List of Archived Posts

2010 Newsgroup Postings (05/25 - 06/27)

Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
History: Mark-sense cards vs. plain keypunching?
Significant Bits
Significant Bits
Idiotic programming style edicts
Problem Statement on the Cross-Realm Operation of Kerberos
Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
Seeking *Specific* Implementation of Star Trek Game
A programming language history page
Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled
Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Warren Buffett faces hearing over ratings agencies
A "portable" hard disk
Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Idiotic programming style edicts
What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Idiotic programming style edicts
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
Idiotic programming style edicts
Idiotic programming style edicts
A "portable" hard disk
The Durbin Amendment Ignites a Lobbying Frenzy on Capitol Hill
A "portable" hard disk
Tube Talk 1952 computer design
Tube Talk 1952 computer design
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Idiotic programming style edicts
IBM Rational Developer for System z
Favourite computer history books?
Idiotic programming style edicts
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Friden Flexowriter equipment series
A "portable" hard disk
Monet, was Re: A "portable" hard disk
Intelligence and foreign policy
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Knuth Got It Wrong
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Knuth Got It Wrong
Knuth Got It Wrong
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Knuth Got It Wrong
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Information on obscure text editors wanted
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
A "portable" hard disk
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
RISC load-store verses x86 Add from memory
taking down the machine - z9 series
1952 use of transistors in computers
IBM 3670 Brokerage Communications System
Disk replacing Tape?
What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Idiotic programming style edicts
What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
zVM training
Idiotic programming style edicts
Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks
USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks
taking down the machine - z9 series
taking down the machine - z9 series
taking down the machine - z9 series

Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 25 May, 2010
Subject: Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
Blog: Payment Systems Network
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#63 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#71 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

another reference to interchange revenue

Wal-Mart Claims Issuers Block Progress of EMV Cards in U.S.
http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_55/bernanke-we-will-do-what-it-takes-to-end-too-big-to-fail-1057723-1.html

from above
Most U.S. issuers are loath to disrupt the existing model because, according to Wal-Mart, if the EMV Integrated Circuit Card Specifications were to become commonplace in this country, they would lose significant revenue on signature-based credit and debit card interchange fees.

... snip ...

with respect to x9.59 financial standard and the above referenced rollout work for walmart a decade ago ... it would do both contact & contactless ... as well as be able to perform a (contactless) secure transaction within the distance, power, and elapsed time requirement for transit turnstile. it would work with single-factor authentication as well as mult-factor authentication (selectable based on risk and/or transaction value)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

History: Mark-sense cards vs. plain keypunching?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: History: Mark-sense cards vs. plain keypunching?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 20:59:04 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
When I visited years ago it was beautifully maintained. IIRC it's a campus of two- or three-story brick buildings scattered around a lawn. I think the exteriors were original, but the interiors were completely redone. Of course that may have been just a part of it.

what i remember of endicott plant site had offices (partitions) all converted large warehouse bldgs ... the first modern brick bldg was for the 801/risc group ... it was part of the corporate strategy to move the myriad internal microprocessors to 801; the 4341-follow-on (4381) was going to have 801 microprocessor; the s/38-follow-on (as/400) was go to have 801 microprocessors ... as well as several others. misc. old 801 email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#801

i contributed to paper that killed 801 for the 4381 ... basically cisc chips was getting to the point that majority of 370 instructions could be implemented directly in silicon ... rather than implemented as microcode. use of 801/risc for as/400 also ran into trouble and a cisc chip was done for that also.

misc. posts mentioning 801, iliad, romp, rios, power, somerset, power/pc, etc.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

endicott had suckered me into helping with the virtual machine microcode assist for 138/148 (precursor to 4331/4341) ... old post with some of the studies that went into design of ecps for 138/148
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

then they had me running around the world off and on for a year or so helping with business justifications for the machines with the various country business groups. the issue was that 370 microcode was about ten native instructions per 370 instructions ... a lot of ECPS basically moved high-use portions of kernel instructions into microcode on 1:1 basis.

in parallel with this future system was being killed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

during the height of future system, 370 efforts were terminated and 370 (software & hardware) product pipelines were allowed to go dry ... also reference here
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

then after future system was killed, there was mad rush to get products back into the 370 pipeline. the favorite son operating system made the case that in order to make mvs/xa schedule, the virtual machine product needed to be killed, the development group in burlington mall shutdown and all the people moved to POK. somewhat because of the expanding virtual machine midrange product base ... endicott eventually managed to make the case for them to take-over the virtual machine product mission ... but they effectively had to reconstitute a development group from scratch.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Significant Bits

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From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Significant Bits
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 26 May 2010 07:00:47 -0700
m42tom-ibmmain@YAHOO.COM (Tom Marchant) writes:
Apparently so. My comment (68000 and its successors) was in response to Ted's statement that the Motorola processors were little endian. I was referring to the Motorola designed 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, 68040 and 68060, not the IBM designed PPC, which was also manufactured by Motorola. The 680x0 series had an architecture that is rather similar to the 370/XA, but without bimodal support. A major difference is that eight of the registers were address registers and the other eight were data registers.

68k refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000

801/risc from early beginnings was single processor w/o cache consistency support. I've periodically claimed that whole 801 was adverse reaction to failed future system effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

and to do the exact opposite in terms of hardware complexity. Also along the way there were periodic observations of not wanting to pay the significant hit on performance and thruput that standard 370 (multiprocessor) cache consistency cost. some old email mentioning 801
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#801
and other posts mentioning 801
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

We did ha/cmp (High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing) cluster scalup for rios/power because w/o cache consistency ... that was about the only available scale-up option offered (couldn't hook up rios chips to SCI ... since rios/power design didn't have any provisions for cache consistency operation).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

Somerset was then the joint IBM, Motorola, apple, etc ... effort to achieve a number of things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_e600
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_G4

.. including single chip processor and support cache consistency for SMP. Motorola did have a (non-801) RISC, the 88k that supported cache consistency and had somewhat scalable cache consistency bus (and some of somerset could be described as adapting 88k cache consistency to 801) ... and also not wanting to pay the significant hit on machine performance that standard 370 (multiprocessor) cache consistency cost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000

The executive we were reporting too at the time (when we started ha/cmp) went over to headup somerset (he had also previously worked at motorola before coming to ibm).

misc. posts mentioning power & rios
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER

The above refers to somerset as the "AIM alliance" (Apple, IBM, Motorola) ... also reference that Motorola had original tried to get Apple to upgrade their then use of 68k to Motorola's 88k risc processors.

the lore about more recent move of apple to intel chips was that power/pc work was falling way behind in doing low-power chips for laptops.

recent reference to 801 in the late 70s converging the large number of different corporate microprocessors to 801:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#1

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Significant Bits

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Significant Bits
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 26 May 2010 13:08:01 -0700
ibm-main@TPG.COM.AU (Shane Ginnane) writes:
One of these days, for your sins, you will have to work in a (x86) little-endian world. Byte (pair) reversal will be visited upon you.

long ago and far away ... when I was undergraduate in the 60s and adding tty/ascii terminal support to cp67 ... i tried to get the 2702 to do something it couldn't quite do. the base cp67 terminal support could automatically differentiate between 1052s & 2741s ... didn't need to specify terminal type in any i/o gen ... could use a common modem pool with single base dial-in number, etc. So i did a bunch of work to be able to differentiate 1052, 2741, & tty. The 2702 had SAD command that could switch the kind of line-scanner with each port ... but had taken a short-cut and hard-wired oscillator for line-speed (1052s & 2741s were same line-speed). For leased lines that went into port with correct line-speed ... the automatic recognition would just work; however wouldn't work with a single dial-in number to common modem pool since wouldn't select the appropriate port (and bit-rate).

so this was somewhat the motivation for the univ. to start the clone controller effort ... reverse engineering mainframe channel interface and building a channel interface board for an interdata/3 ... programmed to emulate 2702 ... with the addition of how "software" line-scanner on the ports which would dynamically determine bit rate (110 or 134.+).

the first bug was channel interface board wasn't releasing channel frequently enough and the 360/67 timer would redlight (i.e. it tic'ed approx 13mics and each tic had to update location 80 ... if there was still a pending location 80 update when the next timer tic came around ... it would machine check).

the next bug was overlooking 2702 line-scanner which placed leading bit in low-order bit position of byte ... filling byte in reverse order (i.e. 2702 terminal bytes were bit reverse). default ascii/tty would put bits into corresponding bit position as it came off the line. as long as things were always bit-reversed terminal world ... things were ok ... just have a fixed translate table to handle both ascii<->ebcidic translation and bit reversal. things got little more of problem when there was ascii over lan coming in whole byte (w/o bit reversal) and terminal with bit-reversed ascii bytes.

there was also some writeup blaming four of us at the univ. for clone controller business. the interdata/3 involved into a cluster with interdata/4 dedicated to the channel interface and one or more interdata/3s dedicated to line-scanner function. then perkin-elmer bought interdata ... and the box continued to live on and be sold under the perkin-elmer brand. misc. past posts mentioning clone controller business
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

this writeup ... blames motivation for future system effort on the clone controller business.
https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm
https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm

quote from above:
IBM tried to react by launching a major project called the 'Future System' (FS) in the early 1970's. The idea was to get so far ahead that the competition would never be able to keep up, and to have such a high level of integration that it would be impossible for competitors to follow a compatible niche strategy. However, the project failed because the objectives were too ambitious for the available technology. Many of the ideas that were developed were nevertheless adapted for later generations. Once IBM had acknowledged this failure, it launched its 'box strategy', which called for competitiveness with all the different types of compatible sub-systems. But this proved to be difficult because of IBM's cost structure and its R&D spending, and the strategy only resulted in a partial narrowing of the price gap between IBM and its rivals.

... snip ...

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

and then there have been a number of references that the distraction of future system ... and policy of letting 370 product pipelines to got dry ... allowed clone processors to gain market foothold.
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

then there is reference in fergus & morris book about what happened to corporate culture after the FS failure ... part of quote here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 08:25:28 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
When I was in college about the OS/360 release 12 timeframe, the computer center had a library which was at least 20x20 or larger, with rows of head-high shelves filling the room, all shelves full of binders of manuals. Makes you appreciate CDs and the web for manuals.

and the constant TNLs replacing and adding pages. the added pages would have nos like xx.1, xx.2, xx.3, ... xx.25, etc. there were few larger TNLs with dozens of pages. I forget what they did when then needed to add TNL pages to something that was already TNL page added ... vaguely remember having to replace series of pages that would be correctly renumbered ... I suspect it somewhat akin to replacing cards in sequenced deck ... sarting out with sequencing in the thousands (x000) ... first adding cards with numbers in the hundreds, then in the tens, and finally single digit ... and then have to resequence whole deck.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Problem Statement on the Cross-Realm Operation of Kerberos

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Problem Statement on the Cross-Realm Operation of Kerberos
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 16:22:27 -0400
RFC 5868

Problem Statement on the Cross-Realm Operation of Kerberos
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5868.txt

from above:
This document provides background information regarding large-scale Kerberos deployments in the industrial sector, with the aim of identifying issues in the current Kerberos cross-realm authentication model as defined in RFC 4120.

... snip ...

Long ago we would periodically go by project athena to see what was going on (i.e. DEC & IBM both funded athena to tune of $25M and each had assist. directors of the project ... and various corporate people would also have review visits). One of the visits (at the time, the IBM assist director was person that I had worked with at the science center and had invented the compare&swap instruction) was watching the cross-realm message flows being worked on blackboard in real-time.

A few years ago I sat thru presentation on one of the first large-scale SAML cross-relm (coalition forces) deployments ... and had opportunity to comment that their messages looked identical to kerberos (modulo the bit arrangements being different).

athena wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena

kerberos wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_%28protocol%29

I was somewhat involved in the certificate-less flavor of kerberos public-key authentication (pk-init) ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#kerberos

then there was pressure to add PKI/certificate-based specification to the specification. Somewhat later, the person claiming responsibility for pushing PKI into Kerberos pk-init specification ... apologized ... finally realizing that it was redundant and superfluous in the kerberos environment.

saml wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAML_2.0

misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

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

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 27 May, 2010
Subject: Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
Blog: Payment Systems Network
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#63 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#71 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#0 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

latest on the interchange revenue front (aka, above article reference "Wal-Mart Claims Issuers Block Progress of EMV Cards in U.S.")

Visa, MasterCard May Face Antitrust Concern on Fees, Durbin Says
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-27/visa-mastercard-may-face-antitrust-concern-on-fees-durbin-says.html

& walmart has been battling this for some time ... past reference

MasterCard Puts the 13-Year-Old Wal-Mart Case in the Rear-View Mirror
http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=2256

There was an article a couple years ago that the payment related revenue avgs. 40% of the bottom line for US institutions (some big issuers, 60%) compared to under 10% for European institutions. The scenario was that big component of payment fees are proportional to fraud ... and could mean factor of ten reduction in those fees if fraud was significantly reduced (theme was that US institutions have a lot more at stake if those fees are significantly reduced).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Seeking *Specific* Implementation of Star Trek Game

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Seeking *Specific* Implementation of Star Trek Game
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 08:04:02 -0400
Bernd Felsche <berfel@innovative.iinet.net.au> writes:
But the Germans aren't allowed to look unless the owner of the information (the person to whom the data relates) has granted specific permission for *specified* others to be able to access the details. Those collecting the data (e.g. the tax office in Ireland) would be facilitating a criminal act.

"opt-in" with regard to privacy sharing.

a decade ago, we were invited in to help word-smith the cal. electronic signature legislation. some of the parties involved were heavily involved in privacy issues and done detailed consumer privacy studies/survesy. the number one issue was identity theft, specifically the form of account fraud involving fraudulent transactions as result of various kinds of data breaches. very little corrective action (or even publicity) seemed to be taken ... and they seemed to think that the publicity from breach notifications might motivate corrective actions and countermeasures.

they were also working on "opt-in" privacy sharing legislation when GLBA passed with "opt-out" provision ... sort of federal pre-emption of their "opt-in" legislation. GLBA was also the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall and did some number of other things. The rhetoric on the floor of congress was major purpose of GLBA was that if you were already a bank ... you got to stay a bank, but if you weren't already a bank, you couldn't become a bank (specifically calling out wal-mart and m'soft).

even with the "opt-out" provisions in GLBA ... a few years ago at annual privacy conference in washington ... there was a panel of the FTC commissioners ... and during the discussion, somebody got up in the back of the room and said they were involved in providing call-center infrastructure for many of the financial institutions ... and they knew that the people answering the "opt-out" lines had no mechanism for recording information (aka there was no trace of people calling in requesting "opt-out" of privacy sharing). He asked if the FTC commissioners were planning on ever enforcing any of the privacy sharing legislation.

recent posts mentioning "opt-in"/"opt-out":
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#82 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#94 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#95 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#73 Our Pecora Moment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#74 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#75 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#82 Costs Of Data Breaches Much Higher In U.S. Than In Other Countries, Study Says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#62 blasts from the past -- old predictions come true
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#63 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#77 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#83 The Evolution of the Extended Enterprise: Security Stategies for Forward Thinking Organizations

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A programming language history page

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A programming language history page.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 10:51:51 -0400
greymausg writes:
In my opinion, the whole witch thing was an attempt to keep 'uppity' women in their place, and a struggle between the wholly useless medicine of the time, and the old folk medicines that people had used from time immemorial.

some number of years ago, my wife's uncle got a call about contributing to memorial for the salem witch burnings ... he told them that the family had already contributed enuf (the witches that were burned).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled

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From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 28 May 2010 08:21:47 -0700
Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/27/idc_q1_2010_server_nums/

from above:
... all had products in transition during the first quarter, which hurt sales, and IBM's mainframes are expected to be upgraded in the second half of this year, which damped sales of this legacy box.

