advantage over organizations that take 7-8yrs to respond.

past posts mentioning C4 effort:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#61 TGV in the USA?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#51 [OT] Lockheed puts F-16 manuals online
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#14 In Search of Stupidity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness

IBM Unionization

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:30:57 -0600
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization

oops, do i hear the name john boyd and OODA-loops being whispered?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:41:53 -0600
John Ahlstrom <AhlstromJK@comcast.net> writes:
What kind of trouble with corporate and why?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#29 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

they weren't suppose to do multiple microprocessor common bus implementation. it is now long ago and far away (35yrs) ... but i have vague recollection that it may have involved some domestic plants complaining that Boeblingen had done a more advanced/competitive design

Display Technologies Evolution

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Display Technologies Evolution
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 13:46:57 -0600
Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes:
Monochrome plasma panels were also used at one point in products such as the IBM 3190 Information distributor, which had four times the resolution of a normal 80x25 screen, and could be used to display 1-4 logical screens, with a maximum single screen capacity up to 132x60 (a normal lineprinter page at that time).

3290 plasma display predated 3190 ... some search engine use found a picture/reference:
http://www.recycledgoods.com/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=7774&SubCategoryID=101&CategoryID=1

and

The History of Plasma Displays
https://www.plasmatvscience.org/plasmatv-history3.html

from above:
IBM took an early interest as well, and the lure of Big Blue's prestige and deep pockets forced Merriam and Alpert into some ticklish negotiations between the two corporate players, with the happy result that U of I collected a million dollars from IBM in exchange for another license. That license would lead in 1983 to the IBM 3290 Information Panel, "the industry's first mass-produced, large-screen plasma display terminal for commercial use," according to an IBM advertisement.

... snip ...

strange FTP problem--transatlantic asymmetry

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: strange FTP problem--transatlantic asymmetry
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 14:42:31 -0600
patrick.peters writes:
What kind of a problem gives you good latency numbers but poor application performance? What kind of problem only shows up when the big data flows move east?

routing doesn't have to be symmetrical, bandwidth/traffic shaping doesn't have to be symmetrical, individual physical links may not be symmetrical, contention may not be symmetrical (aka link may be symmetrical but dominant traffic flow may not be symmetrical, aka lots of traffic from servers in the west to clients in the east).

traceroute from both ends may give whether the hops are the same (symmetrical routing)

large packet traceroute (from both ends) may give whether the transmission latency over each individual hop is symmetrical.

Small packets may give similar latency for similar hop ... even if bandwidth/traffic of the links are significantly different (or different in different directions). traceroute with different port numbers might turn up port-number specific traffic shaping.

bandwidth/traffic shaping can occur at ip layer and may even be udp/tcp/port specific ... and can be asymmetrical. asymmetrical bandwidth can also occur at lower levels.

wiki page on traffic shaping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping

other traffic shaping reference from search engine
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios120/12cgcr/qos_c/qcpart4/qcfrts.htm

any of the possible characteristics might be asymmetrical for any specific hop.

Problem with TCP connection close

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Problem with TCP connection close
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 15:09:41 -0600
David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> writes:
Unfortunately, TCP takes resources and times to start up and shut down a connection. There's no a whole lot you can do about this. There are known serious hazards with trying to reduce the TIME_WAIT interval.

aka TCP session has a minimum seven packet exchange ... plus FINWAIT tail-end on close.

mid-90s HTTP webservers encountered significant TCP scale-up problem with common implementations that had linear scan of FINWAIT list. the problem was that some loaded webservers were cycling TCP sessions so fast (resulting in quite lengthy FINWAIT lists) that several of the major webservers were hitting 100% processor busy and spending nearly all of that scanning the FINWAIT list. Several vendors relatively quickly put together new releases that significantly reworked how FINWAIT list was handled.

there has also been work on reliable transactions protocols that had fewer minimum packet exchange ... i.e. like VMTP/RFC1045 with 5 minimum packet exchange.

Newbie question on table design

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design.
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 15:59:14 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
one of the things that started to show up with interactive computing was games. in the 70s, tymshare had ported the adventure dec fortran source to vm/cms and i obtained a copy for internal corporate distribution. at one point, the executives in STL complained that they thot nearly everybody was spending their days playing adventure on vm/cms (instead of doing dbms development). recent post mentioning adventure:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#0 10 worst PCs


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#17 Newbie question on table design

STL (south san jose, dbms and language development, subseqently renamed the silicon valley lab) and Hursley (UK, communication and cics development) looked at off-shift dataprocessing offloading in 1980. The dominant development platform at both locations was vm/cms interactive computing. like in the reference to palo alto vm/cms this sort of interactive workload tends to be running at full capacity during first shift with much lower off-shift use.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts

the strategy was to get a "high-bandwidth" double-hop satellite link between STL and Hursley (i.e. from west coast up to the geo-sync satellite over the US, down to the east coast, up again to geo-sync satellite over the atlantic and down to Hursley). Since there was 8hr time-difference ... some of the 1st shift Hursley workload could be run on the STL machines (being 3rd shift in california) and some of the 1st shift STL workload could be run on Hursley machines (being 2nd shift in UK).

This was going to be showcase operation ... so some of the strategy people stepped in to "force" the link to operate with MVS JES2/SNA (even tho the dominate operation was vm/cms which didn't use SNA for network links).

They tried to bring up JES2/SNA on the link ... and nothing happened. Somebody then suggested to try it with VM link just to check things out ... and it came up with no errors. They immediately switched back to JES2/SNA on the link and nothing happened. The "official" conclusion was that there was significant transmission errors on the double-hop satellite link and VM link error handling was too primitive to recognize the problems. The actual situation was that the JES2/SNA had built in round-trip timeout ... which the round-trip double-hop satellite propagation delay was exceeding (and which they couldn't "fix") ... but the VM link support did adjust for the round-trip (double-hop satellite) propagation delay.

for other MVS JES2 topic drift between San Jose and Hursley ... old post mentioning (unless converted) network traffic between different versions of MVS JES2 (with incompatible network traffic headers) would result in JES2 failure that would also bring down the MVS system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#8 vmshare

misc. other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#16 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#24 Newbie question on table design

past posts mentioning the attempt at San Jose/Hursley off-shift offloading:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#212 GEOPLEX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#35 HASP:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#19 tcp time out for idle sessions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#19 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#60 JES2 NJE setup
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#61 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#16 Why I use a Mac, anno 2006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#17 bandwidth of a swallow (was: Real core)

Disc Drives

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disc Drives
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 16:18:02 -0600
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
The real question is what is the MTBF for drives that spin-up/spin-down vs. the MTBF for drives that stay up all the time, and is the difference significant.

the previous reference to the google disk MTBF study on 100,000 drives (there is also mention of a cmu disk MTBF study on 100,000 drives)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#10 Disc Drives
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#13 Question on DASD Hardware

doesn't mention spin-up/spin-down frequency related to MTBF ... but does look at lightly loaded versus heavily loaded. slightly surprising is that after 3yrs, heavily loaded disks tend to have slightly better MTBF than lightly loaded disks (with possible explanation that less reliable heavily loaded disks tended to not make it to 3yrs).

z/VM usability

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: re: z/VM usability
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 17:14:27 -0600
Dave Wade wrote:
I know there is no commercial value in it, so it won't happen, but wouldn't it be nice if IBM realeased a software emulation that worked like the original XT/370 that emulated both the Hardware and CP calls and so would allow CMS itself to be run native on Linux or Windows... .. oh and of course would license CMS for such an evironment.

XT/370 was codenamed washington ... stripped down CP kernel running on modified 68k processor that provided 370 emulation (for problem and some privileged instructions). The "370" had its own dedicated processor memory. Running under dos was a program called "cp/88" and the CP kernel would communicate with "cp/88" for emulation of I/O operations (i.e. cp/88 provided real device i/o support and communicated back and forth with the cp kernel).

the original model had 384k "370" memory ... and I did some application studies which showed that after the fixed cp kernel memory requirements ... that cms applications frequently would "page thrash" in the remaining real memory. Exaserbating the problem was that all disk i/o (both cp paging and cms file i/o) involved communication with cp/88 which would then simulate the operations on XT hard disk that had 110millisecond avg. access.

the publishing of the elapsed time & page thrashing results resulted in a corporate decision to ship the product with 512k "370" memory ... which involved a six month schedule slip ... which lots of people blameed on me.

However, in this time window ... I was allowed to incorporate an enhanced page replacement algorithm (over and above what i was able to ship in the vm370 resource manager) ... and CMS "paging access method" filesystem support ... i.e. page-mapped operation ... which I had originally done on cp67/cms ... but never shipped in standard vm370 release.

the problem was that normal CMS operations are highly disk intensive. DCSS sharing of applications on mainframes were somewhat able to compensate for some of this (by having programs & applications already available in real storage because of use by other users). However, in the xt/370 configuration none of this was applicable ... there wasn't enuf real storage for such caching ... and since it was a single user system ... there wasn't any "sharing" use. however, I had demonstrated avg of 300percent (or better) thruput improvement with the paged mapped cms filesystem support for disk intensive operations. The page mapped CMS filesystem support also allowed for asynchronous operation on program loading ... allowing large block load of CMS "module" into whatever available real storage ... but also allowing some asynchronous overlap of CMS application execution with loading of the program (keeping all the asynchronous activity straight and hidden from cms by playing games with page invalid/valid bits). The page mapped CMS filesystem support also had some enhancements for attempting to do contiguous (physical) allocation when MODULE was generated (and/or written to disk) ... which could be subsequently leveraged when program was loaded.

the same adapter board was later made available in ATs and called AT/370.

the "follow-on" was a full-blown 370 in separate box with 4mbytes of memory code-name "a74" (for the department in POK) and released as 7437 ... old email with announcement of 7437
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#email880622

post that includes list of source update files that I had to the cp kernel as part of A74 support ("dmkpam" is the source routine containing the cp changes supporting paged mapped operation).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#56 ECPS:VM DISPx instructions

other past posts mentioning A74:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#55 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#56 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#19 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#51 DARPA was: Short Watson Biography
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#4 IBM Mainframe at home
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#27 End of Moore's law and how it can influence job market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#40 IBM system 370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#15 IEFBR14 Problems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#65 computer industry scenairo before the invention of the PC?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#7 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#8 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#10 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#14 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#76 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?

old email mentioning some of the activity porting enhancements from cp67 to vm370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

misc. past posts mentioning some aspects of the resource manager
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
and/or page replacement algorithms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
and other posts mentioning the paged mapped cms filesystem work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

and past posts mentioning washington, xt370, at370 and/or getting blameed for six month slip in scheduled to increase real storage from 384k to 512k
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#42 bloat
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#23 Old IBM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#52 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#28 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#20 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#24 HP Compaq merger, here we go again.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#45 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#4 IBM Mainframe at home
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#8 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#40 IBM system 370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#29 BLKSIZE question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#7 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#10 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#11 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#13 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#6 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#10 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#10 How to restore VMFPLC dumped files on z/VM V5.1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#2 using 3390 mod-9s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#56 DCSS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#5 Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#14 RCA Spectra 70/25: Another Mystery Computer?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#29 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#30 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#7 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#25 modern paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#5 Is computer history taugh now?