... snip ...

related thread from early this year ... including reference to IBM announcing new nehalem servers (being caught between rock & hard place):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#25 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#27 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#28 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#32 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#35 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#77 IBM responds to Oracle's Exadata with new systems

aka ...

IBM goes elephant with Nehalem-EX iron; Massive memory for racks and blades
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/ibm_xeon_7500_servers/

from above:
With so much of its money and profits coming from big Power and mainframe servers, you can bet that IBM is not exactly enthusiastic about the advent of the eight-core "Nehalem-EX" Xeon 7500 processors from Intel and their ability to link up to eight sockets together in a single system image. But IBM can't let other server makers own this space either, so it had to make some tough choices.

... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 27 May, 2010
Subject: Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
Blog: Payment Systems Network
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#63 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#71 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#0 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#6 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments

Besides the rather large (POS chipcard) pilot in the US the early part of the century ... that seemed to flounder (and disappear w/o a trace) because of the yes card vulnerability (as opposed to the cost and/or fees) ... there were a number of "secure internet payment" products about the same time. They had gotten agreement from the 100 or so largest internet merchants (transactions quite skewed with over 70% of all transactions), with the merchants anticipating fees being dropped to POS PIN-debit rates. These products appeared to flounder when instead of lowered fees ... the merchants were told there would essentially be a surcharge on-top of what they were already paying (some cognitive dissonance after decades of fees proportional to fraud ... having the whole interchange fee structure thing turned on its head).

misc. past references to yes card
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:06:30 -0400
ArarghMail005NOSPAM writes:
The only time I used WordStar commands was with the SideKick editor, which I used for a while before I got my first copy of PE.

I remember two PEs ... Professional Editor and Personal Editor; from long ago and far away (following gives the list price followed by the internal price):


Date: 03/14/83 08:02:33
From: wheeler

re: pc2; what do i need to do for an IBM order for two copies of the
following software for the pc2

6024002  IBM Macro Assembler                        100        50
6024003  IBM BASIC Compiler                         300       175
6024010  IBM Pascal Compiler                        300       150
6024035  CP/M-86 Operating System
              by Digital Research, Inc.             240       140
6024046  BASIC Programming Development System       130        78
6024048  Professional Editor                        130        78
6024050  Diskette Librarian                          45        27
6024051  Personal Editor                            100        60
6024053  BASIC Primer                                60        36
6024061  DOS 2.0                                     60        40
C 6025000  Guide to Operations Manual for the
              IBM Personal Computer                  49.50     29.75
6025005  Technical Reference Manual for the
              IBM Personal Computer                  36        21.50

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

I actually didn't make much use of Professional Editor ... but made quite a bit of use of Personal Editor. Later on AT with more memory, started using KEDIT ... a PC clone of the mainframe XEDIT.

this claims personal editor lives on as PE32:
http://www.pe32.com/

and KEDIT still lives.
http://www.kedit.com/

The original CMS editor tooks lot of its syntax from CTSS ... and the implementation stream data from original file, thru memory and out to working file on disk ... then subsequent operations streamed back and forth between two working files ... until saved; when newest working file was renamed the original file.

As undergraduate in 68, this was the editor that I hacked the CMS 2250 display fortran library (from lincoln labs) as editor display/output driver ... to get early full-screen editor.

An enhanced CMS editor was then done that would load file into virtual memory (assuming it would fit, the "old" editor was renamed cedit and continued to be used for files that wouldn't fit in virtual memory).

At the univ. I had added ascii/tty terminal support to the existing 2741 & 1052 support in cp67. I've mentioned before that I tried to get 2702 controller to do something that it couldn't quite do ... which was motivation to start clone controller effort ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

I also modified a version of HASP on MVT release18 ... removing the 2780 RJE support code (to limit program image size) and replacing it with 2741 & tty terminal support ... along with an editor that implementated the CMS editor syntax (I implemented it from scratch since the HASP execution environment was quite different from CMS). This was used for crje operation ... predating TSO.

The standard CMS editor was initially adopted to 3270 as full-screen display ... but still had command line and couldn't move around screen to modify data. EDGAR was the first wide-spread 3270 CMS editor that support full-screen operations.

Internally there was RED that saw quite a bit of use ... before XEDIT came along (I participated in trying to get RED released as product in place of XEDIT ... because at the time, it was much more mature and had more function). A few past posts mentioning RED
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#4 HONE, ****, misc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#39 20th anniversary of the internet (fwd)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#55 The very first text editor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#26 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#61 Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#4 Why so little parallelism?

with old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#email781103
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#email790523
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#email800311
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email800311
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#email800312
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email800312
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#email800429
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#email810531
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#email821122

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42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Warren Buffett faces hearing over ratings agencies

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 2 June, 2010
Subject: Warren Buffett faces hearing over ratings agencies
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
Warren Buffett faces hearing over ratings agencies; Berkshire Hathaway, which Warren Buffett leads as chairman and chief executive, is Moody's largest shareholder.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jun/02/warren-buffett-faces-congress-hearing-ratings-agencies

from above:
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and the CEO of credit rating agency Moody's are scheduled to face questions Wednesday from a bipartisan panel probing the roots of the financial crisis.

... snip ...

So far there seems to be little reference to the congressional hearings from fall of 2008 into the rating agencies ... when the testimony was that the rating agencies were being paid for triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs when both the sellers and the agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A ratings. Also that the seeds for conflict of interest and misaligned business process were sown in the early 70s when the agencies switched from buyers paying for the ratings to sellers paying for the ratings

archived recent news item thread mentioning rating ageinces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#48 Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike

at the time of the 2008 congressional hearings, there was news items that the rating agencies were probably immune to criminal prosecution as one of the primary players in the financial mess ... because of the risk that they could lower the govs. credit rating.

Answers on Credit Ratings Long Overdue
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01sorkin.html?ref=business

from above:
One of the enduring questions of the financial crisis is how the credit ratings establishment got so much so wrong for so very long. How could century-old institutions like the Moody's Investors Service give their triple-A blessings to subprime junk?

... snip ...

old nyt reference to fall 2008 hearings

Rating Agencies Draw Fire on Capitol Hill
http://dealbook.nytimes.com//2008/10/22/rating-agencies-draw-fire-capitol-hill/

from above:
"Total revenues for the three firms doubled from $3 billion in 2002 to over $6 billion in 2007," Mr. Waxman said. "Moody's had the highest profit margin of any company in the S&P 500 for five years in row."

... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A "portable" hard disk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:35:56 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
The turbines in Scandinavia usually have several hundred meters of waterfall to generate pressure, and turbines are exposed to the silt hitting the blades at several tens of bars of pressure.

Turbines usually last 10-15 years. Power stations usually have some old turbines exhibited outside, and you can clearly see the wear on the blades.

Generators last longer, but the bearings wear out.

Even Rånåsfoss, the lowest waterfall we have (270 centimeters, in Glomma) has changed turbines and generators, but there they lasted around 40 years.

And ISTR that newer turbines and generators increased efficiency so much that it made economic sense to change them just from the increased electricity output.

Water funnels are also rusting, and are eaten from the inside from silt. They usually last 40-50 years before they need changing. The very first large power station at Fossen Bratte, in full production 1892, has had the funnels changed twice, and the third set is soon needing replacement. There has been more than a dozen turbine changes.


re:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

there is a concret lip along the bottom of the spillway ... to keep the falling water from undercutting the ground under the dam ... especially before the 3rd powerhouse was built (in theory, nearly all the water can now go thru turbines and the spillway isn't really needed much any more) ... that concete splash guard had to be be repaired every couple years.

they use to have overhead lines from the generators to switch yard above the dam (out of view on hill to the right in the picture in wiki). in the 60s, the president's wife was having a beautification effort ... like eliminating billboards from interstates. Part of that involved eliminating the overhead transmission lines from the powerhouses to the switchyard. Somebody put together plan for buried pipes that contained the power lines (carefully located in the center of the pipes). Engineers protested that the (current) technology wouldn't work ... that gravity would result in the mass of the transmission cores "slumping" ... and touching the side of the pipewalls ... resulting in short/arc'ing. The engineers were overruled because it was mandated by the beautification efforts. A couple years later ... when there was big fire with the wires in the pipes slumping ... the engineers that objected ... were the ones blamed (wasn't PC to blame the president's wife).

a little more on turbines at the dam:
http://users.owt.com/chubbard/gcdam/html/hydro.html

the above mentions the reversable pumps ... that started out pumping water into the coulee for irrigation purposes ... but now also be used to pump water during off-peak into the coulee ... and then reverse the flow for power generation during peak hrs.

a couple past posts mentioning grand coulee/hydro-electric power
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#43 VR vs. Portable Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#32 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#14 Geothermal was: VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#7 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#56 IBM drops Power7 drain in 'Blue Waters'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#68 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
To: <ibm-main@bama.ua.edu>
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:38:52 -0400
dba@LISTS.DUDA.COM (David Andrews) writes:
Well, you make me go and look. There across the parking lot, in an attic over a farm equipment shop and accessible by forklift, still sits a bus-and-tag 3088 CTC - plastic wrapped against the elements.

one of the battles my wife lost when she served her stint responsible for loosely-coupled architecture in POK ... was added more features to 3088 (code-name trotter) than simply acting like multi-arm ctc. one of the reasons a little later she started pushing hyperchannel ... put was opposed by people that had pushed vanilla 3088 and were worried that if there was a lot of hyperchannel out there ... it would interfere with eventually being able to ship escon.

she had done Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

which saw little uptake (except for ims hot-standby) until sysplex. other battles that contributed to her not staying long in the position was SNA camp trying to force all loosely-coupled operations thru VTAM.

prior to taking the position in POK ... she had been in the JES group working on merged JES2/JES3 (figuring out what were the missing things in one ... that the customers of the other couldn't live w/o) ... JES Ultimate System.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 11:02:52 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
You are not thinking timesharing at all. I may have been the only user on a PDP-10 but I had that machine doing dozens of tasks for me. One of mmost annoying things about all of these PCs, including iBooks, is having to have to wait for one thing to be finished before I can do the next thing. I didn't have to do that on PDP-11 OSes, except RSTS.

desktop started out as stand-alone environment ... which included a lot of demos/games that would completely take-over the whole system; no thot to defenses or countermeasures.

some of the stand-alone evolved into small business lans ... again w/o defenses and/or countermeasures ... with lots of enhanced applications with scripting and sharing.

multi-user/timesharing systems tended to have defenses and countermeasures between the different parties ... especially when operating as commercial service bureaus. some number of the virtual machine based service bureaus had moved upstream into financial information ... and had clients from competitive organizations ... where security and preventive measures became extremely important. some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

there is an issue now where the world-wide internet is an extremely anonomous hostile environment (requiring significant defenses and countermeasures) ... totally different from the early relatively safe, small, closed business lans.

there is some similarity in the technologies. the problem is taking the stand-alone desktop and small, closed, safe business lans ... and providing internet connectivity ... w/o building in fundamental defenses and countermeasures (including never allowing arbitrary executiion of things arriving over the network interface ... something that had become default in the safe, closed, small business lan environment).

there is significant difference starting with a platform that assumes defenses and countermeasures as part of original design ... as opposed to starting with a platform that makes no assumptions about defenses and countermeasures ... and then attempting to adapt it to hostile environment (say starting with a family automobile and using it for interplanetary transport).

I had above discussion a couple times ... when Jim badgered me into interviewing for position of chief security architect in redmond ... some past references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#7 Hypervisors May Replace Operating Systems As King Of The Data Center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008b.html#5 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008b.html#37 Tap and faucet and spellcheckers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#80 Making tea
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#60 The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#18 Top 10 Cybersecurity Threats for 2009, will they cause creation of highly-secure Corporate-wide Intranets?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#28 Computer virus strikes US Marshals, FBI affected
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#22 My Vintage Dream PC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#20 Cyber attackers empty business accounts in minutes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#66 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc, alt.folklore.computers, comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:02:16 -0400
John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
Your memory is fine, since they didn't. The BIOS emulated a very simple terminal that was just adequate for the DOS or CP/M command line.

The first shareware program was PC-TALK, the terminal emulator that everyone used to call out over a serial port and a modem. As I recall it emulated a VT100.

PCs were also extremly popular as emulators for 3270 block mode terminals because real 3270s were so expensive.


the other scenario was that corporations had thousands (tens of thousands, possibly in some cases hundreds of thousnads) of 3270s.

for organization that had large budget for already justified 3270s, it was a relative no-brainer to switch from real 3270s to PC with 3270 emulation; the costs were about the same, and for that (in a single desktop footprint) ... got 3270 terminal and some local personal computing (much simpler than going for business justification for incremental budget for PC based purely on emerging personal computing ... and having both a PC and a 3270 on the same desk).

misc. past posts mentioning 3270 emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

in the early days ... 3270 emulation help with PC uptake .... later on the communication business unit was trying to preserve the terminal emulation install base ... attempting to fend off all kinds of enhanced PC operation ... like trying to prevent client/server taking hold.

In that later period, we had come up with 3-tier architecture and were out pitching to customer executives ... and taking barbs from the communication interests (part of trying to preserve the terminal emulation install base).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

Also in that period, one of the senior mainframe disk engineers had gotten a presentation scheduled at the world-wide annual internal communication conference ... and started out their talk with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The scenario was that several products that the disk division had attempted to announce ... supporting advanced use of mainframe storage in distributed environments ... were being blocked by the communication business unit (part of preserving their terminal emulation install base). The disk division showed that w/o such products ... their products would continue to show annual declines.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 6 Jun 2010 20:23:49 -0700
eamacneil@YAHOO.CA (Ted MacNEIL) writes:
I think those that are paranoid, are overly so. Just because an OS is available for public use doesn't make it available for cracking. Not that I expect z/OS to ever be available!

there is folklore about various agencies requesting exact source that corresponded to complete running system. supposedly after extremely large amount of money (seven figures) spent investigating the issue, it was eventually decided that it wasn't feasible/practical.

misc. past posts mentioning the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#58 When did IBM go object only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#32 Collating on the S/360-2540 card reader?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#48 myths about Multics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#49 myths about Multics

by comparison cp67 and then vm370 not only shipped source ... but provided source maintenance ... fixes were shipped as source from which customer did new system rebuilds (there was significant retrenching with the OCO-wars).

cp67 was used for commercial timesharing service bureaus ... some of which moved up the value stream providing financial information ... getting customers from different, competitive large wall street firms ... where critical competitive information was frequently involved. misc. references to virtual machines based timesharing (bears some similarities with current cloud computing):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

science center also got into provide timesharing services ... both internally as well as to educational institutions in the cambridge area (students and other non-employees). The science center has also done a port of apl\360 to cms for cms\apl ... opening up workspace size to virtual memory limits (from typical 16k-32k bytes) and adding APIs for system facilities (like read/write files) ... which allowed using APL for large real-world applications. One of the early internal customers for the services was the business planning people in Armonk ... which loaded the most valuable of all corporate information on the system (for their APL business planning models). This assumed that there was significant security given the most valuable of all corporate resources on the same system with a lot of univ. students.

a couple recent posts mentioning providing services for armonk business planners:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#24 Unbundling & HONE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#66 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle

also slightly related ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

i didn't hear about the above customers until much later. other recent posts mentioning the above url:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#63 Source code for s/360 [PUBLIC]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#97 "The Naked Mainframe" (Forbes Security Article)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#62 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#59 More calumny: "Secret Service Uses 1980s Mainframe"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#74 Is Security a Curse for the Cloud Computing Industry?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#9 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#40 someone smarter than Dave Cutler
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#53 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 7 Jun 2010 06:35:30 -0700
cfmpublic@NS.SYMPATICO.CA (Clark Morris) writes:
In one sense, we need to be careful about what we ask for. Do we want z/OS to be easily available to those who want to find vulnerabilities and crack the system? For security purposes are we better off with some kind of regulated hobbyist access to z/OS running under z/VM at data centers?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

the question of security thru obscurity comes up periodically in relation to provable cryptography ... usely related to terms like snake-oil.

open infrastructures tend to have faults identified and corrected much earlier ... there can be a painful period if attempting to transition from obscurity to open ... since all sorts of hidden infections could be found festering ... taking some period to clean out.

we were tangentially involved in the cal. state data breach notification legislation. we had been brought in to help wordsmith the electronic signature legislation and some of the parties were also heavily involved in privacy issues. they had done, detailed consumer surveys on privacy. the number one issue was identity theft, a major component being account fraud ... where skimmed/breached information was being used for fraudulent financial transactions. there appeared to be little or nothing being done about breaches ... and so it seemed that they felt the resulting publicity from data breach notifications would provide motivation to taking corrective action and countermeasures.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#signature

at the time, they were also working on opt-in privacy sharing legislation, but then GLBA (possibly better known for repeal of Glass-Steagall) came out with opt-out privacy sharing ... sort of federal pre-emption of the cal. work in progress (the difference between opt-in/opt-out privacy sharing has been in the news recently).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:01:41 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#18 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

and for some related topic drift (in a.f.c):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#15 Idiotic programming style edicts

late 90s, there was folklore that ceo of large financial institution let their CSO go with comment that fraud was much more cost effectively handled out of the public relations department (than the security department).

some of this could be considered short-term horizon associated with quarterly financial filings of public companies (minimize infrastructure investment and maintenance ... moving the funds into the profit column and used for executive bonuses ... planing on being long gone by the time the infrastructures begin collapsing).

maintaining the facade also showed up (at least) in financial sector infrastructure protection meetings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure_protection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Information_Infrastructure_Protection_Act

at the time a lot of the infrastructure protection meetings were with regard to y2k remediation ... however, there were also issue of information sharing (ISAC) databases ... capturing exploits, threats and vulnerabilities. the initial push-back was fear that ISACs would be subject to FOIA ... when the FOIA issues were addressed ... there was still pushback that information about exploits, threats and vulnerabilities (at least in much of the financial industry) was viewed as competitive advantage (who had them, who didn't, who knew about them, and what were the countermeasures; even when the information was not available publicly ... limited to industry insiders and appropriate law enforcement agencies).
http://www.fsisac.com/
http://www.isaccouncil.org/

the bread&butter of the financial sector ... possibly much more than the other sectors, has been trust ... with lots of concern about publicity damaging their reputation. unfortunately this can result in coming to believe that managing information about exploits can replace/substitute actually doing something about exploits.

misc. past posts mentioning ISAC/FOIA
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#17 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#0 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#11 Hannaford case exposes holes in law, some say
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#82 Data sharing among Industry players about frauds
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#48 Bankers as Partners In Crime Stopping
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#11 Banks should share cyber crime information
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#27 FBI: National data-breach law would help fight cybercrime
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#45 ATM machines are increasingly attractive to hackers

scenario regarding OCO-wars (aka Object-Code-Only wars) ... sort of goes starting to charge for (23jun69 unbundling) application software in response to various litigation ... but making case that system/kernel software was still free; Future System project started (a least partially motivated by clone controllers); Future System distraction is credited with allowing clone processors to gain market foothold; change starting to charge for system/kernel software (at least partially motivated by clone processors gaining market foothold) ... then followed by OCO.

misc. past posts mentioning unbundling ... first 23jun69 announcement for application software ... then later change starting to charge for system/kernel software (my resource manager was selected as guinea pig for starting to charge for system/kernel software)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

misc. past posts mentioning Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. past posts mentioning clone controller
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:54:34 -0400
cfmpublic@NS.SYMPATICO.CA (Clark Morris) writes:
In one sense, we need to be careful about what we ask for. Do we want z/OS to be easily available to those who want to find vulnerabilities and crack the system? For security purposes are we better off with some kind of regulated hobbyist access to z/OS running under z/VM at data centers?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#14 Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#18 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#19 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

aka, during the OCO-wars ... in the transition from freely available source to object-code-only ... I don't remember being able to hide threats and vulnerabilities being an argument ... it was about protecting corporate property (i.e. source) in a competitive environment with clone processors.

starting to charge for application software (23jun69 unbundling announcement) was about various litigation ... but case had been made that kernel/system software would still be free. later decision to start charging for kernel software was in period when clone processors had gained market foothold (during FS distraction, and my resource manager was initial guinea pig for kernel software charging);
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

OCO could be construed as further market inhibitors (in addition to software no longer free).

sometimes (in OCO-wars) there were issues raised about protecting customers from themselves ... that freely available source encourages customer programmers to make modifications ... which would cause problems/delays in moving to newer releases (things like newer source was incompatible with older source). customer source modifications could also result in delays in replacing existing machines with newer machines (that might have various kinds of differences).

there was case where AT&T had gotten a highly modified versions of early csc/vm system (w/o multiprocessor support) ... old csc/vm email reference (long before OCO-wars, still when vm370 shipped with full source maintenance):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

AT&T then made a large number of their own source modifications (things like virtual device support that ran over network connections ... aka being able to run application at one AT&T facility ... thinking it was doing i/o to local tape drive ... but tape drive was actually connected to system at another AT&T facility) ... which was widely distributed/used within AT&T.

Nearly a decade later, the national account manager for AT&T tracked me down looking for help in moving AT&T off that csc/vm system to a more current vm370. This was related to 3081 ... which was only going to be available in multiprocessor configuration ... and there was not going to be a non-multiprocessor (although this was later modified to ship 3083 ... in large part because ACP/TPF didn't have multiprocessor support). Since that particular csc/vm system (w/o multiprocessor support) was so entrenched in AT&T ... they were going to be forced to going to clone processor vendor that was selling newer uniprocessor machines (early csc/vm systems didn't have multiprocessor support until after the version that had escaped to AT&T; except for version that escaped to AT&T ... my csc/vm systems were limited to large number of internal installations ... which I could keep current).

misc. recent posts mentioning 3083
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#1 DEC-10 SOS Editor Intra-Line Editing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#21 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#14 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#79 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#23 Item on TPF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#24 Program Work Method Question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#78 IBM to announce new MF's this year

other reference to 3081 (& future system)
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:55:53 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
When I lived in Mass, I always knew when something was going to happen because of the planes flying low over my house. Then Congress closed the base.

which base? I had relative at devens ... they moved out west as part of the closing (during the move, I was temporary custodian of one of the bldg. signs).

at least part of closing was supposedly related to mass. delegation always voting against military appropriations (if the end of cold war needed to have base closing/consolidation ... and if choice of two bases came down to all other issues being the same ... then that was as good a tie-breaker as any).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:09:16 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
there was case where AT&T had gotten a highly modified versions of early csc/vm system (w/o multiprocessor support) ... old csc/vm email reference (long before OCO-wars, still when vm370 shipped with full source maintenance):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#20 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

also csc/vm email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102

jan75, a couple engineers from POK came up to science center to talk about doing a 5-way SMP skunkworks effort.

in the morph from cp67 to vm370 ... there was a lot of simplification and dropping of code ... which accounted for large part of the effort to move the cp67 csc/vm system to a vm370 base. I did get a bunch of fastpath stuff put back in (that I had originally done as undergraduate on cp67 in 1968) which shipped in vm370 release 1plc9 (aka vm370 had monthly source maintenance mini-releases that were called plc or program level change).

in any case, spring of '75, they roped me into helping with 5-way SMP skunkworks effort called VAMPS ... which was eventually killed w/o even being announced ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bounce

I got to do a lot of microcode/machine design ... queued i/o and queued i/o termination (something similar showed up later in "811" ... internal codename for 370xa). I also got to do multiprocessor dispatching interface ... somewhat similar to what showed up later in intel432 (but in microcode rather than silicon ... the i432 group gave a talk about one of the things that help kill i432 was putting really complex stuff into silicon ... and then difficulty in shipping fixes/patches).

after VAMPS was killed ... one or two of the people from VAMPS helped form another smp skunkworks effort for 16-way smp. this got killed and some people invited to never appear in POK again, when the head of POK was told that it might be decades before the POK favorite son operating system had (effective) 16-way support.

misc. past posts mentioning SMP (&/or compare&swap instruction):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

misc. recent posts mentioning charlie inventing compare&swap instruction (compare&swap was chosen because CAS are charlie's initials):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#67 How long for IBM System/360 architecture and its descendants?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#47 Extracting STDOUT data from USS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#20 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#15 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#80 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#86 Itanium had appeal
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#31 IBM Unix prehistory, someone smarter than Dave Cutler

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 8 Jun 2010 13:59:05 -0700
Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
http://blogs.computerworld.com/16284/ten_years_of_ibm_mainframe_linux

from above:
While IBM's System z, aka mainframes, revenue fell 17%, a billion bucks or so of business still isn't anything to sneeze at. So what happened to give the mainframe a new lease on life? In a word: Linux.

... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 8 Jun 2010 17:22:11 -0700
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#23 Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux

misc other past items in the same vein

IBM Enterprise Linux Server on z as mainframe savior
http://dancingdinosaur.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/ibm-enterprise-linux-server-on-z-as-mainframe-savior/

from above:
Clearly, IBM has identified Linux on System z as the most immediate growth opportunity for the mainframe. To that end, it is willing to slash prices to capture market share against the likes of HP and Sun in the enterprise Linux segment.

... snip ...

10th Anniversary of Linux for the Mainframe: Beginning to Today
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/10th-Anniversary-of-Linux-for-the-Mainframe-Beginning-to-Today/

from above:
Then, in late 2008, IBM created new pricing for the new System z10 Business Class mainframe to make it more economical to use. This amounted to about a 40 percent discount on Linux for System z subscriptions for the System z10 Business Class servers. IBM also dropped its prices for IFLs by more than 50 percent.

... snip ...

Mainframe Sales on the Rise, Why?
http://opseast.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/mainframe-sales-on-the-rise-why/

from above:
Linux, specifically SUSE Linux Enterprise, that's why.

... snip ...

Linux on IBM System z
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/

10 years of Enterprise Linux on System z; A simple idea that changed the world
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/news/announcement/20100517_annc.html

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:02:34 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
I think they came from Devens. Those HUGE transport carriers would fly [what looked like] 200' above the ground and follow Rt. 495 south. I can remember that happening when Granada got fixed.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#21 Idiotic programming style edicts

or maybe not so huge (aka c5a) ... just look that way flying low ... possible more like c-130 ... saw one a couple weeks ago at blue angels performance ... "fat albert"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C-130T_Hercules_Blue_Angels.jpg
fat albert airlines
http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/fat_albert.htm
wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130_Hercules

c-17 & c-130 reference
http://www.baseops.net/basictraining/airborne.html

Ft. Devens history
http://www.fortdevensmuseum.org/history.htm

from above:
Despite a valiant political effort to keep it open, Fort Devens closed in 1996, under the national Base Realignment And Closing Act.

... snip ...

wiki ... includes reference to army air field:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Devens

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:38:52 -0400
Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:
They still are in the UK. I've read somewhere that 97% of cars in the US have automatic transmission and 3% manual. In the UK the numbers are the same, but the other way round. I have one of each...

i learned to "drive" on '38 chevy flatbed when i was eight ... needed to double-clutch ... no synchromesh of any kind (before that I had steered tractors .... but that wasn't real driving, tractors had throttle on steering column).

first business trip to germany, the locals were apprehensive about my being able to manage a rental car ... since I was american and none of the rental cars had automatic transmission (also issue about staying in local hotel where nobody but the children spoke any english).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A "portable" hard disk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:44:21 -0400
Patrick Scheible <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
S.F. and Seattle both have those. They're a natural for cities where electricity is cheap. S.F. gets a particularly good deal on streetcar electricity as it's generated from the city-owned damn at Hetch Hetchy.

supposedly, one of the reason for boeing in seattle area was availability of cheap aluminum for planes which (at least partially) came from cheap electricity from all the hydro-electric power in the region.

BPA wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Power_Administration
BPA
http://www.bpa.gov/corporate/

combination of the hydro and hydro-electric power supposedly now accounts for several mega-datacenters in the region

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

The Durbin Amendment Ignites a Lobbying Frenzy on Capitol Hill

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 09 June, 2010
Subject: The Durbin Amendment Ignites a Lobbying Frenzy on Capitol Hill
Blog: Payment Systems Network
The Durbin Amendment Ignites a Lobbying Frenzy on Capitol Hill
http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=2550

from above:
The lobbying efforts come in the wake of another research report that warns of unintended consequences from debit card price regulation and estimates that government-benefit prepaid card programs could lose more than $140 million in revenue should the amendment become law.

... snip ...

There was something similar when community banks were rallied to oppose walmart obtaining an ILC to become its own acquirer ... effectively eliminating the walmart acquiring interchange fees for a few very large institutions ... and wouldn't have impacted the community banks primarily issuing interchange fees. The scenario supposedly was that being its own acquirer was just a small step on the way to becoming an issuer.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A "portable" hard disk

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:13:04 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#27 A "portable" hard disk

this talks about history of boeing, power, and aircraft production in ww2:
http://www.taphilo.com/history/WWII/USAAF/Boeing/B17/index.shtml

more about columbia river hydropower and aluminum
http://www.nwcouncil.org/history/Aluminum.asp

this is earlier history ... including 1916 seaplane assembly in Lake Union boathouse (merged with mcdonnel/douglas history):
http://www.boeing.com/history/chronology/chron01.html

other boeing history
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/boeing-early/Aero17.htm

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Tube Talk 1952 computer design

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tube Talk 1952 computer design
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:33:16 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
We used to open the gates on 360/30's and point a fan into the innards when things got too warm.