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 20:22:23 -0600
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#30 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

Inside Intel's Spring Analyst Meeting: 8 Things To Know About Its Quad Core, Penryn, Silverthorne & Mobile Plans
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199901501

... and

Then the Penryn Generation
http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/ibm-mainframes-nipped-tucked-for-cloud-a/240158991

z/VM usability

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: re: z/VM usability
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 22:12:22 -0600
Alan Altmark wrote:
Well, it's been nigh on 40 years that CMS has been around. Seems like a committment to me. CMS is here to stay. If all the people with z/OS get z/VM and [re]discover CMS, who knows what might happen? "Never say die!"

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#41 z/VM usability

well, cms (as in cambridge monitor system) started on cp40 (cambridge had gotten a 360/40 and did the hardware modifications to implement virtual memory ... pending getting 360/67) ... cambridge got 360/67 in 1967 and morphed cp40 into cp67 ... so it has been 40yrs (in part, CMS work could even start on real 360/40 before cp40 was operational)

from Melinda's history
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist
By September of 1965, file system commands and macros already looked much like those we are familiar with today: ''RDBUF'', ''WRBUF'', ''FINIS'', ''STATE'', etc

... snip ...

cambridge installed cp67 out at lincoln labs in 1967 and then last week in jan68 came out to install cp67 at the univ where i was undergraduate. Note, that in jan68, the cp67 people were still apprehensive about CMS filesystem ... with cp67 source, assemble, and build still being done on os/360.

in the morph of cp67 to vm370 ... they changed the cms name to conversational monitor system.

major change in cms from cp67 to vm370 was a little re-arranging of cms kernel in anticipation of 370 (r/o) segment protection. However, in doing the virtual memory hardware retrofit to 370/165 ... they ran into problem with schedule slipping. In order to regain six months in the schedule for 370/165 virtual memory, they dropped r/o segment protect and some number of other features from the original 370 virtual memory architecture (and to have compatibility across the 370 product line ... the same features had to also be removed from other 370 models that already had implemented the full 370 virtual memory architecture). With 370 hardware r/o segment protect dropped ... vm370 had to revert to the page protect hack used by cp67 that involved fiddling the 360 storage protect keys.

Then during the "future system" period ... much of the corporation was distracted and a lot of 370 product activity fell by the way side. Misc. past posts about future system:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

I had made some unflattering comments about practicallity of future system stuff and continued to do both cp67 and cms enhancements ... and then ported them from cp67 to vm370 ... some old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

after FS was canceled, there was rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipeline. Part of this was reason that small subset of the "virtual memory management" enhancements ... a lot of shared segment stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#adcon
that had been integrated with the paged mapped filesystem stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

was released as DCSS in vm370 release 3.

Canceling FS contributed to enabling me to also release the resource manager (that included a lot of changes that were in cp67 that i had done ... which were dropped in the morph from cp67 to vm370)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

It was also in the aftermath of killing FS that POK convinced the corporation to kill the vm370 product, shutdown the vm370 product group and move all the people to POK to help accelerate the mvs/xa development schedule (again attempting to make up lost time in 370 product pipeline resulting from the FS distraction). Eventually Endicott was able to salvage the vm370 product mission.

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 06:54:14 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Yes, it's "easy" to do with software. The problem was to provide a computer_system_ no matter what kinds of things died, hardware or software. The goal was 7x24x360 with 0% perceived MTBFs.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

when we were doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

... one of the places we talked to was the telco operation doing 1-800 implementation. they were using a smp fault tolerant platform ... where hardware/processor failures could be totally masked. 1-800 had five-nines availability requirement (5 mins outage per yr).

there was small issue ... kernel software maint. required taking down the system i.e. being "shared memory multiprocessing" ... all processors shared the same kernel image. Typical scheduled maint. for such an event could blow the five-nines outage budget for a century.

in the ha/cmp scenario ... having multiple "loosely-coupled" systems ... allowed any kind of downtime on any specific system (unscheduled hardware/software failures, scheduled hardware maint, scheduled software maint) ... to be totally masked by the availability of the other systems. this could be done with less-expensive traditional non-fault tolerant hardware ... although by that time ... regular hardware was getting very reliable ... ref to the study done in the early 80s about outages due to hardware failures becoming smaller and smaller fraction of total outages.

The issue then was whether the fault-tolerant solution would require a loosely-coupled installation of multiple fault tolerant systems in order to achieve the same "availability" of the non-fault tolerant ha/cmp configuration ... in which case, what was the justification for having the (additional) expense of fault-tolerant hardware at all?

There is an analogy here to disk RAID operation ... redundant array of inexpensive disks ... redundant array of inexpensive processors may be much more cost effective than traditional fault-tolerant hardware (especially as "normal" hardware reliability has continued to improve).

i've mentioned before in the past decade we had some discussions with one of the larger financial transaction networks ... they had attributed their 100percent availability over the previous several yrs to

• ims hot-standby • automated operator

when my wife was con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture ... she had created peer-coupled shared data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

which saw very little uptake until sysplex (one of the reasons she didn't stay very long in that position) ... except for the ims hot-standby work. the financial transaction network had triple redundant ims hot-standby configuration in two separate geographically distributed datacenters.

these days ... the only practical way of approaching 100percent availability is with geographical dispersed operation ... i.e. when we were doing ha/cmp, we coined the terms disaster survivability and geographic survivability to differentiate from disaster/recovery
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:09:44 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
This should have been a huge wakeup call. Instead the trend is going the other way.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization

in the early 90s ... we did some technical recruiting from cal. institutions ... all the 4.0 students were foreign born

in the mid-90s ... we did some work with large mid-western land grant university ... one of their comments was that between the late 60s and early 90s, they had to "dumb down" the entering freshman text books three times. past threads mentioning the reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#12 DEC's Hudson fab

other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#34 IBM Unionization

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:23:15 -0600
Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
Wasn't that the idea of Tandem Computers? Zero downtime, no matter what?

Ah yes ....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#44 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

misc recent postings mentioning tandem:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#13 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#16 Attractive Alternatives to Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#36 Quote from comp.object
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#76 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#34 Internal DASD Pathing

for other drift ... tandem had bought atalla (and compaq had bought both tandem and dec ... which hp subsequently inherited when they bought compaq). this has reference to conference sponsored by main atalla sales & marketing guy (hosted at tandem in cupertino):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security

for other trivia ... i've previously mentioned about having worked on ibm clone controller built out of interdata
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

which continued to be marketed under the perkin/elmer brand when perin/elmer bought interdata. the atalla "sponsor" of the above mentioned conference, once made the comment that in the early 80s he made quite a good living selling the boxes to NASA and other gov. agencies. He also mentioned that the "wire-wrap" mainframe channel attach board appeared to have still been the original design that had been done in the 60s.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:46:46 -0600
hancock4 writes:
There were many programmers who literally doubled their salarly jumping from civil service to the private sector in the 1990s.

At that time several govt agencies were seeking programmer/analysts, there were no takers since salaries were so much better in industry.


in the early 90s, we were regularly going by various gov. labs, LANL, LLNL, NCAR, etc to talk about things like distributed/hierarchical filesystems (datatree, unitree, mesa archival, etc), some recent posts mentioning the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#30 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#31 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#32 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#35 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#16 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)

on ha/cmp platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

as well as ha/cmp scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

more than one lab commented that they were discontinuing their large ibm mainframe operation because they had outstanding REQs for system support people for over a year that they were unable to fill. The school systems were turning out lots of unix skills ... but few ibm mainframe skills. they were having to compete with commercial companies, like in the financial industry, for the increasingly scarce ibm mainframe system support skills.

somewhat unrelated, i've heard of some people that jumped from the army to silicon valley in the late 90s and quadrupled their salaries (unix sysadmins).

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 10:12:36 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
more than one lab commented that they were discontinuing their large ibm mainframe operation because they had outstanding REQs for system support people for over a year that they were unable to fill. The school systems were turning out lots of unix skills ... but few ibm mainframe skills. they were having to compete with commercial companies, like in the financial industry, for the increasingly scarce ibm mainframe system support skills.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#47 IBM Unionization

for a little x-over ... the guy running the financial transaction network mentioned here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#44 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

said that he had to do presentation to the executive board on major threats and vulnerabilities ... at the top of the list was most of the (mainframe) system support people had reached the age where their mortgages were paid off, their children were all through college and they had no real motivation to not retire (and there didn't seem to be any feasable way of backfilling the skills)

How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 12:36:20 -0600
tbabonas@ibm-main.lst (Anthony Saul Babonas) writes:

Please colleagues, allow my to clarify by stating :

SET FAVORITEEXPLETIVE=''

1. I do not believe "other platforms" are &favoriteexpletive.
2. I am not arrogant and certainly not blind.
3. I am not responsible for the mainframe market share situation.  I neither
buy nor sell mainframes.
4. I have heard the costs of hardware and software, but I still believe
arrogance is no cost.
5. I do understand the competition (&favoriteexpletive).
6. Recent young graduates are free to work on any platform of their
choosing.  Undoubtedly the market influences
their choices.
7. I do believe the learning curve for Novell, circa 1995, was orders of
magnitude less than zOS + subsystems, circa 1995.

So fast forward 12 years, is learning to be a PC based network "sysprog"
more difficult than zOS, less so, or about the same?

Please note, final question is posed without beliefs, opinions, standpoints,
political biases, or prejudices.  I reserve the right to invoke arrogance at
some later date.

a little x-over
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#47 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#48 IBM Unionization

from afc ng thread ... w/regard to post referencing some national labs ... discontinuing mainframe systems in the 90s because of inability to fill positions for system support (schools were turning out lots of unix skills but little or no mainframe skills). It wasn't a particular cost issue, it was an issue about being able to find/hire the (scarce) skills.

part of the problem is getting into a negative feedback loop ... programs to turn out mainframe skills can take a decade ... once it starts the reputation about skill shortages can contribute to choices made about platforms to use ... and the choice about platforms to use can contribute to choices about skills required.

for totally other topic drift ... in the very early 80s, the disk division had a PC network server project ... part of the implementation was being done under a work for hire contract by people in Provo. For a while, one of the people on the project was commuting between San Jose and Provo nearly every week. At some point, the corporation decided to cancel the project ... and allowed the group in Provo to retain rights to the work they had already been paid for. Not long afterwards there appeared a PC network server company out of Provo.

misc. past posts mentioning DataHub project:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#40 No more innovation? Get serious
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#19 When will IBM buy Sun?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#33 Over-the-shoulder effect
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#26 MP cost effectiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#13 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#16 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#23 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#9 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#36 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#39 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#31 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#17 Is computer history taught now?

Using rexx to send an email

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 12:54:11 -0600
"jerry chapman" <jerryc314@sbcglobal.net> writes:
I am updating an Excel spread sheet with oorexx. Under certain condition I would like to email the spread sheet to someone as an attachment. Is there a way I could do that?

from long ago and far away ... REXX exec used for generating tcp/ip email (actually it took existing email in numerous formats and converted them to 822 format)

the sending of attachments normally involves mime support.


**********************  XXXX Internal Use Only  ************************
• :nick.REMAIL
• :sec.XXXX Internal Use Only
• :title.REMAIL - trivial exec for VM/822 mail forwarding
• :version.1
• :date.87/09/28
• :scp.VM/SP.3 ONWARDS
• :oname.Lynn Wheeler
• :onode.
• :ouser.WHEELER
• :aname.Lynn Wheeler
• :anode.
• :auser.WHEELER
• :lang.REXX
• :abs.REMAIL will process all spooled reader mail, convert it to
• 822 mail format and forward it to the specified TCP/SMTP mail
• gateway for sending to the specified tcp/ip node. If the VM/TCP/IP
• SMTP mail gateway is installed, REMAIL can be used to forward
• all VM mail to your <unix workstation>.
• :kwd.MAIL TCP/IP SMTP 822
• :sw.
• :doc.REMAIL MEMO
• :support.N
*********************************************************************  **
*
&1 &2 REMAIL   EXEC         * Process spool reader files
&1 &2 REMAIL   XEDIT        * Reformat cms mail to 822 format
•                                    *
 &1 &2 DISCRDR  EXEC         * Toy exec that activates REMAIL
&1 &2 XROSSCAL EXEC         * Toy exec for generating PROFS cal. req.
•                                    *
&1 &2 REMAIL   MEMO         * Brief documentation

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 16:22:04 -0600
Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
You don't think that American schools are capable of producing workers with equivalent education and skills? If American schools are so crappy, why do people from around the world want to go to school in them? You don't think that if HR paid "TREMENDOUSLY" more, the field would attract more qualified domestic engineers? That (more) smart people would go into engineering instead of plastic surgery or Harvard Business School?

there are k12 school systems and then there are institutions of higher learning.

as i mentioned here ... curriculum for entering freshman had to be dumbed down three times between late 60s and early 90s ... primarily because of "domestic" students
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization

while this post references requirement for two yrs of college in order to get "domestic" workers who had at least a high school education
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization

and this post (again) mentions interviewing 4yr college (technical degree) graduates and the only 4.0 students were foreign born.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization

in the mid-90s ... going into the internet bubble ... sjmn also had an article that said half of the students graduating with advanced technical degrees were foreign born. old posts mentioning the sjmn article
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#1 More on Aging Legacy Workforce
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT

on the other hand ... more recently NSF has been concerned about the dramatic increase in the number of technical graduates from foreign universities ... post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

with reference to most recent study:

Study: China Leaps Forward In Advanced Tech Education
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&artnum=2&issue=20070501

then there is census study from mid-90s claiming that half of the high school graduate age people (i.e. includes dropouts, not necessarily graduates ... just that age) are functionally illiterate. recent posts that make reference to the study:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 16:56:22 -0600
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization

sorry, last part of this url got snipped
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&artnum=2&issue=20070501

a little more from the above:
More than 60 percent of U.S. engineering doctorates were awarded to foreign nationals, according to data from the American Society for Engineering Education.

The U.S. is producing the same number of Ph.D.s for its citizens as it did in the 1970s — about 3,000 a year, says Michael Gibbons, ASEE Director of Data Research.


... snip ...

the sjmn article in mid-90s said 50precent for any phd in technology area ... this more recent study says more than 60percent (engineering specifically).

part of the article raises the issue that as society and global economy shifts more and more to high-tech areas, there will be ever increasing requirement for competitive high-tech skills.

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 07:24:49 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Your company's FS had scheduled maintenance for the kernel?!!! Why?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#44 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

i didn't mean to imply that the fault tolerant server that was being used by the 1-800 (telco) guys was from same vendor ... in fact it was from totally different vendor.

my impression was that a (software) system upgrade for the fault tolerant server vendor ... i.e. system build and related system files on disk, kernel image on disk, kernel image in processor (shared) memory ... required taking exclusive control of those resources to replace existing copies with new copies. It would happen periodically, even if only once every yr or so.

Using rexx to send an email

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 08:48:45 -0600
"Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> writes:
The code you show is not REXX, it's EXEC.

Reminds me of the difference between ERASE CMS EXEC and EXEC CMS ERASE.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#50 Using rexx to send an email

it isn't code ... it is a "package" file description ... used by toolsrun (also implemented in rexx) ... somewhat analogous to README file.

toolsrun provided all sorts of function ... it had listserv type function for email distribution lists ... for conferencing and file distribution (like application packages). it also had support for repositories ... where local "slave" toolsrun could maintain the same kind of information that might be distributed via email, sort of being able to operate either in listserv mode and/or more similar to early usenet.

by the way, it predated listserv that evolved for bitnet ... some old posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

in the late 70s and early 80s ... I had been doing some semi-automated computer conferencing type stuff on the internal network. at some point top executives became aware of the situation ... and there was an "investigation" ... one of the outcomes was decision to have some official corporate supported computer conferencing facilities ... which then contributed to the wide-spread deployment of toolsrun.

there was also a researcher hired to sit in the back of my office and follow me around for nine months ... investigating how i communicated (face-to-face, telephone, etc ... they also had copies of my incoming and outgoing email as well as all of my instant messages). The resulting research report was also a Stanford PHD thesis (joint between language and AI depts) ... and the material for subsequent books and papers. somewhat related posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:08:51 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Even if security was designed in, allowing pieces of the executing code to be part of the kernel will defeat any and all security designs. It is similar to laying 1000 rattraps around the cheese building after the rats have all moved in.

for a little recent different security topic drift:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#0 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#1 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy

and old post discussing some related work with world bank
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm15.htm#31 Electronic Safety and Soundness: A Four Pillar Approach; Public Policy Issues

... chapter 6, Twelve Layers of Security (Pillar 4)

some World Bank E-Security/E-Finance publications
http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/html/FinancialSectorWeb.nsf/SearchGeneral?openform&E-Security/E-Finance&Publications

and presentations:
http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/html/FinancialSectorWeb.nsf/SearchGeneral?openform&E-Security/E-Finance&Presentations

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:24:34 -0600
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
So look it up - see for example:


http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/paper-smp.txt


above reference appears to be at least one place that DEC may have adopted a term (tightly-coupled) used by IBM 10-15 yrs earlier.

i.e. a decade after Charlie was doing work on fine-grain locking for cp67 smp support on 360/67 ... and invented compare&swap instruction .. recent posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#49 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#23 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

collected posts mentioning, tightly-coupled, smp, and/or compare&swap instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:46:47 -0600
kkt <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
Fortunately, American higher ed is pretty good and makes up for most of the inadequate high school preparation by the time lower division classes are completed. Thus, American colleges still attract a lot of foreign students.

but one of the issues worrying NSF and other organizations ... is that things may be at tipping point. previous posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#52 IBM Unionization

earlier apprehension was that since so much of domestic high-tech industry was being fueled by foreign graduates, who stayed in the states ... that it possibly only required slight changes in the relative standard of living between here and their home country ... to result in mass migration back to their home countries.

in fact, numerous of these foriegn graduates (getting 4.0) are here paid for by their home govs. ... and directed to stay on, spend 5-10 yrs in high-tech employment and then return home ... as "tech transfer". Some surveys had even found some of the leading edge corporate high-tech departments totally composed of such foreign employees (obligated to return home after graduation and spending 5-10 yrs working in leading edge, high tech activities).

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 13:42:33 -0600
"Micheal H. McCabe" <mhmccabe@alltel.net> writes:
(10) The sad state of educational affairs in much of America is on-par with the worst conditions found in some third-world countries. The only people we can blame are ourselves for letting it get this bad. As a society, we allow hack politicians to play games with our educational infrastructure. We allow our tax dollars to be wasted on programs of questionable value. We accept simple answers to complex questions and we allow untenable concepts of forced educational equality to bring down our best and brightest minds. We need change in our educational system that is more revolutionary than evolutionary.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#52 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#57 IBM Unionization

old post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#38 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!

references national institute for literacy
http://www.nifl.gov/
http://lincs.ed.gov/

and quoted some numbers from 1994-1998 international literacy survey


• The average composite literacy score of native-born adults in
  the U.S. was 284 (Level 3); the U.S. ranked 10th out of 17
high-income countries;
• The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with primary or no
education, ranked 14th out of 18 high-income countries;
• The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with some high
school, but no diploma or GED, ranked 19th out of 19 high-income
  countries;
• The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a high school
diploma or GED (but no college), ranked 18th (tie) out of 19
countries;
• The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with 1-3 years of
college, ranked 15th out of 19 countries;

... snip ...

and more recent statistics show declining situation over the last decade or so from the earlier studies

recent thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#6 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#35 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#68 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness

IBM Unionization

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 17:09:53 -0600
D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
What is funny/sad about it is most of them died from over work at those manual labor jobs they kept telling me was the only honest work. They felt that anyone who worked indoors was not earning that money.

early on, i once used it as excuse to stop them bothering me about being promoted to management ... past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#56 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#53 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#1 The 8008

and related topic drift from another thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#76 Working while young
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#79 Working while young
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#19 Working while young

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 18:27:09 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
Study: Signature Debit Fraud Runs 15 Times Higher Than on PIN Debit
http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=738


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#58 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#59 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

Double trouble for ID theft victim
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/05/id_thief_bounce.html

from above:
But that was just the beginning of her ordeal. For two full weeks after Poor reported the crime to her bank, her imposter continued to withdraw money from her account as fast as she added it. As a result, she was hit with 20 overdraft fees totaling $670, and nearly six weeks after the fact, she was still fighting to get all her money back.
...
Banks constantly market their zero liability programs, which aim to convince consumers that they stand to lose nothing from most cases of identity theft.
...
But these reports rarely discuss the more challenging problems connected with the theft of debit card or checking account data theft. Getting a credit card company to waive fraudulent charges may be hassle-free for most people, but beating back electronic transfer fraud – usually carried out via cloned debit cards or counterfeit checks -- is another matter entirely.