I was told that the person that took the univ.'s 709 had it installed in a "barn" and only ran it on cold days with barn doors open and large industrial fans at the doors.

recent thread/post about 709 cooling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#78 SLIGHTLY OT - Home Computer of the Future (not IBM)

other past posts mentioning cooling for the univ.'s 709
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#53 How Do the Old Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#39 WHAT IS A MAINFRAME???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#74 Metric System (was: case sensitivity in file names)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#55 Origin of "Function keys" question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#49 can a program be run withour main memory?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#55 1401's in high schools?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Tube Talk 1952 computer design

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tube Talk 1952 computer design
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:36:10 -0400
Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> writes:
The theatre has three giant swamp coolers, two of which are broken. We open "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" tomorrow night.

use to have canvas water bags that were hung on the vehicle in front of the radiator.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 11 Jun 2010 07:39:30 -0700
shmuel+ibm-main@PATRIOT.NET (Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.) writes:
Fishing with dynamite, are we? OS/360 had so many holes[1] that most people lost count. Take ISAM - please.

MVS may have holes, but it's harder to find them and IBM is willing to fix them. It's my fault that the operator can no longer blow you away with a simple START command.


for future system effort ... the corporation wanted to move to softcopy document ... avoid some of problems where hard copy FS specification might be copied and leaked outside the company (there was a situation involving unannounced 370 virtual memory features that had leaked out in this manner ... prompting a number of things, including retrofitting all corporation copiers with unique "serial numbers" attached under the glass ... which would appear on all pages copied). there were some enhancements added to vm370/cms that was supposedly the base for FS softcopy documentation (like disabling lots of mechanisms for copying and/or printing what was being displayed on 3270 screen).

they would needle me that the fixes were such that if I was left alone in the datacenter with the machine ... that even I couldn't access the FS documentation (part of this may have been in response to various unflattering comments that I had been making about the FS effort).

one friday afternoon when I was visiting to setup for some offshift dedicated time ... they got somewhat irritating about the subject ... which prompted me to reply it would take less than five minutes and involve changing one byte.

I first had to disable all access to the machine from other than the operators console. I then used the hardware console to patch a branch instruction in the kernel password checking routine ... so that everything entered was treated as valid password. I pointed out that countermeasure would require something like service console passwords for access to hardware functions (like display/alter storage).

misc. past posts mentioning Future System effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 11 Jun 2010 08:22:15 -0700
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#32 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

it was also about the time that the corporation hired a new CSO, long distinguished career in gov. ... things like having been head of presidential detail; knew a lot about physical security. I got asked to run around with him some; supposedly the corporate computer/information security expert (a few details about physical security would rub off).

other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#14 Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#18 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#19 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#20 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#22 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:31:39 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Since we had shipped system sleep functionality in 1980, I like to play with today's implementations to see if they really do it. :-)

one of the '60s hacks for cp67 (especially for commercial online timesharing service bureaus being able to provide online 7x24 access) was figuring out how to "sleep" the system meter. back then computers were leased and charges were based on number of shifts ran per month. normal first shift monthly lease was standard with additional charges for system meter running more than a first shift month.

commerical online timesharing would recover their (billed) operational expenses by charge for use ... normally with off-shift usage billed at lower rate (to help encourage off-shift use) ... but early on, off-shift use could be extremely low & sporadic ... but system must be left available 7x24 for possible incoming offshift dialin calls.

system meter would run whether processor and/or i/o was "active". normally just leaving an active i/o on dial-in port ... to answer possible call ... would be sufficient to keep the system meter running. hack was to work on an i/o sequence that would allow system meter to stop ... but wakeup if there was incoming call (system available to be active when it was being used ... but system meter wasn't running whenever everything was quiet).

misc. past posts mentioning online commercial timesharing operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

the system meter had characteristic that it would continue running (coast) for 400millisecond after everything had gone quiet. in the 70s, the pok favorite son operating system included an operation that wokeup and ran at least every 400milliseconds ... even tho by that time, most customers had moved to purchased machines (the wakeup feature was possible design left over from earlier times).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

IBM Rational Developer for System z

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: IBM Rational Developer for System z
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:57:28 -0700
john_w_gilmore@MSN.COM (john gilmore) writes:
None of this is altruistic, but neither is it reprehensible. It is business as usual. IBM has always repudiated the notion that it is an eleemosynary organization.

recent post in a.f.c.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#34 Idiotic progrmaming style edicts

in the 60s, most systems were leases and monthly charges were based on number of shifts recorded by the system meter. the system meter would run whenever the processor and/or i/o was active ... and would continue to coast for 400milliseconds after everything had gone quiet (i.e. everything had to be quiet for at least 400milliseconds before the system meter actually stopped).

one of the challenges for cp67 use in 7x24 operation for online commercial timesharing service bureaus was figuring out an i/o programming hack for terminal connections and dialup so that system was available for incoming characters/connections but the system meter wouldn't being running if nothing was actually happening (commercial timesharing service bureaus recovered their operational expenses from use charges ... encouraging offshift use had to leave system available 7x24 ... but also minimize operational expenses ... like "system meter" ... during those periods when usage tended to be low; another area of reducing off-shift expenses was drastically reducing/eliminating requirement for human operator).

however, the pok favorite son operating system had something that would wakeup every 400milliseconds, even when nothing else was going on (this continued long after customers had been converted to purchased systems); aka the only way to stop the system meter would be to manually push the STOP buttom (or shutdown).

misc. past posts mentioning virtual machine based online commercial timesharing service bureaus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

this has some overlap with recent thread mentioning that those commercial online operations also needed fairly high level of security ... since there was a lot of open use ... even from fierce business competitors, using the same machine concurrently.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Favourite computer history books?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Favourite computer history books?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:33:54 -0400
spring 96 MDC at moscone sort of was turning point. it had lots of discussion about supporting internet ... but the repeated theme & banners were "preserve your investment". this was all the people that had been doing development in various flavors of basic ... adding all kinds of scripting capability to various applications ... and that capability would be preserved as things moved to the internet (which is the root of enormous amount of current threats, vulnerabilites, and exploits).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Developers_Conference

the private discussions were that up until then ... new releases always came out with lots of new features that people had been waiting for ... but at the turning point, apps had 95+% of the features that 95+% of the people normally used. the issue was moving the market to new reasons to continue to always buy the newest release (sort of the '60s motivating consumers to buy a new car every year ... whether it was needed or not).

some past posts mentioning '96 mdc at moscone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#45 Computer programming was all about:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#22 Why did TCP become popular ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#34 Next generation processor architecture?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#43 The 50th Anniversary of the Legendary IBM 1401
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#63 who pioneered the WEB
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#37 (slightly OT - Linux) Did IBM bet on the wrong OS?

m'soft had hired some old internet hands to do their tcp/ip and several were at moscone ... and they assured me that their browser had multiple A-record support.

we had been brought in to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... they had also invented something they called SSL they wanted to use ... and the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce".

Part of the deployment was something called "payment gateway" ... that sat on the internet and acted as gateway between webservers and the payment transaction network. The payment gateway had multiple links into the internet backbone locations for availability ... and initially was planning on advertising routes. However, about that time, backbone infrastructure made decision to start migrating to (ip-address) hierarchical routing ... which pretty much left multiple A-record support as the primary availability mechanism. I could mandate that all webservers implement multiple A-record support for connections to the payment gateway. misc. past posts mentioning "payment gateway"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

However, didn't have equivalent authority over browser implementation (for supporting high-availability webserver configurations). The browser group pushback was that multiple A-record support was too advanced ... even when I provided them samples of client implementations from BSD 4.3 tahoe distribution. I was still having periodic skirmishes with their browser group when MDC at moscone rolled around.

misc. past posts mentioning multiple A-record support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#34 Mainframes & Unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#16 Old Computers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#158 Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#159 Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#23 Buffer overflow
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#32 Buffer overflow
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#34 Buffer overflow
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#30 Round robin IS NOT load balancing (?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#33 Round robin IS NOT load balancing (?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#8 Network separation using host w/multiple network interfaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#12 Network separation using host w/multiple network interfaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#24 Network separation using host w/multiple network interfaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#25 Network separation using host w/multiple network interfaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#57 Easiest possible PASV experiment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#32 Frontiernet insists on being my firewall
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#53 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#55 What is the "name" of a system?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#21 Protocol stack - disadvantages (revision)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#5 Wildcard SSL Certificates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#34 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#24 is a computer like an airport?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#32 How does the internet really look like ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#39 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#15 30 hop limit
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#36 MAC and SSL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#67 SSL vs. SSL over tcp/ip
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#44 latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#34 what does xp do when system is copying
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#67 what does xp do when system is copying
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#13 What do ATMS and card readers use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#34 Builders v. Breakers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#60 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of patents ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#32 comp.arch has made itself a sitting duck for spam
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#41 Follow up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#43 Status of Arpanet/Internet in 1976?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#40 The Web browser turns 15: A look back;
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#29 Check out Computer glitch to cause flight delays across U.S. - MarketWatch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#8 Union Pacific Railroad ditches its mainframe for SOA
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#66 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:47:54 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Why didn't you just charge it to overhead? PDP-10s ran what we called the null job (job 0) in the ACs and the system accounting charged the usage to that. Every job had its own usage data base which would then get recorded on disk when the session ended.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#34 Idiotic programming style edicts

system meter was built into hardware ... not accessible by any software. was used by IBM for billing usage for machines on lease ... early 70s, company converted most customer machines from lease to sale. The issue was that the customer didn't own the machine ... and the customer was being charge based on (hardware) usage. there was all sorts of software, operating systems, and user code that ran on 360s ... some of it built from scratch by customers (MTS operating system done at Michigan univ. for example) and company couldn't necessary rely on any software correctly reflecting hardware use for basing machine charges.

for little topic drift
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#35 IBM Rational Developer for System z

cp67 did cpu usage accounting using the location 80 (x'50') timer ... that was high-speed interval feature on 360/67 ... resolution approx. 13microseconds. when switching tasks/charging, it would place the new tasks value in x'54' and do an overlap move:
MVC X'4C'(8),X'50'

eight bytes starting at x'50' was (overlapping) moved to x'4C' ... basically old (4byte timer) value in x'50' was x'4C' and the new value at x'54' was moved to x'50' in one instruction.

Mechanism was used for accounting for individual virtual machine processor time, supervisor/kernel time spent on behalf of each virtual machine, time spent in wait state, and (originally) "overhead" time.

when initial cp67 was delivered to univ. in jan68, "overhead" time was time that the dispatcher spent "running" master task list looking for work to do ... and periodic scheduling functions adjusting dispatching priorities. "overhead" increased (non-linear) proportional to the number of logged on users. One of the first things I did when rewriting high-use critical pathlengths ... was add ordered list of dispatchable tasks ... effectively then the dispatcher only had to pop the first item off the dispatch list to select next runnable ... rather than doing scan of all possible elements on master list. "overhead" had been pushing 10% of processor with more than 30-35 users. the change nearly eliminated all "overhead". part of old presentation that I made at Fall68 (ibm user group) Atlantic City SHARE meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14

above references both a lot of pathlength rewrite I had done for cp67 kernel ... measuring OS/360 MFT14 running in virtual machine ... as well as a lot of performance work I had done on OS/360 (applicable whether running native or in a virtual machine).

I was also starting to do other cp67 rewrite for the scheduling algorithms, page replacement algorithms, I/O subsystem on how I/O queueing was done for disk and paging drum ... bunch of other stuff.

misc. past posts related to dynamic adaptive resource management algorithms (& fair share scheduling)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
misc. past posts related to page replacement algorithms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

Summer of '69, I added code to cp67 to make parts of the kernel code pageable. As part of doing that, I created stub, dummy virtual address space tables for the kernel image that identified which parts were pageable and which parts weren't pageable. Then to make the stub, dummy virtual address space tables work ... I created stub virtual machine control block for "SYSTEM" virtual machine. Then some of the residual stuff that was still related to "OVERHEAD" ... was switched to being accounted for against the "SYSTEM" virtual machine.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:23:48 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
I'm not sure this is "unusual." CMS files are indexed files, and I think a lot of other systems did this. Especially when memory was tight you had to avoid pulling all of a large file in to edit it, but you didn't want to go thru the garbage one DEC editor used (IIRC on the PDP-8) where you had to explicitly read and write blocks in sequential order.

original CMS files were either "fixed" or "variable".

the CMS file system kept index of physical block records for a file. If a file was "fixed" ... if application specified reading a specific record ... it could calculate the displacement into the file (using the fixed record length) and then select the physical block and read it directly from the physical block index.

variable length records were implemented with filesystem half-byte length field in front of each record. to read/write specific record, required running thru the file to find the corresponding record.

later os/dos simulation "variable block" support was layered on top of underlying CMS filesystem ... increasing efficiency of any "random" access for "variable block"

this references original cp67/cms editor (somewhat over from ctss) which did stream bits between two disk files:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted

fairly soon a new "memory" cms editor became the standard ... i.e. (if it fit) load the whole file into (virtual) memory and operate on it there. the original editor then became "cedit" ... and were used for files that were too large to load into memory.

for other topic drift ... fairly early, I provided a cp67 layer that overlayed cms filesystem on top of page mapped api (using 4k page size block) ... which provided all sorts of pathlength, thruput and functional improvments (compared to the channel program disk i/o paradigm) ... misc past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

old email mentioning moving lots of changes from cp67 base to vm370 base ... including page mapped filesystem support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Friden Flexowriter equipment series

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Friden Flexowriter equipment series
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:52:31 -0400
"Dave Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
Do you know I have no idea. I had even forgotten there were two division...

pc/rt ... was done in "OPD" austin .... started out with ROMP (rsearch/office) processor for displaywriter follow-on. when that effort was canceled, they looked around for something else to use it for and came up with the unix workstation market.

the displaywriter follow-on was being done in cp.r implemented in pl.8 ... however, retargeting for unix workstation market required unix and c language. they got the company that had done the at&t unix port to the pc for pc/ix ... to do "aix" for reworked displaywriter (pc/rt).

i have some vague memory of presentation on displaywriter follow-on about 200 pl.8 programmers working on the effort ... so when the displaywriter got canceled ... they needed something for all those pl.8 programmers to do. they came up with the unix implementation was going to be ontop of an abstract virtual machine implementation called "VRM" that would be done by the pl.8 programmers. there was some claim that would be faster and more efficient than if the outside company implemented directly to the bare ROMP processor.

the later counter-example was when the ACIS group was redirected from doing BSD port to 370 to doing the BSD port to the bare ROMP hardware (for what ACIS sold as "AOS").

misc. past posts mentioning 801, romp, rios, power, fort knox, somerset, power/pc, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

during HSDT effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

I tried to order a FE toolkit ... it was packaged to look like a large (suitcase-like) briefcase. For some reason, it got rejected when it became apparent that I wasn't in a service division ... I had to escalate to a executive level to get the order to go thru. It came with lots of tools that appear to be used for springs and other things that might be found in the innards of typewriters and misc. other things. They let me keep it when I "retired".

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A "portable" hard disk

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:23:45 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
I remember reading in a trade rag in the early '70s about how IBM rocked the industry by slashing the price of a megabyte of memory from $75,000 to a mere $15,000.