... snip ...

the blog comments following the above article must be 50 times longer than the original article.

lots of past posts on subject of threats, exploits, fraud, vulnerabilities and/or threats:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud

Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 19:25:34 -0600
edgould1948@ibm-main.lst (Ed Gould) writes:
John,

I agree with you on this issue ... somewhat.....

I was in the Army (over in Germany) and our base was a 'stepping stone' for generals. They came in a 1 star and one year (more or less) later they became a 2 star. We weren't even close to the trench's (so to speak) we were a "command" so no one really got hurt (per se) by any screwups the General may have caused. In a side issue (humorous) one of our subordinate bases when polled at 11PM reported they were under attack by the communist. Since they reported an attack we had to wake up our General to inform him of the situation. The colonel (IIRC), in charge of that base, was reduced in rank to a Captain(?) and was basically told to retire. All this from a sergeant who couldn't read a code book.


Boyd had lots of run in with generals ... just one of his old stories
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War

past post w/reference to dedication of Boyd Hall, United States Air Force Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. 17 September 1999
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#20 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#74 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

...
"There are two career paths in front of you, and you have to choose which path you will follow. One path leads to promotions, titles, and positions of distinction.... The other path leads to doing things that are truly significant for the Air Force, but the rewards will quite often be a kick in the stomach because you may have to cross swords with the party line on occasion. You can't go down both paths, you have to choose. Do you want to be a man of distinction or do you want to do things that really influence the shape of the Air Force? To be or to do, that is the question." Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF 1927-1997

... snip ...

misc. past posts mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd
misc. URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2

... there have also been corporate stepping stone positions ... for individuals that got put on "fast track". Woe was you if the head position of your organization was designated as a "fast track" stepping stone ... there could be turn-over in the position every six months (executives playing musical chairs).

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 08:06:16 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
TOPS-10's constrasting word usage was 'master/slave' vs. SMP.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#56 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

... "smp" as in symmetrical multiprocessing ... as opposed to shared memory processing ... both also "tightly-coupled".

other master/slave variation was asymmetrical multiprocessing.

previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

referencing mar88 vms announcing support for symmetric multiprocessing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#46 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?

and of course, past posts mentioning my wife being con'ed into going to pok to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

IBM Unionization

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 08:42:01 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
But that is what matters for those reports. Have you ever been involved in the beige book planning of those companies? Have you ever participated in a bullshit session that decides which direction the work is going to go? We had ideas of what we were going to do 5 releases from now. This was necessary because some of the ground work had to be out in the field and established for certain future implementations.

i got stuck with managing 5yr plan details shortly after graduation ... being new person in the group. past ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#53 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#40 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?

5yr plans and what really happens are the difference between strategic and tactical ... very boyd, i've considered boyd the greatest strategic thinker that i've ever interacted with (and he could simulataneously plan for tactical within strategic structure)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

for a little different pespective, x-over post from thread in bit.listserv.ibm-main
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

past posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#34 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#47 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#48 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#52 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#57 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#58 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#59 IBM Unionization

Disc Drives

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disc Drives
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 09:09:01 -0600
"Michael N. LeVine" <mlevinespmfltr@redshift.com> writes:
Is stiction still a problem? Thats when the heads resting on the surface of the disk sometimes adhere then get torn off or bent out of alignment when the disk is started up again.

some early 3380 drives (floating thin-film heads) had stiction problem ... but was variable ... some batches with no problem at all. lots of quality control and manufacturing monitoring and forensics for six months to try and identity what coorelation was ... but also tweaking processes and formulation ... so i don't remember if the original culprit was ever definitively identified.

slight drift ... past posts mentioning air-bearing simulation work that went into designing 3380 heads:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was: Movies with source code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#30 Weird
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#63 Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#74 They Got Mail: Not-So-Fond Farewells
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#51 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#52 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#69 Multics Concepts For the Contemporary Computing World
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#20 360 Microde Floating Point Fix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring, wandering story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#21 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on 7 Apr 2004
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#15 harddisk in space
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#25 CKD Disks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#8 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#4 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#5 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#44 Intel engineer discusses their dual-core design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#29 IBM microwave application--early data communications
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#0 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#13 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#14 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#6 Google Architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#18 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#42 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#41 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#18 Why so little parallelism?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#27 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#31 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#43 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#44 Is computer history taught now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#46 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#83 Disc Drives
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts

Help settle a job title/role debate

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help settle a job title/role debate
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 09:42:20 -0600
Steve Samson <ssamson@dc.rr.com> writes:
I would regard SP as the "inside" job, designing, writing, testing, and integrating code to accomplish some well-defined purpose. An SE would be on the interface between "inside" and "outside", meeting with TPTB and the end users to arrive at a set of specs that would then be reviewed and/or revised with the SP to assess cost and schedule, thus defining the purpose of the SP's effort.

In the dawn of history, an SE was the IBM sales team member who would provide on-site training and act as the level 1 contact for solving problems. By 1965 the SE became not much more than the guy you called to order manuals, as all of them with half a brain were pulled into the S/360 development effort.

Just my opinion and recollections...


big change was 23jun69 with unbundling announcement and charging for SE time (along with charging for software and other services). prior to that, a lot of SEs got "hands-on" training at customer installations doing real-live technical things (sort of on-the-job training after introductory school). after 23jun69 announcement, customers were less likely to pay for SE "services" ... especially younger ones getting their on-the-job training. that sort of created two-class system ... those that had hands-on experience prior to 23jun69 ... and customers were more likely to pay for their time ... and those that came after 23jun69.

before 23jun69, for a period as an undergraduate, i had responsibility for the univ. production os/360 system (and also got to play with cp67). I had done a lot of stuff to significantly soup up mft (and then mvt) thruput ... part of of it doing carefully crafted sysgens. There was a period where I would see brand new SEs in the branch office (fresh out of corporate schools) for 3-4 month period and then be replaced by new batch (getting their "hands-on" by "helping" me).

the early "HONE" system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

was largely instituted as countermeasure to training issues introduced with 23jun69 announcement ... started out as clone of science center's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

cp67 (virtual machine) system on a few 360/67s at locations around the states and remote login access from branch offices ... being able to use dos/360, os/360, etc (i.e. motivation for the original "hands-on" in the HONE acronym).

the focus somewhat changed after science center did the port of apl\360 to cms for cms\apl and the explosion in the number apl applications supporting sales & marketing appeared ... like the "configurators". Early in 370 product time-frame ... there was transition where sales couldn't even submit orders until after they had been processed by HONE configurator. The explosion in the use of HOME by direct sales & marketing sort of swamped the processors and there was then transition away from its original purpose of allowing SEs to get "hands-on" system experience.

HONE would migrate (from cp67) to vm370 and eventually had HONE (clone) systems sprouting up all around the world ... some of the early ones, i even got to do the installation. Many of the HONE APL modeling applications would also permeate hdqtrs locations (in addition to direct branch office sales & marketing support). One of my first HONE installs outside the US was when EMEA hdqtrs moved from NY to La Defense (outside Paris) in the early 70s.

for other drift ... misc. posts mentioning 23jun69 unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

Help settle a job title/role debate

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help settle a job title/role debate
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 11:22:29 -0600
mark.zelden@ibm-main.lst (Mark Zelden) writes:
Today, I see these two used interchangeably. I've even seen title changes from one to the other in the same shop when HR decided to review everyone's job titles and such.

I still prefer plain ol' Systems Programmer over all the titles I've had.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#65 Help settle a job title/role debate

later, i would have battles to have no title at all ... and have my business cards w/o any title (I would sometimes joke that if it was necessary to get things done based on a title ... then it was time to retire ... i should be able to convince people to do something based on it was the right thing to do).

the other battle was being one of the first to have email address on business card.

... there is old joke about person that use to fly a kite from the roof of 705 bldg. in pok on april 1st ... who had pencils made up with his name ... "Elect .... lab director, raises or promotions, but not both". old references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#60 South San Jose (was Tysons Corner, Virginia)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#38 S/360 development burnout?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#22 Patent #6886160

this is slightly different than the Boyd line effectively about neither raises nor promotions ... recent ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

which is more along the lines of references at some number of locations (across a variety of large bureaucratic organizations) being primarily mushroom factories (i.e. most of the people are kept in the dark and feed .... )

open source voting

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: open source voting
Newsgroups: alt.politics,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.programming,alt.comp.opensource,sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 11:50:04 -0600
Ben Rudiak-Gould <br276deleteme@cam.ac.uk> writes:
The banking industry uses open encryption algorithms like 3DES and AES. They'd be crazy not to, because designing a secure encryption algorithm is (empirically known to be) extremely difficult, and it's (again empirically) very dangerous to trust a design that hasn't been thoroughly vetted by a large number of experts. It's not enough to have an expert design the algorithm, because they routinely fail to notice attacks. This goes for every aspect of a secure

the US financial standard group is X9
http://www.x9.org/

... and X9 chairs the international ISO TC68 financial standard group.
https://www.iso.org/committee/49650.html

X9F subcommittee primarily deals with security and encryption items. Although, X9A, retail banking subcommittee was responsible for X9.59 standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

in part because there was requirement to make sure things were aligned with the actual business processes ... as opposed to possibly being totally unrelated to any practical use.

part of this was because it was in the heyday of "PKI is the answer, now what is the question?" ... and the adding of digital certificate processing to existing payment transactions was resulting in factor of two orders of magnitude (100 times) bloat in both payload size and processing overhead:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#bloat

the issue is more along the lines of risk adverse in disputes and where the burden of proof lies. a financial institution electing to not use a "standard" will find that they have a significantly more difficult burden of proof placed on them in any dispute/litigation. this has actually shown up in at least one litigation dispute in europe ... where the plantiff claimed damages (and prevailed) from financial institution in a an unexplained large financial transaction and only cited DES as still being used (after it had been depreciated). as a result, the burden of proof fell on the financial institution to prove that the continued use of DES could not be a factor.

there was some additional transformation when NIST announced that it no longer needed to create standards from scratch ... but could cite as standards, work done by other bodies ... like X9F (I think the first instance was x9.62 having to do with elliptical curve cryptography).

we had been called in to work with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... and they had this technology called SSL ... old reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

references having previously worked, in a prior life, with the people (at the startup) responsible for the "commerce server"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15

some other recent topic drift on the subject in financial cryptography blog:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#0 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#1 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy

more accurately ... to go to the very core of secure ... is to actually do a detailed end-to-end vulnerability and threat analysis ... and stop trying to get by with wonderkind point solutions.

Disc Drives

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Disc Drives
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 12:18:38 -0600
"Michael N. LeVine" <mlevinespmfltr@redshift.com> writes:
Are you sure it was just limited to that IBM drive? If memory serves me this problem also showed up occasionally on other drives and not just IBM's

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#64 Disc Drives

it likely was other than 3380 drives ... but i was referring to dealing with the 3380 drives

misc. past posts about getting to play disk engineer and wander around bldg. 14 (disk development lab) and bldg. 15 (disk product test lab). i didn't very often wander onto actual assembly and manufacturing floor.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

i didn't get to play disk engineer for other vendors.

Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 12:29:05 -0600
rfochtman@ibm-main.lst (Rick Fochtman) writes:
I went "the other way" in the Army, finding myself in a tropical climate where the main diet was rice, with a few vegetables and maybe a water buffalo, when the gunner "forgot" to clear the M2-HB before attempting to "clean" it. In my (somewhat limited) experience, the officers were there to get some combat time, and pay, into their service records, as a stepping stone to further promotion. Net result: the sergeants ran the Army while the officers "fought the battles" and collected the medals. Needless to say, I have a very low opinion of high-flying "leaders" that don't share the hardships of those who are "led".

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

for other boyd drift, he did yr running datacenter at "spook base" ... possibly largest in the world ... or at least largest in the fareast at the time, claim was that it represented a $2.5B windfall for IBM.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#1 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#2 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#5 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#51 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#13 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#4 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

and for other drift ... boyd's briefing on organic design for command and control ... past posts mentioning the briefing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#8 scheduling & dynamic adaptive ... long posting warning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#34 War, Chaos, & Business (web site), or Col John Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#33 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#34 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#46 employee motivation & executive compensation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#25 Timeless Classics of Software Engineering
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#34 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain the
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#69 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#2 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#3 Computerworld Article: Dress for Success?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#41 was change headers: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#25 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#35 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source

and as before ... lots of other past posts mentioning Boyd as well as other URLs from around the web
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

Using rexx to send an email

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:43:23 -0600
Phil Hobbs <pcdh@SpamMeSenseless.pergamos.net> writes:
I remember TOOLSRUN very fondly. All the IBM internal forums used to use it, as well as the internal tool distribution discs. I wish I had a newsreader with the comfort features of FORAVIEW!

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#50 Using rexx to send an email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#54 Using rexx to send an email

from long ago and far away, other TOOLSRUN folklore, old email regarding enhanced RSCS drivers for HSDT (t1 & higher speed) links & conflict with TOOLSRUN.

Date: 11/25/86 14:44:06
From: wheeler
To: distribution
re: hsdt link;

the only conflict that I'm aware of with HSDT RSCS drivers are a current conflict with the TOOLSRUN exec (the REXX exec from <<rexx author>> that handles all the tools disks). The REXX exec expects that for files that originated from VM nodes, the second NOP/TAG record (i.e. RSCS control information) alwas contained the origin nodeid & userid. If that is not found in the 2nd record, TOOLSRUN rejects the file.

As part of improving the efficiency of HSDT links, the RSCS line driver code to do character compression was removed (it was determined that the cpu overhead was costing much more than the transmission time savings ... i.e. actually ran slower). With that change, "S&F" records began appearing as the 2nd nop/tag record.

After a bit of analysis, it turns out that S&F records were RSCS information records that alwas were part of the file, but somewhere in the far distant past a change to the compression code inadvertantly also deleted forwarding of S&F records. With the deletion of the compression code, the S&F records magically reappeared.

There is a simple 3 line change to the TOOLSRUN EXEC to recognize S&F records and bypass them when looking for the origin information record. There is a separate 40-60 line change to the TOOLSRUN exec which generalizes the processing of the nop control information, which recognizes a large number of different formats based on content (rather than position). This more complex change also correctly handles recognition of origin information from MVS/JES systems.

There is currently discussion about how best to resolve the TOOLSRUN EXEC problem. The removal of the compression code makes sense in a number of situations ... not just for HSDT links but for other links where the speed may be as slow as 56kb (i.e. CPU compression overhead taking more time than the transmission savings of transmitting uncompressed record).


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

for other topic drift, old email referencing DATASTAG EXEC, a pre-TOOLSRUN facility that provided ftp/anonymous type function
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email800409
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email821214
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email821217

lots of posts related to HSDT (high-speed data transport) project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

and for other topic drift, past posts related to the internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

and for even more topic drift ... old email dealing with various aspects of HSDT dealing with events surrounding the NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

i.e. while tcp/ip is the technology basis for the modern internet, we claim that hte NSFNET backbone was the operational basis for the modern internet.

in related hsdt activity, the mainframe tcp/ip product had been implemented in vs/pascal. it had several thruput issues; it could consume a full 3090 processor while only getting 44kbytes/sec aggregate thruput. I made the modifications to the product to support RFC1044 and in some testing at Cray research between a Cray machine and a 4341-clone, was sustaining 4341 hardware interface speed (1mbyte/sec) using only a modest amount of the 4341-clone processor (over 20 times the aggregate data rate for less than 1/20th the processor overhead). past posts mentioning doing rfc 1044 support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

some recent posts mentioning mainframe tcp/ip support and vs/pascal
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#12 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#29 Being "Open" (Was: Mainframe vs. "Server")
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#8 whiny question: Why won't z/OS support the HMC 3270 emulator
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#60 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 08:27:58 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Was she going to be able to design new hardware to fulfill that loosely-coupling? Or was she going to have to work existing hardware products?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#76 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#44 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#62 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

she could design features in support of loosely-coupled ... but then the features had to be justified. this was heyday of buillding bigger iron and if single processors weren't big enuf .. then go to SMPs. at the time loosely-coupled didn't get as much attention ... that is one of the reasons she didn't last long.

she also had constant battles with the "SNA" group ... "SNA" supposedly had responsibility for terminal communication ... but actually wanted control over anything that had the words communication and/or networking. one of the (temporary) truces was that "SNA" had control over everything that crossed the walls of the datacenter/machine room (and therefor wasn't supposedly mandated also for everything that might go between machines within the datacenter walls). semi-related posts mentioning SNA group and terminal emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

as I've mentioned numerous of times before, her Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture didn't see much take-up ... except for by the ims group doing ims hotstandby ... until much later with sysplex (which is found in current generation of mainframes):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

An example, battle she fought and lost was over 3088/trotter ... a "new" channel-to-channel multiple processor interconnect. She had a bunch of enhancements for it ... but it eventually shipped as a product with little more than the earlier CTCA (channel-to-channel adapter) implementation.

an example of the "temporary" truce ... was past story about sjr having implemented 4341 clusters using 3088/trotter (doing a couple of the hardware enhancements on their own) ... and w/o SNA. When it finally saw limited customer release ... they were required to convert to standard SNA (even tho it was purely within datacenter walls) ... which severely degraded its operation. a couple past posts mentioning the effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#6 Blade architectures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#7 54 Processors?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#4 Google Architecture

part of the sjr 4341 cluster was sjr had done the original relational/sql implementation, System R
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

there were then follow-on projects for distributed/cluster relational database ... some past mentions of System R follow-on work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#17 disk write caching (was: ibm icecube -- return of
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#15 Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#18 Wars against bad things
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#39 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

lots of past posts about loosely-coupled, clusters, and also later doing our own ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

and past email about almost being allowed to do ha/cmp scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

semi-related is the work done of hsdt activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

and while we did a lot of work leading up of NSF backbone NSFNET we were eventually prevented from bidding
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

even tho a NSF audit of what we had running claimed it was at least five hrs ahead of NSFNET bid submissions (to build something new) ... some old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

and we also ran afoul of the SNA group when we had come up with 3-tier architecture and were out doing executive customer presentations
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:53:51 -0600
John Byrns <byrnsj@sbcglobal.net> writes:
How do you know that the employers didn't honestly believe that they would be able to pay the bills when they would come due 30 years hence, that things would proceed as they always had?