360/67 (360/65, 370/75) had 750ns magnetic/ferrite core memory (& no caches) ... with humans threading wires for core

370/155 had 2mic core memory ... with processor cache.

370/145 had 200-300ns electronic memory and no cache (electronic memory was much less expensive to manufacture).

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3145.html

from above:
In a major departure from conventional computer technology, International Business Machines Corporation today introduced its first computer using a main memory made entirely of monolithic circuits.

To store its data and instructions, the new IBM System/370 Model 145 uses silicon memory chips, rather than the magnetic core technology that has been the mainstay of computer memories for the past 15 years. More than 1,400 microscopic circuit elements are etched onto each one-eighth-inch-square chip.


... snip ...

one of the changes from 155 to 158 was memory subsystem change that was similar to 145 (mitigating cache miss penalty) and less expensive.

360->370 transition period also started to see more switch-over from leased to purchase ... so lots of the 360 prices had been given in terms of monthly lease (not purchase).

from IBM 145 archive article:
Monthly rental for typical configurations of IBM System/370 Model 145 will range from about $14,950 (with 112,000 characters of main memory) to $37,330 (512,000 characters), with purchase prices ranging from about $705,775 to $1,783,000. Initial customer shipments will be scheduled for late next summer.

... snip ...

assuming price range is mainly amount of memory ...

lease (37330-14950)/(512000-112000) ... is about $56k/mbyte

purchase (1783000-705775)/(512000-11200) ... is about $2.7m/mbyte

some product announcements:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-ProdAnn/index.html

picture of core memory:
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/MISC.HTM
http://www.pbase.com/jimhwy/core_memory

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Monet, was Re: A "portable" hard disk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Monet, was Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:49:25 -0400
Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:
Unfortunately, in order to have "internet banking", it is necessary to be connnected to the Internet. Also, there is pressure from senior manangement to use the Internet in order to reduce costs.

circa 1996, there were a number of presentations by dial-up online banking about motivation moving from (proprietary) dialup to internet. the dial-up online banking had proprietary gui interfaces and serial-port modem drivers that cost quite a bit in customer support ... one operation claimed to have library of over 60 different drivers to handle variety of operating systems, operating system versions, and different kinds of modems. migration to internet ... basically would move all these costs to ISP (which could amortize the costs across all the publics online activity).

at the same time, the commercial/cash-management dial-up online banking operations were making presentations that they would never moved to the internet ... because of a large variety of security issues.

there have been a number of recent news items about exploits involving commercial internet banking ... including the fact that company/commercial banking doesn't have the same kind of "consumer" protections that apply to individual banking. most of the kinds of current exploits were described in some detail by the mid-90 presentations.

one of the current suggestions for online (internet) commercial/cash-management operations is companies have a separate PC that is *ONLY* used for online banking and is never used for any other purpose.

a few recent posts on the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#21 security and online banking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#72 Users still make hacking easy with weak passwords
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#79 Customers risk online banking fraud by reusing bank credentials
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#86 NY Town's Bank Account Hacked; Poughkeepsie Loses $378K in Fraudulent Transfers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#6 Online Banking & Password Theft

One of the related scenarios is that in the very early part of this decade, there was fairly wide program to deploy smartcards for internet financial transactions and (internet) online banking ... that included serial-port smartcard readers that were either free or at a very nominal cost. The effort fairly quickly floundered due to enormous consumer support issues related to support serial-port devices. It somewhat can be characterised that in a period of something like give years ... the ephemeral institutional knowledge regarding difficulty with support serial-port (especially after-market) devices (attempting to work out all the serial-port issues) evaporated. Customers were calling in with BSOD and having to re-install their operating system from scratch in order to recover from the serial-port drivers.

The aftermath of the support difficulties resulted in the effort being abandoned and widely spreading opinion in the industry that smartcards weren't practical in the customer marketplace ... even tho the issue wasn't directly with the smartcards but with the serial-port smartcard readers. It should also be noted that all the serial-port difficulties was one of the major motivations for USB development. Another apparent side-effect was it was in the aftermath that microsoft canceled various smartcard efforts (including work on smartcard operating system).

a few past posts mentioning aborted internet smartcard deployment:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#25 Cambridge researchers show Chip and PIN system vulnerable to fraud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#26 Should the USA Implement EMV?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#27 Should the USA Implement EMV?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Intelligence and foreign policy

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Intelligence and foreign policy
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:07:58 -0400
Patrick Scheible <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
Soccer moms is understood to be moms who spend time shuttling their kids to events of all types, soccer, gymnastics, swimming, softball, (American) football, basketball, whatever their kids happen to be into.

Why soccer moms and not the other sports? I guess because soccer is a trendy sport with increasing market share in the U.S., and it has both boys and girls playing it while most of the others don't.


i thot it started weekend yuppy (yuppy kids had to be driven as opposed to things like school bus) ... as opposed to predominately during &/or after school.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:17:57 -0400
hancock4 writes:
for full article please see:
http://www.mainframezone.com/it-management/top-10-reasons-the-mainframe-is-the-most-cost-efficient-platform-avail/print


a couple recent posts & article references in ibm-main regarding large part of mainframe "growth" this century was linux:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#23 Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#24 Ten years of IBM mainframe Linux

part of it is "specialty" engines (basically mainframe processors licensed only for new kinds of workloads/applications) ... at drastically reduced/competitve prices.

somewhat related recent mainframe competitive posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#0 Processors stall on OLTP workloads about half the time--almost no matter what you do
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#1 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#5 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#81 BMC reveals 'free money' mainframe and DB2 tools
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#9 Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Knuth Got It Wrong

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Knuth Got It Wrong
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:18:22 -0400
for the fun of it ... recent item ...

Developers Story Knuth Got It Wrong
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/2225251/Knuth-Got-It-Wrong

You're Doing It Wrong - ACM Queue
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

from above:
Would you believe me if I claimed that an algorithm that has been on the books as "optimal" for 46 years, which has been analyzed in excruciating detail by geniuses like Knuth and taught in all computer science courses in the world, can be optimized to run 10 times faster?

... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:00:14 -0400
Walter Bushell <proto@panix.com> writes:
And if mainframes are so cheap for processing why does Google use server farms for its processing?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

there was presentation that google does a lot of selection of commodity parts ... looking at variety of costs issues ... and builds servers for 1/3rd (or less) the cost of what one would pay for brand name.

while my previous post mentions that "specialty engines" have (comparitive) significant price reductions ... this article mentions that the standard processors (used for running traditional/legacy workloads) still carry quite a premium (compared to mainframe prices from earlier eras).

Financial Matters: Mainframe Processor Pricing History
http://www.zjournal.com/index.cfm?section=article&aid=346

from above (2006) article:
is that the price per MIPS today is approximately six times higher than the $165 per MIPS that the traditional technology/price decline link would have produced

... snip ...

recent posts mentioning above article:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#81 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#83 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#0 Processors stall on OLTP workloads about half the time--almost no matter what you do
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#2 Processors stall on OLTP workloads about half the time--almost no matter what you do
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#5 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#81 BMC reveals 'free money' mainframe and DB2 tools

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:42:58 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

somewhat related

IBM goes elephant with Nehalem-EX iron; Massive memory for racks and blades
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/ibm_xeon_7500_servers/

from above:
With so much of its money and profits coming from big Power and mainframe servers, you can bet that IBM is not exactly enthusiastic about the advent of the eight-core "Nehalem-EX" Xeon 7500 processors from Intel and their ability to link up to eight sockets together in a single system image. But IBM can't let other server makers own this space either, so it had to make some tough choices.

... snip ...

for other topic drift, recent ibm-main posts about needing lots of independent channels for mainframe half-duplex synchronous I/O paradigm ... but moving to full-duplex, asynchronous I/O operation ... becomes primarily an issue of aggregate data transfer:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#36 What was old is new again (water chilled)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#13 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#16 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#18 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#62 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#63 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM

one of the differences is that the servers are profit for the vendors ... but cost for customers. google has incentive to minimize its server costs (as opposed to vendors looking maximize server profit, which sometimes indirectly also means maximizing market share ... in competitive environment).

in the past, users didn't have scale to justify doing their own servers ... especially when it involved designing and manufacturing processors from scratch. with the microprocessor revolution ... more and more server vendors have reduced their costs by moving to industry commodity microprocessor chips. the issue here is that such a server paradigm change reduces the break-even level for customers to (also) use the same commodity sources and build their own servers.

operations like google somewhat led the way. however, other large businesses that are heavy data processing users have been looking at it for internal "cloud" operations ... recent item:

Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700158

from above:
Move by three global banks to reduce their dependence on HP, IBM, and Oracle by working together to build their own highly secure cloud-based global infrastructure and network.

... snip ...

followup article:

Can HP, IBM, & Oracle Make Peace With Breakaway Banks? Three huge global banks plan to revolutionize the CIO-vendor relationship -- will their audacious plan trigger major changes from major IT vendors?
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700158

misc. recent posts referencing the cosortium reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#71 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#83 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#12 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#22 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#35 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#40 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#66 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

reference to Nehalem-EX targeted for mainframe server market:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#25 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#27 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#28 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#32 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#35 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#37 16:32 far pointers in OpenWatcom C/C++
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#77 IBM responds to Oracle's Exadata with new systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#10 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#12 OS/400 and z/OS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#19 How many mainframes are there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#24 How many mainframes are there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#63 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#0 Processors stall on OLTP workloads about half the time--almost no matter what you do
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#1 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#9 Windows, Linux propel Q1 server sales, Unix boxes, mainframes stalled

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Knuth Got It Wrong

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Knuth Got It Wrong
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:39:43 -0400
Patrick Scheible <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
You should also have quoted the author's followup in the messages on the ACM message board:

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#44 Knuth Got It Wrong

... it would have detracted from the "for the fun of it" phrase ... lots of people can complain about the slashdot characterization

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Knuth Got It Wrong

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Knuth Got It Wrong
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:46:10 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
Indeed. It isn't so much that there's anything wrong with the algorithm, just that some implementations weren't designed to ensure locality of reference. Worrying about locality of reference is something people do all the time when writing programs to invert large matrices, but there it's sometimes as simple as deciding whether to go row first or column first.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#44 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#47 Knuth Got It Wrong

one of the early experiences of this was on cp67/cms porting apl\360 to cms (with workstations the size of virtual memory) ... for cms\apl and having to redo apl's memory allocation & garbage collection.

standard apl\360 environment had been real storage with workspaces that were typically 16k-32k bytes ... where the complete workspace was always swapped as single unit. apl would always allocate a new storage location on every assignment (even if the variable had previously had allocation). this would continue until all memory had been exhausted and then it would perform garbage collection ... compacted allocations to contiguous area and then start all over.

in large virtual memory environment, this pretty much guaranteed that any apl application would quickly touch every virtual memory page before compacting back to contiguous area and repeating. an early form of vs/repack was used to trace typical apl instruction use and storage references. some number of this were printed/plotted on 1403 ... white backside of greenbar paper ... with x-axis memory storage address scalled to approx. 6ft vertical ... and time/instruction running for couple dozen feet vertical. these were then taped on the walls of science center corridors with storage references showing a very distinctive sawtooth pattern ... a slanted line of storage references as allocation quickly rose to top of virtual memory and then a solid line as garbage collection was performed and allocation compacted to bottom of the workspace.

in mid-70s, the vs/repack code was packaged, and shipped as product from the science center ... including doing semi-automated program reorganization for virtual memory environment. it was also used internally for analysing various large software application products ... not only for characterizing virtual memory operation but also "hot-spot" identification ... things like IMS database making transition from real-storage environment to virtual memory environment. One of the characteristics of large DBMS and evolving stuff like B-Tree ... was that their DBMS cache management tended to be tightly integrated with other parts of the application (where DBMS cache management has lots of similarities with virtual memory management) .... with the tight integration within the application of both cache management and the code that used the cache ... it was more natural that cache friendly implementations would evolve.

misc past psots mentioning vs/repack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#7 IBM 7090 (360s, 370s, apl, etc)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#68 The Melissa Virus or War on Microsoft?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#30 Could CDR-coding be on the way back?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#83 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#31 database (or b-tree) page sizes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#33 database (or b-tree) page sizes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#20 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#28 OS Workloads : Interactive etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#45 cp/67 addenda (cross-post warning)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#46 cp/67 addenda (cross-post warning)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#49 Swapper was Re: History of Login Names
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#50 IBM going after Strobe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#50 Blade architectures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#15 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#21 "Super-Cheap" Supercomputing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#53 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#15 Disk capacity and backup solutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#8 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#32 Language semantics wrt exploits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#14 Holee shit! 30 years ago!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#21 PSW Sampling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#22 Lock-free algorithms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#55 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#7 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#73 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#76 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#4 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#41 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#48 Secure design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#15 Exceptions at basic block boundaries
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#62 More on garbage collection
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#17 More on garbage collection
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#28 IBM's mini computers--lack thereof
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#18 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#5 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#15 {SPAM?} Re: Expanded Storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#23 Seeking Info on XDS Sigma 7 APL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#20 About TLB in lower-level caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#46 using 3390 mod-9s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#37 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#18 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#22 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#24 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#11 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#23 Strobe equivalents
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#26 Cache-Size vs Performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#12 Trying to design low level hard disk manipulation program
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#1 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#16 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#31 Wylbur and Paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#55 Capacity and Relational Database
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#53 Virtual Storage implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#57 ACP/TPF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007s.html#41 Age of IBM VM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#24 Job ad for z/OS systems programmer trainee
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#78 CPU time differences for the same job
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#35 Interesting Mainframe Article: 5 Myths Exposed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#16 Kernels
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#36 Object-relational impedence
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#81 Intel: an expensive many-core future is ahead of us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#69 Speculation ONLY
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#65 APL

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:02:28 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
Only very recently, though, with the announcement of the Nehalem-EX, has Intel brought to the x86 platform some of the RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features common on mainframe hardware. Before that, if you wanted high reliability, there was actually a *reason* to consider an Itanium to get mainframe reliability at microprocessor prices.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

some of the discussions about Nehalem in other forums about moving Itanium RAS features to x86 ... were about needing also software RAS features ... and about whether the vendors have given up on Itanium being the processor of choice for high-end servers.

one of the big problems with all the C-language based implementations is the vast numbers of buffer length related bugs associated with storage allocation paradigm for things like strings. ... misc. past posts on the subject
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

in the 80s & 90s ... one of the primary justifications given for hosting mainframe unix ports under vm/370 ... was requirement for RAS (in some cases, field people wouldn't sign-off on servicing the machine w/o appropriate mainframe software RAS) ... and that adding mainframe software RAS to unix base was possibly order-of-magnitude larger effort than the straight-forward port of unix to 370 architecture. running unix under vm/370 would depend on vm/370 to provide appropriate level of error retry and well as EREP recording and reporting structure.