What about the ethics of the unions, if it was so obvious that thye employers wouldn't be able to pay the bills when they came due in the future, what were they doing making the demands in the first place? I get it now, the unions get a pass on the ethics issue.


there is some implication that both employers and unions act as if they are single voiced entity that has extended life. in fact, both employers and unions are made up of composite of individuals, whose agendas may have little or nothing to do with any (theoritcal) agenda of the organization they are suppose to represent.

time-and-time again there are situations where individual agendas appear to have little or nothing to do with the organization they supposedly represent. sometimes this difference becomes more pronounced as individuals near their own retirement age. possibly one last "bonus" or some other kind of reward is tied to some strictly short-term objective ... and the individual places their personal benefit over that of the organization's long-term benefit (especially if they are shortly to be long gone).

semi-related is the saying that business ethics is an oxymoron.

my wife was sent to "executive school" (step up from "managers school") a couple times. one of the things that they do in such environments is play team building games ... split the group into two teams and play act on how to resolve issues. one of the scenerios has to do with win-win, win-loose, and loose-loose strategies. now in real life ... for ongoing interactions ... win-win tends to build better cooperation and long term benefits for everybody. however, win-loose may provide significant advantage, if life is viewed as a one-shot game (or purely a series of one-shot games). so she had her team play win-win up to the last round ... and on the last round (since in the game, there was apparently no long term downside), she had her team play win-loose. This brought some members of the other team nearly to the brink of tears.

old past posts with related scenerio for railroad industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#7 Big Brother -- Re: National IDs

somewhat related scenario prompting call for 100precent unearned profit tax
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 09:00:02 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
I have never thought of disk as memory even when it was used exclusively for swapping and when the loosely-coupled TOPS-20 project was happening.

tss/360, future system and other systems from the period had concept of "one-level store" ... where everything was mapped into virtual memory paradigm .... disk were for both paging/swapping address spaces as well as all file operations were done via memory mapped construct.

lots of past posts about virtual memory paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

and numerous past future system posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 10:10:50 -0600
hancock4 writes:
In this discussion, we must be looking at modern circumstances, not the excessively greedy unions of the 1960s, and not the hot DP job market of the 1970s.

individual selfishness doesn't seem to have abatted any ... if anything it has gotten worse ... with large portion of society members looking at playing win-loose.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#72 IBM Unionization

it isn't the organizations that are playing greedy ... it is the individual members that compose those organizations that play greedy. the composite organization may be characterized as being greedy when that reflects the aggregate behavior of the individual members.

individual benefit, greed and win-loose strategies can be seen at all levels of social interaction ... from driving behavior on highways to "business as usual" on wall street. the win-loose strategies can sometimes have wide-spread disastrous results ... where individuals are willing to compromise group welfare for relatively small individual benefit (i.e. the downside of their behavior to the overall group welfare can be several orders of magnitude larger than the relatively small individual benefit gained). In some cases, even a million yrs in jail may not approach the penalty for the damage they do (which is all out of propotion to their individual gain).

the stuff around sarbanes-oxley is small example. one of the people that does a TV financial show ... in an interview a couple weeks ago, stated that when he was involved in day-to-day trading a decade or so ago ... everybody in the industry practiced stock manipulation on a regular basis and he has no reason to believe that has changed (and the regulators apparently have no clue).

misc. past posts mentioning sarbanes-oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#33 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#58 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#1 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#28 Password Complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#22 AOS: The next big thing in data storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#63 Is Silicon Valley strangeled by SOX?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#0 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 12:16:13 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
the stuff around sarbanes-oxley is small example. one of the people that does a TV financial show ... in an interview a couple weeks ago, stated that when he was involved in day-to-day trading a decade or so ago ... everybody in the industry practiced stock manipulation on a regular basis and he has no reason to believe that has changed (and the regulators apparently have no clue).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#74 IBM Unionization

for other drift ... this was a very long-winded post ... but includes a discussion of the aggregate long term financial consequences stemming from the S&L incident of the 80s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security

possibly i have a jaundiced view partly based on past experiance.

recent post about after going on 15yrs, finding out that the new hires I was interviewing (to work in a new group under my direction) were being offered 1/3rd more than i was currently making ... and then finding it tough slogging to argue that I should get a raise so i was making the same as what new hires were being offered.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer

also colored my view of what went on during the whole NSFNET backbone sequence
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

and the ha/medusa scale-up work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

and all that was happening in supposedly one of the "best" corporations.

Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 13:03:43 -0600
David Powell <ddotpowell@itiscali.co.uk> writes:
Windoze has problems with 9600Bd async input, unless the UART has a 16(?) char FIFO. :(

one of the reasons for doing the clone controller project when i was an undergraduate ...
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

was couldn't get line dynamic baud rate.

the standard telecommunication controller had a "SAD" command that allowed dynamically associating the type of controller line scanner with each specific line (i.e. 1052, 2741, tty). The standard cp67 terminal support code provided for 1052 & 2741 support with dynamic terminal identification and "switching" the appropriate line-scanner with the "SAD" command.

So when I went to add TTY/ascii terminal support to cp67 ... I attempted to integrate it in such a way that it would also do dynamic terminal determination and switching the appropriate line scanner with the SAD command. All this worked with "hard-wired" lines ... however, wanted to extend the support to dial-up lines ... so a single phone number and common dial-up rotory pool could be used for all terminals. This is where the problem showed up ... since the standard terminal controller implementation had took a short cut ... hardwiring the (line baud rate) oscillator to each line (so that while the type of line-scanner was dynamically assignable to each line ... it wasn't actually possible to change terminal type when different baud rates were involved).

the line-scanner in the interdata3 clone was implemented in software and on initial connection would probe signal rise/fall at very high rate .... until it figured out where the edges appeared and calculate the baud rate.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 14:39:22 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
possibly i have a jaundiced view partly based on past experiance.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#74 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#75 IBM Unionization

and very boyd ... a few past references to dedication of Boyd Hall at Nellis AFB:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#20 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#74 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

lots of past posts mentioning John Boyd and/or Boyd URLs from around the web:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

IBM 360 Model 20 Questions

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:44:46 -0600
"Nico de Jong" <nico_at_farumdata_dot_dk> writes:
I've only seen 2780's and 3780's as RJE terminals (Denmark). The 3780 was basically a 1442 printer (IIRC) and a 2501 card reader.

after doing tty support for cp67 ... i also looked at putting (crje, conversational remote job entry) terminal support into HASP ... i.e. borrowing the syntax from the cms editor (the code had to be completely different because CMS code didn't have to be re-entrant and HASP code had to be multi-threaded/re-entrant) and the terminal support from cp67. As part of shoe horning my terminal & crje code into HASP ... i carefully removed the rje/2780/transparency line support ... to reduce resident code size and also alleviate some module addressability issues.

recent post about doing tty terminal support for cp67
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#76 Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler

a couple recent posts mentioning crje
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#14 ISPF not productive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#43 Wylbur and CRBE

numerous past posts mentioning HASP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp

there was supposedly a 360/20 installed in the univ. admin bldg (which i never bothered to go by and see) ... i had the impression it was done as sort of an upgrade of some old mechanical tab equipment.

there was the semi-famous incident of a daily (cobol) job that univ. admin would run on the datacenter's 360. One day the whole place ground to a whole when the person overseeing the admin run said that the results were something he hadn't seen before. It turns out that the application had originated as a 407 plugboard application ... which was converted to autocoder that simulated the 407 plugboard, which was converted to 709 cobol still simulating 407 plugboard, which then was converted to 360 cobol) still simulating 407 plugboard. The last thing the application did was simulate the printing of the 407 sense switches. The problem on this particular day was that there was an unfamilar (407) sense switch settings. The whole place had come to a dead halt while it was decided what to do (i.e. all product work on the 360 was drained). Finally it was decided to rerun the admin job ... to see if the final results printed were the same.

old postings mentioning 407 and/or 360/2-something
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#137 Mainframe emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#11 I'm overwhelmed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#12 I'm overwhelmed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#19 Computer of the century
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#71 HASP vs. "Straight OS," not vs. ASP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#5 Emulation (was Re: Object code (was: Source code - couldn't resist compiling it :-))
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#52 Author seeks help - net in 1981
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#49 OT Friday reminiscences
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#21 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#53 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#62 history of CMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#20 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#39 HASP:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#69 OT: One for the historians - 360/91
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#23 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#41 When nerds were nerds
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#44 who were the original fortran installations?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#29 Using the Cache to Change the Width of Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#3 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#37 CRJE and CRBE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#5 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#66 Why these original FORTRAN quirks?; Now : Programming practices
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#72 IBM S/360 series operating systems history

IBM 360 Model 20 Questions

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 16:14:02 -0600
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#78 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions

here is referenece titled "The History of Computing at Cornell University"
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/82/10/History_Computing_Cornell_Rudan.pdf

that showed up in a search engine query for 360/20 and RJE (there is a passing reference).

It also mentions Worley and HASP on 360/65 at Cornell. I've mentioned before the Univ. sending me on a trip to east coast SHARE meeting along with a side-trip to Cornell to talk to Worley about HASP. I remember it well because of catching a DC3 at LaGuardia marine air terminal and sitting on the tarmack for a couple hrs (w/o airconditioning in extremely hot, humid air heavily laden with the smell of kerosene) waiting for a thunderstorm to pass. when we did get off ... it turns out we were flying through the middle of the storm ... violently bouncing around and lightening appearing to repeatedly strike the plane and I got extremely air sick. I staggered off at the first stop (Elmira) and found a motel to sleep it off. The next morning I rented a car and drove to Ithaca. A few past posts mentioning that trip:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#27 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#27 Mount DASD as read-only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#1 About TLB in lower-level caches

lots of past posts mentioning hasp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp

and other past posts that make mention of bill worley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#84 Is a VAX a mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#57 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#18 Black magic in POWER5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#35 why doesn't processor reordering instructions affect most
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#28 [Meta] Marketplace argument
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#29 [Meta] Marketplace argument
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#18 address space
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#39 What happens if CR's are directly changed?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#1 About TLB in lower-level caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#42 old hypervisor email

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 20:21:05 -0600
kkt <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
If you've got a mortgaged house and can't make the payments do you blame the lender for lending you too much? Would you consider it an ethical lapse that the lender didn't give you a lower interest rate?

there is something of a difference between unforeseeable circumstances and things like balloon payments that are clearly written into sub-prime mortgage contracts ... modulo possibly some significant proportion of the population that don't understand middle school arithmetic and/or are functionally illiterate.

misc. past posts mentioning functionally illiterate and/or not understanding middle school arithmetic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#41 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#44 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#61 Health Care
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 22:38:24 -0600
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
If I have two highly lucrative years where I make $200,000 a year, and I get a mortgage that depends on that income, whose fault is it when the next year I make $35,000 and the bank forecloses?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#80 IBM Unionization

i think the simple version of the scenario is statistically insignificant among all the events that are in the news about problems in the subprime mortgage market.

The above hypothetical scenario applied to the subprime scenario, is that a person with two yrs of $200k/annum earnings, signs a subprime contract for a mansion that will have regular monthly payments of $20k/month after the introductory period. Doesn't make any difference whether the earnings stay at $200k/annum (gross), the payments rise to $240k/annum (after the introductory period). At $200k/annum or $35k/annum, the bank still forecloses. The subprime scenario is that the introductory subprime mortgage payments are sized based on current income ... and then rise to potentially more than even the gross income after the introductory period.

the majority scenario in the news are the people that got subprime mortgage ... for the a couple yr introductory period and then becomes standard variable adjustable. the vast majority have standard hrly wage that varies little ... and they are possibly barely able to afford the contracted subprime rate introductory payments ... and then at the end of the introductory period ... the payment suddenly doubles or triples (as specified in the contract).