on the other hand we did start high-availability HA/CMP cluster product in the late 80s ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

it is probably better known these days for the cluster scale-up part of the effort (than the straight-forward high availability part); some past email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

old post with jan92 meeting reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

even tho there are starting to be signs that there is renewed focus on re-integrating some cluster scale-up back into the high-availability part ... some recent references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#43 From The Annals of Release No Software Before Its Time
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#46 From The Annals of Release No Software Before Its Time
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#49 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#54 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#55 MasPar compiler and simulator
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#57 MasPar compiler and simulator
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#83 What would be a truly relational operating system ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#85 Anyone going to Supercomputers '09 in Portland?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#19 Mainframe running 1,500 Linux servers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#21 Is Cloud Computing Old Hat?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#42 The 50th Anniversary of the Legendary IBM 1401
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#68 Now is time for banks to replace core system according to Accenture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#4 70 Years of ATM Innovation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#9 The 50th Anniversary of the Legendary IBM 1401
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#33 While watching Biography about Bill Gates on CNBC last Night
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#0 16:32 far pointers in OpenWatcom C/C++
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#4 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#33 SQL Server replacement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#44 16:32 far pointers in OpenWatcom C/C++
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#48 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#77 IBM responds to Oracle's Exadata with new systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#81 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#63 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#29 someone smarter than Dave Cutler
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#61 IBM to announce new MF's this year

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Knuth Got It Wrong

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Knuth Got It Wrong
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:20:54 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#44 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#47 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#48 Knuth Got It Wrong

slightly more drift ... most of original relational/sql dbms implementation was done in on 370/145 under vm370 (in bldg. 28) ... so started out from a virtual memory prespective. misc. past posts mentioning system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

there are also some interesting intersections involved in operating an LRU managed cache paradigm in a (LRU managed) paged, virtual memory environment (unless you resort to just pinning the dbms cache pages in real memory).

now the first RDBMS product to ship was on multics (virtual memory base) ... beating sql/ds (productized system/r ... aka tech transfer from bldg. 28 in san jose to endicott for release as product).

for historical drift, some of the ctss people went to 5th flr multics and some went to the science center on the 4th flr ... where (virtual memory & virtual machine) cp67 was done ... misc. past posts mentioning 545 tech sq (i was there for most of the 70s before transferring to bldg. 28 in san jose)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:48:21 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
So, to answer the original question, what was the first functional year of a MULTICS OS?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#38 Information on obscure text editors wanted

this gives site (and other multics) timelines:
http://www.multicians.org/site-timeline.html

most site showup late 70s (or early 80s).

being just one flr separated in 545 tech sq ... there was a little competitive flavor ... as well as science center had originally started out wanting the multics effort ... some amount of this covered in melinda's history
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

it wouldn't be considered fair to base comparison on number of customers. i've commented in the past, it wasn't even fair to compare total mutlics installations that ever existed against just the number of internal corporate vm370 installations. I have noted that at one period in the mid-70s, I was supporting approx. the same number of internal csc/vm customers ... as total number of multics installations that ever existed. ... some old email mentioning csc/vm:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

for other ... this mentions multics "new storage system"
http://www.multicians.org/nss.html

that some of the motivation for the new storage system was that MIT had a multics system that could take an hour to recover from a crash ... and in the same room, a cp67 system that could recover in a couple minutes.

this has a reference to modification to the TTY device support resulted in CP67 crashing and restarting 27 times in the same day (multics taking and hr to recover could hardly do that 8times/day)
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/360-67.html

i would be partially responsible for the crashes ... I had done the CP67 TTY support as undergraduate in the 60s ... and at one point fiddled something with using one byte to calculate line-length. The MIT modification was to increase the maximum TTY line-length to something like 1200 bytes (I think to support a dial-up tty plotter device over at harvard) ... and the one byte hack resulted in incorrect length calculation and clobbering storage. In any case, supposedly, the side-by-side crash recovery comparison was motivation for multics new storage system

other posts mentioning 545 tech sq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech csc/vm (&/or sjr/vm) posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#cscvm

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:10:19 -0400
art clemons <artclemons@aolSPAM.com> writes:
If you really think about it, netbooks, ipads as well as most computers commonly in use likely have more processing power and memory than the fastest mainframe of the 70's.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

recent post mentioning doing some work on airline res system in the mid-90s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#73 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#74 Happy DEC-10 Day

and part of thread that xscale processor used in treo
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#78 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#79 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#80 Happy DEC-10 Day

has more raw computing power than what we had sized as needed to handle every airline passenger reservation for every passenger in the world for every airline in the world (in the mid-90s).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:21:18 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#52 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

airline passenger res. system design was pretty much left over from the 60s ... done on 7090 & 360. started with "routes" which represented about 25% of the load ... aka lists direct & connecting flts to get from origin city/airport to destination city/airport.

res. system operation would take oag flat file, one entry for every flt segment, take-off/landing ... in the mid-90s nearly 500k and (periodically) rebuild database entries for the possibly origin/destination pairs with direct and connecting flts that would get between the two points (typically two connects at the most, origin/destinations that required more than two connects would have to be stitched together by agent/manually). database lookup/key was the combination of the origin & destination pair.

i redid it by building a compressed memory resident image of the original oag flat file ... and then dynamically doing search of that data for each query ... which turned out to be significantly faster than doing dbms query. one of the influences was that between the 60s & the 90s, real storage configurations got larger than (compressed version of) oag flat file. another possibly influence is that I had just recently done a contract that involved chip/board physical layout.

the search results then required some rule post-processing. as part of standard approach building dbms ... various airports have all sorts of special rules about getting minimum (connecting) time to get from gate on one concourse to gate on another concourse. then there are special airport codes for cities with multiple airports and special connecting flt rules involving gate/concourse at one airport and gate/councourse at different airport (instead of the rules being used as part of the dbms build ... the rules had to be applied during the real-time search).

one of the side-effects ... besides core lookup being nearly two-orders of magnitude faster ... was that it could handle any number of connections between two origin/destinations anywhere in the world.

the paradigm switch is analogous to various recent news items about speedups from designing dbms from scratch to be "in-memory" (claims of ten times performance improvement compared to traditional dbms design ... even when comparison involves traditional dbms with all disk data already loaded in cache).

a little x-over thread about selecting row/column operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#44 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#47 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#48 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#50 Knuth Got It Wrong

it turned out that there was a factor of five difference in the implementation thruput depending on how the memory image of the OAG data was traversed (basically difference in processor hardware cache efficiency).

another side-effect was that it helped eliminate the traditional ACP/TPF dbms rebuild outage that was typically part of 3rd shift sunday outage that happened a couple times per month. the route process could be offloaded to high-availability cluster ... the OAG memory rebuild could be done asynchronously and then take a few seconds to switch one-at-a-time, each application from the previous OAG memory image to the new OAG memory image ... w/o requiring any downtime/outage (I remember being in the fareast on monday morning trying to change airline resverations and the system being down for its regular scheduled maint).

It wasn't long after doing the implementation that you could get PCs large enough to run the full route finding application ... and then as somewhat referrred to ... in theory current treos are capabile of running the whole thing, handling the load for the whole world.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:05:17 -0400
some RAS cross-over

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
it wouldn't be considered fair to base comparison on number of customers. i've commented in the past, it wasn't even fair to compare total mutlics installations that ever existed against just the number of internal corporate vm370 installations. I have noted that at one period in the mid-70s, I was supporting approx. the same number of internal csc/vm customers ... as total number of multics installations that ever existed. ... some old email mentioning csc/vm:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430


from this recent post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#51 Information on obscure text editors wanted

charlie, in addition to working on fine-grain smp locking for the cp/67 kernel (at the science center) ... and inventing the compare&swap instruction (CAS was chosen because they are charlie's initials) ... misc. past smp/cas posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

was having some cp67 kernel integrity problems involving general area of serialization ... so he undertook to rewrite the virtual machine reset (including serialization that was used for i/o reset, virtual machine reset/re-ipl, and user logoff ... whether running single processor or multiprocessor). part of this involved re-assigning all pending i/o to the "system" psuedo virtual machine. recent post mentioning having create "system" psuedo virtual machine for paging part of kernel:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#37 Idiotic programming style edicts

this had the side-effect of eliminating crashes ... dangling operations/pointers that completed after associated control blocks were dissolved ... and hung/zombie users.

now the official cp67 dev. group split off from the science center and during morph for vm370 product ... took-over/absorbed the boston programming center on 3rd flr. of 545 tech sq. then as it continued to grow ... it moved out to burlington mall ... taking over the old/vacant sbc bldg. there. as part of the morph into vm370 ... there was quite a bit of simplification and also dropped a lot of stuff I had done in cp67 (an exception was the pageable cp67 kernel stuff i had done summer of 1969 ... and hadn't shipped in cp67 product was part of of the original standard vm370 release).

in any case, as mentioned in the old email ... at some point the science center start planing for replacing the 360/67 (cp67) with 370/155-II (and moving to vm370) ... which required moving a lot of stuff that was in cp67/cms to vm370/cms base. I've mentioned in the past that the "H" updates for cp67 including being able to simulate/virtualize a 370 machine (and run software that was designed to run on real 370 ... including vm370). so a lot of the early work ... i could test out on the cambridge cp67 operation. However, at some point, I needed do some real 370 hardware test ... and had to get some weekend time on one of the vm370 devel group machines. a couple recent refs. to getting weekend test time on one of their machines (which also involves security/integrity issue):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#6 Need tool to zap core
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#32 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

in any case, as part of the cp67 & then vm370 algorithm, performance, and thruput work ... a automated benchmark process had evolved. This included being able to specify synthentic workloads with numerous operation characteristcs, rebuild and change kernels, change configurations, change system parameters ... turning it loose and having it run for days at a time. one of the side-effects was specifying a workload that was 10-20 times ever actually seen in the real-world. one of those side-effects was that the artificial heavy load was guaranteed to crash a standard vm370 system. so in addition to everything else referrenced in the cp67->vm370 transition ... I also redid charlie's rewrite of the kernel serialization function for vm370 (eliminating all known cases of crashes from dangling operations as well as zombie users).

as been previously mentioned ... during the future system effort (planning on completely replacing 370), the 370 hardware and software product pipelines were allowed to go empty. then with the death of FS there was mad-rush to get products back into the 370 product pipeline misc. past posts mentioning future system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

part of that included selecting a bunch of stuff I had been doing all thru the future system period (some of it having been in cp67 product releases and then dropped in the morph to vm370 ... other stuff was new). A small subset of the shared segment stuff for cms was shipped in standard release 3. A lot of the other stuff was packaged as a separate kernel product called the "resource manager".

Because of gov. and other litigation, there was 23jun69 unbundling announcement to start charging for application software ... but the case was made that kernel software continued to be free. misc. past references to unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

the claim is then the distraction of FS ... allowed the clone 370 processors to gain market foothold. with the death of FS and the mad rush to get out 370 products ... it was also decided to start charging for kernel software ... initially done in stages. The first guinea pig for kernel software charging was my "resource manager" ... which met that I had to spend a lot of time with business planning, lawyers, and pricing people. Also the final stage of release the "resource manager" involved doing over 2000 (automated) benchmarks that took over three months elapsed time to run (representing a wide variety of workloads and configurations). misc. past posts mentioning automated benchmarking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bench

and some other recent posts mentioning csc/vm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#70 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#79 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#1 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#2 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#17 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#25 HONE Compute Intensive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#24 Would you fight?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#72 Interesting presentation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#20 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#22 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:30:53 -0400
Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> writes:
What kind of I/O bandwidth is "massive" for a 70s-era mainframe?

168-3 ... about 3mip processor ... and possibly 16 i/o channels ... each one potentially operating at up to 1.5mbytes/sec transfer, with potentially 100-300 3330 disk drives spread across those 16 i/o channels (say 8-16 drives per channel ... but potentially also other devices, like 3270 terminal controllers, spread across/sharing the channels).

3330 disk drive was 200mbyte capacity and 800kbyte/sec transfer.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3330.html

i think DIALOG datacenter in late 70s (not far from stanford) had 300 3330-clone disk drives connected to a pair of 370/158 processors (in loosely-coupled/cluster configuration).

3380 disk drives attempted to address a number of things in the early 80s. the per "disk" capacity was increased to 630mbyte and the data transfer rate to 3mbyte/sec.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html

the channel protocol was tweaked to "data streaming" (change to channel protocol from doing hardware handshake on ever byte transferred to being able to transfer multiple bytes per handshake). this made it easier to achieve 3mbyte/sec transfer (mitigating number of end-to-end half-duplex handshakes). It also allowed increasing maximum channel distance from 200ft to 400ft. In the earlier regime, lots of installations were running into physical configuration problems with placing processor in the middle of cicle and then getting all the devices packed into a 200ft radius. Some customers were resorting to multiple floor configuration ... extending number of devices that could be connected within the 200ft limitation by going from two-dimensional radius to starting to approach 3dimensional sphere. doubling the maximum channel from 200ft to 400ft allowed for a datacenter with placing devices in a cicle with 400ft radius.

complicating the situation was datacenters with numerous processors in cluster configuration ... placing all the processors at sort of the center of sphere ... and then needing to have all devices within the 200ft radius of all processors.

this is recent posts/threads talks about doing special effort for santa teresa lab (since renamed silicon valley lab) in 1980, using HYPERchannel for channel extension and allowing placing local channel devices 10-15 miles away. Part of the HYPERchannel support was going to downloading asynchronous channel programs ... as mentioned, significantly increased the I/O thruput. Standard channel protocol included a lot of busy time doing control operations associated with channel programs ... being able to download channel programs (with HYPERchannel) to be run remotely asynchronously ... effectively freed up the mainframe channel for just doing data transfer.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#16 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#18 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#2 Processors stall on OLTP workloads about half the time--almost no matter what you do

some misc. other posts mentioning doing things with HYPERchannel
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

earlier posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#52 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#53 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#54 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:58:59 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
Some of us considered PL/I to be bloatware.

os/360 pl/i had an enormous compiler and enormous runtime libraries ... however, other pl/i implementations didn't have similar amount of baggage.

pl.8 (theoretically a pl/i subset) was quite efficient. some old comparisons between pl.8 and vs/pascal. one part of pl.8 technology was doing a pascal language frontend for pl.8. this is old email comparing the pascal/pl.8 on a number of platforms against vs/pascal on 3033 (high-end 370 for the period):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#email810808

in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#9 32 or even 64 registers for x86-64?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:28:16 -0400
DMcCunney <plugh@xyzzy.com> writes:
I wouldn't expect it to use a lot of resources in any case. If I have to print in really high volume, I'll have a dedicated big mutha printer that does it, and the PC will just send it the data. The actual information that varies between checks is fairly minimal - addressee and amount - and an intelligent printer can have a template holding the base data and take a feed of the variable stuff. The amount of data being sent is a tiny fraction of the amount being printed, and certainly wouldn't require Firewire.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#55 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

mainframe channels could consume a significant amount of resources and the control & handshaking overhead between channels and devices/control units could be significant.

the legacy design from the 60s was trade-offs regarding extremely expensive and relatively scarce electronic storage ... as a result mainframe memory was used for channel programs ... and the channel would execute the channel program out of mainframe memory. this consumed lots of memory bus capacity (independent of just memory bus for doing data transfer). it was less of an issue for "integrated channels" ... where the same engine that executed the processor microcode also was being shared with executing the channel micrcode. however, it represented more & more of bottleneck as things scaled up ... and deployed things like independent processors for executing channel (including latency issue between the channel processor and frequent accesses to mainframe memory for every channel command in channel program).