There was basically no reasonable foreseable circumstance where they were going to be able to afford the post-introductory mortage payment as stated in the contract (i.e. contractual payments potentially even larger than gross income).

Various analysts talk about the big boom/bust in the subprime mortgage market as irresponsible mortgage lenders throwing money at irresponsible home buyers.

Recent article from the 9th says total mortgage lending up 11pct ... while subprime lending sank 49pct.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:15:44 -0600
Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
Your exception recognizes that the circumstances are not seen by some (who may foolishly be depending on what the agents and brokers are telling them). Add to that circumstances like job loss and unexpected medical expenses (especially combined and in that order) that can happen even to populations who do understand middle school arithmetic and are functionally literate.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#80 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#81 IBM Unionization

from previous post
The above hypothetical scenario applied to the subprime scenario, is that a person with two yrs of $200k/annum earnings, signs a subprime contract for a mansion that will have regular monthly payments of $20k/month after the introductory period. Doesn't make any difference whether the earnings stay at $200k/annum (gross), the payments rise to $240k/annum (after the introductory period). At $200k/annum or $35k/annum, the bank still forecloses. The subprime scenario is that the introductory subprime mortgage payments are sized based on current income ... and then rise to potentially more than even the gross income after the introductory period.

...

i.e. given a $200k/annum scenario ... possibly the person takes out a $3.5m mortgage with say an introductory subprime 2.5percent interest only payment ... around $85k/annum. after the introductory period it becomes a normal variable mortgage interest+principle ... say $270k/annum.

also from previous post:
Various analysts talk about the big boom/bust in the subprime mortgage market as irresponsible mortgage lenders throwing money at irresponsible home buyers.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:23:36 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
That is exactly why it should be confidential. You found out somebody whom you didn't respect made more than you. So you started a work slowdown. It's a normal human reaction and behaviour.

There were people who believed that JMF and TW should have been paid half. EVerybody overlooks longevity and yearly increases over a long time.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#74 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#75 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#77 IBM Unionization

but my scenario was that after nearly 15yrs ... i find that they are offering new hires (that i was interviewing to work under my direction) 1/3rd more than what i was making ... and initially when i raised the subject, they claimed that they had done a detailed study and i was making exactly what i was suppose to (that was before I raised the discrepancy between what i was making and what they were offering the new hires that i was interviewing).

VLIW pre-history

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:45:48 -0600
Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com> writes:
I was under the impression that the 370/165 and 370/168 microarchitecture was fairly similar to the 360/65 microarchitecture. Perhaps I'm mistaken. I haven't seen non-trivial portions of the microcode for any 360 or 370 other than the 360/30.

155, 165, 158, 168 (3830 disk controller) ... lots of high-end stuff from the 70s ... used horizontal microcode. wide instruction format that directly controlled various hardware functions with no interlocks ... aka start of transfer from one unit to another ... the programmer counted instructions/machine cycles ... from the time they initiated the operation ... until the time that the results should be available.

115, 125, 135, 145, etc ... was vertical microcode ... something that looked like more traditional sequential programming.

the low-end and mid-range vertical microcode tended to characterize the avg. number of (microcode) instructions executed per 370 instruction i.e. ten.

the high-end horizontal microcode tended to characterize the avg. number of machine cyles per 370 instruction (since some amount of stuff went on in parallel) ... i remember one of the 165 engineers making some statement that one of the microcode optimizations going from 165 to 168 was getting avg. machine cycle per 370 instruction from 2.1 to 1.6. then the transition from 168 to 3033 (started out using 168 wiring diagram mapped to faster chip) got it down to approx. 1.0.

misc. past posts mentioning 165 to 168 avg. machine cycles per instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#23 Old IBM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#61 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs (was: Re: 36 to 32 bit transition)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#82 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs (was: Re: 36 to 32 bit transition)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#56 ECPS:VM DISPx instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#37 S/360 undocumented instructions?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#56 RFCs that reference MD5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#59 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#29 Documentation for the New Instructions for the z9 Processor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#54 Hey! Keep Your Hands Out Of My Abstraction Layer!

misc. past posts mentioning slow down going from 3830 (disk controller) horizontal microcode to 3880 vertical microcode (one of the justification for transition to vertical microcode was that the burden placed on horizontal microcode programmer was so enormous).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#38 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#75 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?>
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#54 VLIW at IBM Research
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#28 checking some myths.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#63 MVS History (all parts)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#2 Microcode? (& index searching)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#3 PLX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#7 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#43 S/360 undocumented instructions?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring, wandering story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#46 Hercules 3.04 announcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#0 IBM 3380 and 3880 maintenance docs needed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#50 Was FORTRAN buggy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#36 REAL memory column in SDSF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#32 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#17 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#6 21st Century ISA goals?

one of the things that Amdahl introduced (for high-end horizontal microcode machines) was something called "macrocode" ... which was sort of a special 370-mode microcode ... where the engineer could implement more complex machine features using much simpler "vertical" (370) microcode ... as opposed to the much more complex task of horizontal microcode ... misc. past posts mentioning "macrocode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#44 Linux paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#48 Linux paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#9 Mainframe System Programmer/Administrator market demand?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#56 Wild hardware idea
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#59 Misuse of word "microcode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#60 Misuse of word "microcode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#24 Description of a new old-fashioned programming language
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#14 Multicores
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#29 Documentation for the New Instructions for the z9 Processor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#40 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#43 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#48 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#38 blast from the past ... macrocode
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#9 Mainframe Jobs Going Away
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#32 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#35 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#39 Using different storage key's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#42 old hypervisor email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#33 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#34 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#20 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#1 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#3 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#9 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 09:03:32 -0600
CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> writes:
By and large I think the education level of HS or College or PHD graduates has been declining steadily. Today you need a college graduate to get what most HS graduates used to know.

there is the thread from last yr:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#21 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#23 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#24 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#25 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#33 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#6 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline

there was the example about HS graduates from large land grant mid-western univ. claimed that went thru three different cycles dumbing down entering freshman texts three times between 60s and the 90s (indication that level of HS graduates was declining). few past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#23 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#21 Are there more stupid people in IT than there used to be?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization

there was general statement by census in the early 90s that half of HS graduate age were functionally illiterate (but that would have included dropouts and non-graduates ... all of that age). few past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#80 IBM Unionization

another scenario was that foreign automakers when they first came over (auto manufacturing plants in the us), found that they had to require 2yr college to get workers that had HS graduate level eduction that they were used to (however that was comparing US to other countries ... not whether US was in general declining). some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization

and then the general literacy survey from the 90s how US (across all levels of education) stacked up with the rest of the world ... a few past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#38 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#25 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#58 IBM Unionization

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 10:10:23 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Americans wouldn't buy small cars. I was still under a family edict to never buy Japanese (hangover from WWII).

once in a business dinner with some high level japanese executives, i happened to mention that my wife had lived in nanking for a couple yrs after ww2 (family evacuated on 3hrs notice in army cargo plane to tsingtao when the city was ringed). misc. past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#19 Message To America's Students: The War, The Draft, Your Future
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#3 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#27 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#27 Mount DASD as read-only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#44 Universal constants

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 10:19:08 -0600
Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes:
IETF TCP/IP RFCs: "rough consensus and running code" and vendor independent interoperability testing. Unlike OSI.

besides being able to approve a standard w/o having running code, ISO had a requirement that there couldn't be networking standards work on anything that violated OSI (crippling its ability to adapt to new technologies and paradigms):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#0 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy

lots of past posts related to XTP/HSP (and some mentioning of trying to work with ISO and running into problem that both IP, internetworking protocol and LANs violate OSI).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 14:36:16 -0600
D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
Did those executives deny the existance of Nanking ? Yes, I know the history of what happened there.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#86 IBM Unionization

they profusely apologized ... of course this is all within the last 15 yrs. quite a lot has changed since i first went over their in the early 70s to do a HONE install ... a recent x-over from another thread about doing HONE installs in the early 70s (from mainframe n.g.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#65 Help settle a job title/role debate

lots of past posts mentioning HONE (&/or APL):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

a thread in this n.g. about trips in the early 70s and yen was over 300/$
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#35 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness

it was about 20yrs ago when there was this short period that Nippon Steel was going to buy Oracle. The next qtr, Oracle had signed a really large enterprise license with one of the oil companies and was able to back out of the Nippon Steel purchase.

Nippon Steel buying a database company sort of surprised me, so I looked a little into what was going on. Supposedly, the gov. had decided that Japan was going to be world leader in information technology country by 2010. As part of that gov. economic policy all the profitable manufacturing companies (including automobiles) were told that they had to invest some specific percentage of their profits in information technology or have it taken as gov. taxes (of course, not included was buying computers for corporate operation)

this is sort of along the lines in the US a decade earlier with the call for one hundred percent unearned profit tax on the US automobile industry when they weren't investing their profits (in the wake of the embargo) in becoming more competitive. past posts mentioning the call for 100% unearned profit tax on the US automobile industry:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#72 IBM Unionization

the difference being that all the profitable manufacturing companies in japan were going ahead and doing the investment to become more competitive. in any case, as a result, a lot of the technology investments (in US companies) that went on in the 80s & 90s was actually coming from overseas (this is separate from recent posts about the high-tech boom of the 90s in the US was helped significantly by the large number of highly skilled foreigners with advanced technology degrees).

a past post mentioning Nippon Steel
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#49 How did Oracle get started?

for lots of topic drift related to RDBMS ... original relational/sql implementation was system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and other Oracle mention here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15
when we were doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
and cluster scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

a few past posts about countries having specific economic policies and goals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#4 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#7 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#8 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor

and few recent posts mentioning fifty percent or more of high-tech graduates being foriegn.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#57 IBM Unionization

IBM Unionization

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:02:04 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
OH! I still get those two words mixed up in trying to classify stuff into each category. I don't know why my brain is stuffed this way, but it is.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#63 IBM Unionization

strategy/strategic frequently is described as deciding what needs to be done ... and tactical is deciding on how it gets done.

one of boyd's highlights on this was with regard to the american army in ww2 ... was that they had to field a large number of unexperienced troops ... as a result they went with a very rigid command & control structure with both tightly controlled top-down strategy as well as tightly controlled top-down tactical.