I've periodically mentioned that adding tty/ascii terminal support to cp67 as undergraduate in the 60s ... I tried to make the terminal controller do something that it couldn't quite do. this was motivation for the univ. to start a clone controller effort ... using an interdata3 programmed to emulate the mainframe terminal controller.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

part of this required reverse engineering the channel interface and building a interface board for the interdata3. the 360/67 had high-speed timer option which "tic'ed" the location 80 timer approx. ever 13microseconds (and if memory bus was reserved by channel, locking out timer from updating location 80 ... and a 2nd tic come around while previous timer tic update was pending ... it would force machine fault). one of the first bugs attaching the interdata3 to the channel was locking up the memory bus for longer than timer update interval.

four of us then got written up for responsible for clone controller business. interdata began selling the boxes as clone controllers ... and this continued after P/E bought interdata under the perkin/elmer label. the clone controller business has been cited as major motivation for the future system effort ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

and then the distraction of future system effort is attributed with allowing clone processors to get market foothold.

another such trade-off was in the design of disk (DASD) I/O commands. standard disk channel program includes a search command ... comparing some part of each record against specified critera. The disk device search argument is refetched from mainframe memory for every record that passes under the read/write head (checking if the record meets the search criteria). This results in enormous overhead on every part of the I/O infrastructure as well as introducing latency limits on distance from device to mainframe memory. some past posts mentioning the mainframe disk design & CKD search characteristics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

the trade-offs in the designs was beneficial in the 60s because of scarce electronic storage ... by at least the mid-70s ... the designs were becoming a bottleneck with significant increase in availability of electronic storage.

other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#52 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#53 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#54 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#56 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:38:09 -0400
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
PCs running any flavour of unix will handle multi-processing reliably without crashing.

circa 1989/1990 ... there was tandem lab in austin that was working on unix ... and contributed thousands of unix kernel "fixes" for improving unix RAS characteristics ... including removing an enormous number of PANICs from the kernel (aka kernel encountering some condition and terminating). from long ago and far away ...
3. TANDEM INTRODUCES NEW UNIX SYSTEM

Tandem introduced a new mid-range, fault-tolerant Unix system, Integrity S2. Tandem's announcement is expected to cause trouble for DEC, who is rumored to announced its own VMS-based, fault-tolerant system next month; analysts expect it will not be able to match the S2's 11- to 12-MIPS rating. The S2 is based upon processors from Mips Computer Systems and starts at $172000 (2 295MB disks & 1 1/4-in tape drive stored in a single cabinet). An additional 40MB of memory helps bring the mid-range system to $198000. And high-end systems with up to four storage cabinets (17.75GB storage) start at $248000. Tandem says the S2 architecture is designed to support CPUs running at 1000 MIPS at some later date. Resellers include Nixdorf and GPT PLC. No plans were announced to offer NonStop SQL DBMS on this platform.

(Digital Review, 1/8/90, p. 6)
(Computerworld, 1/8/90, p. 117)


... snip ...

of course, we had started ha/cmp for rs/6000 in the same time-frame
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:20:29 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
the trade-offs in the designs was beneficial in the 60s because of scarce electronic storage ... by at least the mid-70s ... the designs were becoming a bottleneck with significant increase in availability of electronic storage.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

the trade-off design regarding amount of available electronic storage has repeatedly shown up. there is the whole channel and disk i/o design trade-offs from the 60s.

i've commented this also shows up in a little discord between the 60s (physical) databases and rdbms effort ... misc. past posts mentioning original relational/sql implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

end of the 70s, the IMS group in STL would somewhat bash relational effort pointing out that the implicit indexes typically doubled the physical disk space (compared to IMS) and significantly increased the disk accesses (reading various index levels) to get to actual record. the relational retort was that the direct record pointers (exposed in IMS data) significantly increased administrative effort (things like re-organization).

going into the 80s ... the amount of disk storage significantly increased at the same time the cost significantly decreased ... mitigated the disk issues related to implicit indexes in relational. at the same time, futher increases in availability of electronic storage allowed significant portion of indexes to be cached in memory (mitigating number of disk reads to transverse the index).

MULTICS shipped the first RDBMS product
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics_Relational_Data_Store
http://www.multicians.org/mgm.html

and several other vendors were in the market before system/r tech. transfer from bldg. 28 to Endicott for sql/ds. then one of the people mentioned in this jan92 meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

claimed to have handled most of the tech. transfer from endicott back to STL for DB2. Possibly one of the delays for productizing system/r was the other DBMS product offerings the company had.

design of indexes ... requiring significant access overhead ... also shows up in this recent thread/article:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#44 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#47 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#48 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#50 Knuth Got It Wrong

IMS reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Management_System

for other topic drift ... old email reference to Jim handing off a number of things to me when he departed for tandem ... including consulting with the IMS group
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801016

above references starting to get calls from places like Bank Of America on RDBMS stuff.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:35:23 -0400
Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> writes:
Multics as a project grew out of the CTSS project (lots of the same people). CTSS had an on-line editor which was the ancestor of some of those on Multics. CTSS time frame is roughly PDP-1, so the two lines grew up together.

note much the same could be said for cp67/cms, also with some number of CTSS people ... cp67/cms being done on the 4th flr of 545 tech sq at the science center and multics being done on 5th flr of 545 tech sq ... misc. past posts mentioning 545 tech sq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

recent reference to MIT running cp67 and MULTICS side-by-side in the same machine room
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#51 Information on obscure text editors wanted

comparison somewhat motivation for doing "new storage system" for multics

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:56:37 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
MULTICS was an experimental operating system developed on the GE 645 computer. It was a big project that took a long time to bring a product to fruition, which led the developers of UNIX, in frustration, to make their own much more simple operating system - at first on another DEC computer, but for quite a while, the PDP-11 was the primary platform on which UNIX ran, after it was distributed to educational institutions.

As I've noted, one of the big things about MULTICS was that it had an elaborate security model, including mandatory rather than permissive security - if you output data to a file from a program that was reading data from a file with a high security level, the file you output to would have its security level raised to match, preventing secure data from leaking out of the system. This is not a normal feature of computer operating systems, but it was added to the NSA's Security Enhanced LINUX.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#51 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#60 Information on obscure text editors wanted

somewhat related reference ... but with respect to 4th flr 545 tech. sq ... rather than 5th flr:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

for other MULTICS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#42 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#43 another 30 year thing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#44 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation

aka multics implementation in pli supposedly never had a buffer overflow problem.

references article
http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf
and the original
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/karg74.pdf

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:04:42 -0400
reference to asynchronous, full-duplex i/o implying big part is for latency compensation (as datarates increase)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

references using HYPERchannel as channel extender ... and being able to download channel program to remote location (with it executing remotely) ... significant mitigating latency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#55 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

this was in 1980 as part of remoting 300 people from the IMS group to offsite bldg ... and being able to preserve the human factors of local 3270 terminal operation (the alternative was remote 3270s which were abysmal human factors in comparison). this is unrelated to item about doing DBMS consulting to the IMS group ... mentioned here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#59 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

this reference to old jan92 meeting on scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

it also references 9333/harrier and would have liked to see it it become interoperable with FCS ... instead of becoming SSA. harrier had taken SCSI devices and SCSI commands and packetized the commands and flowed them over serial copper links (dedicated copper for flow in each direction) ... running them asynchronously. this significantly reduced SCSI controller busy and overhead ... since the commands were packetized sent out asynchronously for execution at the devices. For even half-dozen disks ... it resulted in significantly higher aggregate thruput.

this ibm-main talks about various efforts in the late 80s and early 90s moving to asynchronous serial operation as approach to (at least) being latency compensation.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#7 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#8 What was the historical price of a P/390?

this is part of thread mentioning mainframes highlighting the large number of I/O channels (possibly as compensation for channel trade-off design resulting in numerous bottlenecks & latencies as things moved to higher datarates):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#13 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#18 What was the historical price of a P/390?

old email regarding doing cluster scale-up in conjunction with high availability work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

with this email possibly just hrs being informed that the scale-up work was transferred and we weren't supposed to work on anything with more than four processors.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email920129

and then 920217 press item with cluster scale-up announced as product:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters1

and then rubbing salt into the wound ... press item about how it caught them totally by surprise:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters2

past post in comp.arch thread regarding events fall of '91 leading up to transfer of cluster scale-up (and being told not to work on configurations with more than four processors):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#57 MasPar compiler and simulator

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Information on obscure text editors wanted

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Information on obscure text editors wanted
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:29:51 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
for other MULTICS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#42 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#43 another 30 year thing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#44 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation

aka multics implementation in pli supposedly never had a buffer overflow problem.

references article
http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf
and the original
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/karg74.pdf


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#61 Information on obscure text editors wanted

the original mainframe tcp/ip product implementation was done in vs/pascal ... there was some issues with the implementation and/or the controller box sold for the product ... resulting in extremely high cpu utilization for relatively low thruput.

I did the modifications to add rfc 1044 support for the product and got better than two orders of magnitude improvement in instructions per byte moved (drastic reduction in pathlength and transferring at channel media rate). misc past posts mentioning doing the rfc 1044 support
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

as far as I know, the pascal-based implementation ... also never had a buffer overflow problem ... one of the reasons in the past, I've made lots of comments about buffer overflows being strongly correlated with use of C. misc. past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

misc. other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#38 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#51 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#60 Information on obscure text editors wanted

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:28:05 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
and then rubbing salt into the wound ... press item about how it caught them totally by surprise:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters2


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#62 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

other rubbing salt into the wound
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#21 Cache coherence [was Re: TF-1]

as mentioned in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#57 MasPar compiler and simulator

the retirement of senior executive in fall of '91 kicked off chain of events.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, phl.media
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:08:35 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Did Tandem ever ship it? They wanted to hire JMF to bail them out of their troubles.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#58 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

somebody's comp.arch post from summer 1994:
I benchmarked a Tandem Integrity S2 machine about a year ago, that we had for evaluation. The processor performance was 10 Vax MIPS, measured using Dhrystone 2.0. This is about the same as a 25 Mhz 486 PC. > Admittedly the Tandem S2 is a fairly old machine. It has three MIPS R2000 processors, for redundancy reasons. Performance is equivalent to one R2000. The price tag was pretty high. > There must be better ways of getting redundancy. Loosely coupled systems, for instance. Of course, then you pay the big money for the distributed software to make it work.

... snip ...

or not ... misc. past posts mentioning ha/cmp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

tandem wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

part of uniform 90 trip report, 22-25jan1990 in washington dc (tandem claiming AT&T ordering 40k S2s for telecommuncation):
Tandem

Tandem proudly displayed its newest fault tolerant system, the Integrity S2. A Tandem employee involved in the S2's development said that AT&T will order 40,000 of these systems. In addition, he said that Tandem expects to capture fifteen percent of the telecommunications market in Europe with the S2. As these countries become more open, they will need to standardize their telecommunications systems. I was told that this market is estimated to be $100 Billion, and of course, fifteen percent of $100 Billion is $15 Billion!

The Integrity S2 runs NonStop-UX, Tandem's implementation of UNIX System V. It does not run GuardianOS, Tandem's proprietary operating system, and is thus incompatible with Tandem's other products. NonStop-UX supports NFS, TCP/IP, and X-Window. FORTRAN, C, Pascal, and MicroFocus COBOL compilers are available. In regards to database products, the S2 can run either Informix, Oracle, or Ingres software.

The S2 also has a very different architecture from Tandem's other products. The S2 is based on the 16.67 MHz MIPS R2000 CPU using a triple modular redundant architecture. This means that three of these CPUs are present, each executing the very same instruction stream and each residing on a separate board.

Each CPU has its own local memory which can be up to 8 MB, and each CPU attaches to two voters. The voters compare the results generated by the three CPUs before writing to global memory. Each voter is associated with a global memory as large as 32 MB. In the event that a CPU produces a different result from the other two CPUs, the voters designate that CPU to be faulty, and it is automatically taken down while the other components continue operating.

From the standpoint of the end-user, a failure like this is completely transparent. In fact, a CPU board, I/O processor, or memory board can actually be replaced while the system is running, and this capability was demonstrated at UniForum. Each board is inside of a plastic enclosure and clearly labeled. Therefore, no special training nor skills are required to replace parts. When a part is inserted back into the system, this process is referred to as "reintegration" and normally takes about 90 seconds for the component to be recognized once again by the other parts.

The Integrity S2 also contains dual data paths, dual ported controllers, battery backup, and mirrored disks. The maximum DASD supported is greater than 17 GB. The system enclosure measures 29.5 inches high by 36 inches wide by 16.4 inches deep, while the mass storage cabinet is 29.5 inches high by 16.5 inches wide by 16.4 inches deep. The Integrity S2 comes with one system enclosure and from one to four mass storage cabinets. Additional CPUs cannot be added, at least at the present time. Finally, the S2 is priced from $172,000 to $248,000 depending on the amount of DASD purchased.

Besides Tandem, other vendors also displayed fault tolerant UNIX systems. These included Stratus, Sequoia, and IMP. Stratus demonstrated FTX, its UNIX implementation that is now available for the existing Stratus XA2000 line. Sequoia Systems showed its Series 300 system designed for on-line transaction processing. It runs TOPIX, Sequoia's version of UNIX. IMP displayed the XR650 which is based on a dual redundant architecture. Two 25 MHz Motorola MC68030 CPUs execute the same instructions, and the results are compared. If they differ, then diagnostics are automatically run on each CPU in order to determine which one is faulty.


... snip ...

part of uniform 91 trip report, 22-24jan1991 in dallas
Commercial Processing

At last year's conference a paper was presented by an AT&T employee on a transaction monitor designed for UNIX called Tuxedo. This year several vendors announced products based on Tuxedo, and NCR introduced Top End, its own transaction monitor. UNIX has not been popular for on-line transaction processing, but that is primarily due to a lack of applications. With the introduction of these transaction monitors, many more commercial applications for UNIX should become available during the next few years.

NCR's Top End runs on the NCR System 3000 Family of loosely coupled multiprocessors. It is based on a client/server architecture and allows processes to be distributed over multiple parallel processors at the same time by making several copies of the client. Top End creates an audit trail and also provides automated recovery of the database in the event of an error. It works with the C, COBOL, and C++ languages. Prices range from $3,200 to $150,000 depending on the hardware configuration, and it will be available Second Quarter 1991.

Sequent and AT&T announced a joint agreement to enhance Tuxedo's performance in a symmetrical multiprocessing environment. In addition, Sequent announced new systems based on the Intel 486 CPU. The Symmetry 2000 Series supports from two to thirty tightly coupled CPUs. Each processor board contains two CPUs that operate independently. These systems are meant for database processing, and Sequent claimed the performance to be up to 354 TPS based on an Oracle TP1 benchmark. Sequent said that this is "the highest performance in the industry" and claimed a price/performance ratio "three to five times better than traditional superminicomputers and seven to ten times better than mainframes." A uniprocessor model starts at $23,500, while a thirty CPU system sells for $2.5 Million. Sequent's existing install base was said to be greater than 3,000 systems.