some of this shows up in boyd's briefing on organic design for command and control ... recent reference here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#69 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?

the claim could be made that a decision to be the world leader in information technology by 2010 was a strategic decision ... along with forcing profitable manufacturing companies to invest at least minimum of their profits in IT. However, the specifics of such investments were tactical decisions left up to every company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#88 IBM Unionization

lots of past posts and/or URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

misc. past posts mentioning rigid, top-down command and control structures not being very agile and/or adaptable:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#8 scheduling & dynamic adaptive ... long posting warning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#120 atomic History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#34 War, Chaos, & Business (web site), or Col John Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#45 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#16 mainframe question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#40 Beginner question on Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#33 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#34 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#21 MP cost effectiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#46 employee motivation & executive compensation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#25 Timeless Classics of Software Engineering
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#34 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain the
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#18 Boyd makes wikipedia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#69 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#86 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#5 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#2 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#3 Computerworld Article: Dress for Success?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#40 Microcomputers As A Space Spinoff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#10 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#25 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#45 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#55 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#35 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:48:41 -0600
D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
Interesting. I mention it as my dad was on Corregidor Island in 1941 in the US Army.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#86 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#88 IBM Unionization

my wife's father was engineering combat group. near the end, he was frequently ranking officer into enemy territory and accumulated a variety of officer daggers (platinum, gold, silver) in surrenders. he also liberated some number of camps. supposedly after the end of hostilities, it was the reason he turned down staying on with a military district command ... so they posted him to Nanking (instead).

minor topic drift reference
http://germandressdaggers.com/Army%20Dagger.htm

He was graduate of west point with an graduate engineering degree from UC Berkeley. After coming back from China, he did a "tour" at MIT. recent reference about co-worker, many yrs later, claiming my wife's father was his favorite instructor at MIT.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#4 Even worse than UNIX

other refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#19 Message To America's Students: The War, The Draft, Your Future
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#3 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#27 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#30 Empires and Imperialism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#30 Empires and Imperialism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#33 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#27 Mount DASD as read-only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#15 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#47 Mickey and friends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#44 Universal constants

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 17:58:32 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
Supposedly when the company went into the red in 1992 ... they also took a charge-off to move to fully funded retirement program (i.e. since they were already in the red, going further into the red didn't make that much difference). However, a lot of corporations never have bothered to do that ... assuming that it in the worst case, it can be left up to the taxpayers to cover the difference at some point in the future. An issue ... also raised by the comptroller general, is that it assumes the number of taxpayers continue to significantly outnumber the recipients ... there is also a matter of simple middle school arithmetic involved here to.

past posts mentioning comptroller general and his observation about the lack of even middle school arithmetic skills:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#41 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#44 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#61 Health Care


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization

recent article from yesterday

Tremble for your old age, The world's underfunded pensions
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9172498

i.e. funding the obligation at the time it is incurred ... while the person is working ... instead of waiting to worry about it when it comes time to actually pay the pension. article mentions the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (PBGC) and companies with insurance with PBGC have $340B in unfunded liability. It also estimates that state and local govs. have $2T in unfunded liability for public-sector employees. There is some snide reference to legislation has at least forced chief executives to be (somewhat) more responsible than politicians. also mentioned somewhat delicate balance of how fast some of these companies can be forced to makeup for past failures and transitioning to fully funded obligations (too aggresive could make the company insolvent)

IBM Unionization

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 22:33:52 -0600
"Del Cecchi" <delcecchiofthenorth@gmail.com> writes:
Your example works perfectly if the 3.5M mansion appreciates to 5 million in 2 years, and can quickly be sold for a 1.5 million tax free profit before the teaser rate expires.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#80 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#81 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#82 IBM Unionization

which is on par with some people doing stock speculation on 20percent margin ... as long as it doesn't drop more than 20percent and they actually loose more than they put into it.

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:19:09 -0600
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
Now, the union asks for a pension plan that depends on $200 million a year in profits. The business agrees. Whose fault is it when the market cools down to $35 million a year in profits and the business can no longer afford the pension it agreed to?

the issue in the past was that pension plans were not funded at the time of the obligations ... but were paid out of current operating profits. fully funded pension plans has the money being placed into the pension fund as the obligation is being incurred. there is some scenario that the business has pension funding proportional to the current employees which is proportional to the current business.

the old time was that there was pension obligations agreements for the current employees at possibly 30yrs in the future ... but not providing current funds to meet those obligations ... planning instead of paying for those pensions out of operating revenue at that future date.

in some of these old corporate and gov. retirement funding scnearios it could almost be viewed as pyramid scheme. there are only a few current retired workers and they are paid out of current revenue w/o setting anything aside for pension obligations that have to be paid at 30yrs in the future. this sort of assumes that situation at 30yrs in the future remains the same as it is today ... there continues to only be a very small number of retirees receiving funds and the business hasn't changed i.e. possibly ratio of 100 workers per retiree.

however, at some point in the future ... the ratio of retirees to workers significantly changes ... which can happen even if the business stays the same, the number of workers stay the same ... but the life expectency of the retirees goes up.

in the fully-funded pension/retirement scenario ... the money being set aside is based on the pension obligation of the current workers. in effect, money is being set aside out of the current profits, based on current workers (funding the pension payments for those current workers). if the business drops off ... there is no issue of having to take out money to pay for the pension payments for past workers.

in fully funded pension/retirement scenario, there is much tighter feed-back control between the amount of funding that needs to be set aside for pensions, the number of current workers, and the amount of current business. any contract obligations that might have to be renogiated is if the profit margin for the business changes ... and cutting the number of workers isn't sufficient adjustment. in a fully funded pension/retirement scenario ... since each employees future pension obligation appears as benefits paid against the current work of the current employees ... the contract renegotiation may reduce size of direct salary and also indirect benefits (medical insurance, pension contribution, etc) of current workers. In fully funded pension/retirement scenario, such renegotiation would have no effect on the payments to existing retirees ... since that money had already been payed into the pension fund during the lifetime of those workers.

in the unfunded and/or partially funded scenario ... a downturn in current business would affect the pension benefits payments for everybody (since the responsible entities had not bothered to set aside the funds at the point in time that the pension obligation had been incurred).

past posts/threads mentioning pension/retirement funding:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#9 A hundred subjects: 64-bit OS2/eCs, Innotek Products,
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#37 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#27 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#35 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#91 IBM Unionization

IBM Unionization

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Unionization
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:32:42 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
I don't understand that one about new hires. The first thing a new supervisor of the development groups had to overcome was the notion that his underlings made much more than he did.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#74 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#75 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#77 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#83 IBM Unionization

ok, how 'bout this example ... say JMF has 15yrs experience and is the senior technical person working on a project, was providing technical direction for the whole project and was asked to interview some recent college graduates (to join the company to also work on the same project). The HR department decides that starting salary offer for all the new hire candidates should be 1/3rd more than the existing salary of the most senior and experienced person working on the project.

Possibly conversely ... HR department had almost never bothered to give JMF a raise in his 15yrs of employment ... so that after 15yrs, the standard starting salary offer for all recent college graduate new hires ... was now 1/3rd more than what JMF was currently making (after 15yrs of employment).

What would JMF think if he finds out that all the recent college graduate new hires, that were being brought in to work on a project that he was technically heading up, were being paid 1/3rd more than what he was being paid?

VLIW pre-history

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:49:47 -0600
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
Unless, of course, the instructions are so complicated that the microcode for them performs enough elementary operations as to permit superscalar operation at that level. My point is: in general, if you've got instructions like "add" and "multiply", and microcode is handling them, it's hard to make effective use of any ability to add and multiply at the same time.

no, the individual instruction operations are so simple ... there are things like start transfer of from register to functional unit. a single horizontal microcode instruction is controlling possibly half-dozen or more functional units that are operating in parallel w/o interlocks.

one of the reasons i mentioned that horizontal microcode was quoted in avg. number of 370 instructions per machine cycle was that there could be different operations for multiple 370 instructions going on in parallel/overlapped ... so they counted the avg. number of 370 instructions that completed in some unit of machine cycles. ref
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIW pre-history

part of the complexity for the horizontal microcoder was that they had to constantly keep track of which operations were in flight and approximately how many instructions later could they start the next operation (i.e. had transfer finished so add operation could be kicked off, etc).

besides FS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

contributing to creation of early 801/RISC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

... i.e. exact opposite from future system in terms of hardware complexity ... there were (801 related) comments in the 70s like all operations being fixed single cycle (in part eliminating the type of complexity and variability that the horizontal microcoders were having to deal with) and no cache consistency (eliminating the significant cache consistency overhead/slowdown that was going on in high-end 370s).

VLIW pre-history

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 10:06:50 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
no, the instruction are so simple ... there are things like start transfer of from register to functional unit. a single horizontal microcode instruction is controlling possibly half-dozen or more functional units that are operating in parallel w/o interlocks.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIS pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#95 VLIS pre-history

... or more accurately ... the level of control that horizontal microcode instruction provided was at extremely primitive hardware component level. the reason that it was referred to as horizontal microcode was that there was possible control over every primitive hardware component (in the system) in every instruction (in theory allowing each single instruction to activate every hardware component in the infrastructure ... concurrently and in parallel).

VLIW pre-history

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 10:30:08 -0600
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
The meaning of VLIW includes *superscalar*: unless you are independently executing separate microcode streams for fields in your source instruction, or generating microcode on the fly - in which case, it isn't microcode anymore, you have a decoupled microarchitecture, which _can_ be superscalar - it's pretty hard for a conventionally microcoded machine to be superscalar.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#95 VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#96 VLIW pre-history

some of the VLIW implementation have multiple instructions with multiple op-codes ... encoded in a wide word ... allowing things to be done in parallel.

this is somewhat similar to mainframes that do i-instruction fetch in double words or larger units ... fetching multiple instructions in one operation from storage.

however, an issue in horizontal microcode ... was that it didn't have instruction op-codes in the sense that most vertical programmers are familiar. an horizontal microcode instruction had positions for control of the various low-level/primitive hardware components ... it could be doing i-fetch, decoding i-fetch opcode, moving stuff to various execution units, etc ... all in one instruction. basically lots of the kinds of stuff that current supercaler processors perform under strictly hardware control ... but left up to the microcoder to implement in horizontal microcode.



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