The leading fault tolerant vendors were also present at UniForum. Tandem demonstrated its one year old Integrity S2. Boards were pulled out of the system as it continued to run. Stratus went even further in its demonstration. Besides pulling boards out of the running system, Stratus shut the power off and a few seconds later turned the power back on. The system began running again by itself right where it had left off as if nothing had happened. FTX, Stratus's version of UNIX that was announced at last year's UniForum, has been available for the past month.

Sequoia, the third largest fault tolerant vendor, also had a large exhibit. TOPIX, the Sequoia Operating System, has always been based on UNIX. The Sequoia Series 300 uses the Motorola 68030 CPU and is claimed to support from two to 64 processor boards. However, the largest system shipped to date consists of 16 processor boards. The Sequoia system is a shared memory computer containing duplexed memory boards, and each processor board contains dual self-checking CPUs. There are four processor boards per cabinet, and every board in the system has its own power supply associated with it, allowing any type of hardware repair to be performed on-line.

Pyramid, known for its multiprocessor UNIX servers based on a proprietary RISC architecture, is now positioning itself against the fault tolerant vendors. "TUFF-ENUFF" was the marketing phrase used to describe Pyramid's "new" Reliant Series. The Reliant Series is actually two separate systems connected to a Gandalf StarMaster, which appeared to be some sort of terminal server. The disks are mirrored, and there is a UPS. The two systems are existing Pyramid MIServer Systems, each supporting from one to twelve CPUs. There is new software though, and it provides automatic switchover in the event that one system fails. Service is restored within three minutes. Although Pyramid claims that the Reliant Series is a low cost alternative to fault tolerance, a typical configuration sells for $800,000. Pyramid supplies both AT&T and Olivetti with systems.


... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

A "portable" hard disk

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A "portable" hard disk
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:28:32 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#13 A "portable" hard disk

Water flowing over top of Grand Coulee Dam
http://www.krem.com/news/local/Water-flowing-over-top-of-Grand-Coulee-Dam-96617344.html

from above:
"The last time Grand Coulee Dam looked like this was 1997. Most people can't remember that far back. But this is even bigger. That spill is three feet deep and pouring 500 thousand gallons of water every second,"

... snip ...

original dam just had the two powerhouses and quite a bit of water went over the spillway ... but after 3rd powerhouse was built, there was little water left for the spillway. w/o the tremendous amount of water going over the spillway ... there has been lot less wear&tear at the bottom of the spillway.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:59:23 -0400
Louis Krupp <lkrupp_nospam@indra.com.invalid> writes:
It would be interesting to hear more about some of those efforts. The interesting thing about MTS is that it was done on an IBM mainframe at a university and not by a place like Bell Labs or TRW (where Wikipedia says the Pick OS was developed). And it sounds like MTS gave a lot of people a computing environment they wouldn't have had otherwise.

the "official" system for 360/67, tss/360, is reputed to have peaked at over 1000 people working on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSS/360
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67

the unofficial system for 360/67, cp67/cms was with dozen or fewer people (I've commented that the difference was close to two orders of magnitude for much of the period). cp67/cms was done at the science center on 4th flr of 545 tech sq ... with some number of the people having worked on ctss (other ctss people went to work on multics on 5th flr of 545 tech sq). misc. past posts mentioning 545 tech sq.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

ctss at mit:
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System

Michigan did MTS for 360/67 for much of the same reason that the science center did MTS. some reference here:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery8.html
other MTS pages have gone 404 ... but still are at wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212073808/www.itd.umich.edu/~doc/Digest/0596/feat01.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212073808/www.itd.umich.edu/~doc/Digest/0596/feat02.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212183905/www.itd.umich.edu/~doc/Digest/0596/feat03.html

Note that Stanford did Orvyl for 360/67.
http://www.stanford.edu/~guertin/manuals/SPIDES.HTML#I.1.1.3.4

Orvyl (and MTS) were later ported to 370:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/explain/manuals/ORVMAN.HTML

the period at Stanford is possibly better remembered for the Wylbur editor (part of Orvyl):
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/its/support/wylorv/
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wylbur
other reference
http://datacenter.cit.nih.gov/interface/interface206/if206-01.htm
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/itts/documentation/wylbur/wylbur.html

melinda's history of cp67 & vm370 talks about early days of 360/67 and many univ. bought 360/67 in anticipation of tss/360. When tss/360 didn't materialize like expected, that provided motivation for developing other uses for 360/67.
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

available in a number of formats:
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.listing
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.ps
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.pdf

recent posts mentioning ctss:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#11 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#22 Why is JCL so bad was Re: Basic question on passing JCL set symbol to proc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#74 1964 CTSS film
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#31 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#97 "The Naked Mainframe" (Forbes Security Article)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#14 Processes' memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#12 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#14 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#16 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#73 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#9 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#53 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#53 IBM 029 service manual
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#10 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#38 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#50 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#60 Information on obscure text editors wanted

earlier posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#52 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#53 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#54 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#55 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#56 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#58 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#59 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#62 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#64 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#65 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:58:03 -0400
Louis Krupp <lkrupp_nospam@indra.com.invalid> writes:
Once upon a time (early 90s, as I recall), Excel would run under DOS. It was useful when there wasn't enough memory to run Excel and WIN3.1 (or whatever it was) at the same time.

turbo pascal ... came with example/demo spreadsheet that saw quite a bit of use.
http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693

past post in thread on resurrecting some old diskettes (with borland software, pascal in additions to C)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#57 Turbo C 1.5 (1987)

in 1984, there was somebody (in rochester) that did several enhancements ... from somewhat long ago and far away:


I have sent you the following file
  MC PAS    -- pascal source for MicroCalc
MC HLP    -- help file for MicroCalc
  MCDEMO MSC -- demonstration file
MC COM -- compiled verion that matches source
Borland stated the source was public domain for Turbo V2.0.  See
prologue for some of the changes I have made.  All I ask is that
if you have any neat ideas for changes, that you send them to me.
If you find any problems, also please send them.  I am still
trying to find out why I can not put this on IBMPC.
I am adding right justified and centered strings like  1-2-3.
"string ::= right justified in cell(s)"
'string := Centered in cell(s)
string := left justified -- this is the way it works today
I am also looking at sorting the formulas so that forward
references will work.
I wrote this at home for my Z-80 system first and converted it
to the IBM PC.

... snip ...

IBMPC was for computing conferencing similar to IBMVM (vmtools originally developed for internal vm370 computer conferencing ... supported usenet like operation, mailing list like operation, as well as a kind of remote file request). There was restrictions on code in PC computer conferencing. Later "pctools" was setup for purpose of code and executable.

The Rochester person then did tinycalc enhancement and placed it on the internal "pctools" distribution


SUBJECT: TinyCalc
I have sent you the following file
TinyCalc HLP    -- help file for MicroCalc
TinyDemo TSC -- demonstration file
  TinyCalc COM -- compiled verion
This is a tiny spread sheet with external characteristics like Lotus
123 (TM).  I wrote it at home to help me do budgeting and taxes.
It supports most of the common spread sheet operation including
formula move and copy.  This version should run on either a color
or mono monitor with 80x25 lines.It is designed to try an limit
the amount of main store used.
.............  Version 1.01 .................................
Changes:
1.Cleaned up Bounce Bar Menu
2.Added creating of file.BAK for SAVE option so as to not replace
the original.
3.Changed Help to allow ESC to quit exit.
4.Changed cursor positioning for pageup and pagedown.
.............. Version 2.00 .................................
1. Support Move, Copy, ClrRange for cells
2. Support merging spread sheets -- be careful what you do here you
could really clobber what you have.
3. Support color screen.
4. Improved and shortened hlp
5. Flag cells with formulas that could not convert on Move/Copy
with @ERR around term and flashing error indication.
6. Redid screen layout some to use all 80 columns.

... snip ...

listserv later evolved on external EARN (bitnet in europe) ... sort of just the mailing list portion of vmtools
http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv-history.asp
http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/history_listserv.asp
another version of listserv history:
http://www.livinginternet.com/l/li.htm
http://www.livinginternet.com/l/lli.htm

misc. past posts mentioning bitnet (&/or earn)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

old email from person setting up EARN ... looking for some assistance:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320
in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#65 UUCP email

bitnet history reference:
http://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_bitnet.htm

misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

in the late 70s and early 80s, I had gotten blamed for computer conferencing on the internal network (which was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late 85 or early 86). misc. past posts mentioning computer mediated conversation:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:34:59 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
I'm an experienced user, and I resent being handicapped by "easy to learn" systems. Let the inexperienced users have their fun - but don't take away the experienced users' power tools.

GUI is fine for casual use ... the real power of CLI ... is that it is much easier to script them ... and apply efforts to tens or thousands of items. i've recently used gimp's command line scripting interface to "clean-up" images of a hundred or so shots I took of pages at national archives.

recent reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#82 Favourite computer history books?

for tiny drift ... the above mentions reworking the declassification tag that they gave me for the ww2 army reports (had to show up in image of each page photographed)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/dectag.jpg

nara declassification

there is a little similarity to the way the tag appears (on pages) and the "serial number" that IBM retrofitted to all the corporate copying machines in the early 70s. there was an incident where some copied documentation regarding 370 virtual memory (before virtual memory had been announced) found its way to a journalist. after a lot of investigation (where they couldn't prove ... just had suspicions), they went about retrofitting tiny serial numbers under the glass of every corporate copier. The serial number then would appear on every page made on that copier (providing ability to at least trace back to what copier was used). recent mention in another thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#32 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

RISC load-store verses x86 Add from memory

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: RISC load-store verses x86 Add from memory.
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:52:00 -0400
Brett Davis <ggtgp@yahoo.com> writes:
PowerPC has some nice kitchen sink features that have multiple uses. But I always thought of SPARC as just RISC with a registers windows mistake.

What RISC CPU features does LISP need besides lots of registers?


old email from long ago and far away referencing the lisp machine group trying to get an 801:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#email790711

in that time-frame there was effort to replace large variety of different internal microprocessors with 801. 801 iliad chips had specialized features for aid in emulation.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

taking down the machine - z9 series

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: taking down the machine - z9 series
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:12:00 -0400
eamacneil@YAHOO.CA (Ted MacNEIL) writes:
She suddenly screamed that we had to stop the system, it was an emergency. The rookie obliged and hit the big red button to the right of the screen. Bamf! It took four Amdahl reps over 12 hours to replace everything that overheated, because with an EPO, even the fans stop.

there is the early 3081 TCM story about heat exchange had flow sensor on the inboard side ... but not on the outboard side (of the heat exchanger). one customer lost flow on the outboard side of the heat exchanger ... and there was so much heat in the system ... that by the time the thermal sensors caught the rise in temperature ... it was too late ... and fried all the TCMs (a TCM ran something like low six figures). after that, systems were retrofitted with flow sensors on the outboard side.

description (some) of 3081 technology
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

misc. past posts mentioning frying 3081 TCMs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#36 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#38 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#4 hot chips and nuclear reactors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#13 IBM Mainframe at home
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#35 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#36 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#41 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#96 A Blast from the Past
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#77 Z11 - Water cooling?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#43 What was old is new again (water chilled)

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

1952 use of transistors in computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: 1952 use of transistors in computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, misc.transport.rail.americas
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:15:45 -0400
Philip Nasadowski <nasadowsk@usermale.com> writes:
I'd be annoyed to if I had to invest millions in what was obviously a short-term dead end until ICs got better. The IC was obviously the future, but not ready yet, plus Fairchild and TI were tied up making them for Apollo, etc, and none of the units Apollo used were particularly groundbreaking - they only used 2 types, a NOR gate and a sense amp. Both were simple even by mid 60's standards.

It'd be interesting to see what would have happened if Watson had insisted on ICs at all cost. IBM might have beaten Intel to the microprocessor, and Intel would have ended up being yet another also-ran in the semiconductor industry...


for other topic drift, IMS wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Management_System

from above:
IBM designed IMS with Rockwell and Caterpillar starting in 1966 for the Apollo program. IMS's challenge was to inventory the very large bill of materials (BOM) for the Saturn V moon rocket and Apollo space vehicle. However, by some accounts it was accepted too late in the process to make significant contributions to the Apollo program.

... snip ...

recent posts mentioning IMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#0 PDS vs. PDSE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#12 The origins of CICS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#62 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#71 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#72 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#50 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#61 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#83 Entry point for a Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#2 Entry point for a Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#18 What was the historical price of a P/390?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#47 Nonlinear systems and nonlocal supercomputing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#48 Nonlinear systems and nonlocal supercomputing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#28 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#66 25 reasons why hardware is still hot at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#35 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#41 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#50 Ten examples of why the humble ATM = innovation in 2010
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#85 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#48 Knuth Got It Wrong
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#59 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#62 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

IBM 3670 Brokerage Communications System

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 3670 Brokerage Communications System
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:28:09 -0400
hancock4 writes:
My guess is a high end System/360 as the 'server'. Don't know about application and system software. Was CICS common in 1971? Maybe they had a customized package for that hardware.

I am curious as to how many units were in actual service. IBM put out some products that didn't generate a great many sales. I heard a company called Bunker Ramo and affiliates served the brokerage markets.

I assume by 1971 a high end S/360 was perfectly capable of providing basic stock quote information through a S/360-era CRT or Selectric terminal. Back then the inquiry would been a terse string of characters, not a user friendly interface, but the basic high/low/ actual price would be easy to supply.

Around that time Western Union was fading as the long time provider of brokerage information and orders in both directions, although it was working with hardware makers to provide that service and trying to upgrade its ticker services. Private wire service for brokerages was a big business for them, and I presume for AT&T as well.

However, I suspect branch offices of brokerages may not have been computerized at that time; perhaps a small branch had to phone in a query or order to a main office where it would be processed. Certainly computers were used in batch processing of orders and record keeping, but I don't know how much on-line functionality was provided in 1971.

Also around that time the line between communications carrier and computer information processor was getting blurred, which would lead to the FCC Computer Decisions series. If Western Union used a computer as a "store and forward" device, or perhaps reformatted raw information, was it now providing information services beyond communications? These were the questions of those days.


univ. library online catalog project got selected for beta test for original cics product in 1969 ... and I was tasked to support it. online catalog project had gotten a ONR grant and used part of it to purchase 2321 datacell. misc. past posts mentioning CICS (&/or BDAM).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics
CICS wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS
lots of cics history archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040924073107/http://www.yelavich.com/

in the mid-90s ... did some work with NIH library and a couple of the oriignal implementers were still around ... started in the late 60s using mainframe bdam ... but they had invented their own online environment (originally CICS had started out as effort at customer shop ... before being selected to be turned into product). recent post mentioning NLM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#9 Adventure - Or Colossal Cave Adventure

early part of the century, I was in datacenter that mentioned well over 100 CICS regions (at the time CICS didn't have multiprocessor support ... so method for taking advantage of additional processors, was to have multiple copies of CICS). the datacenter handled dataprocessing outsourcing for most of tv cable companies in the US ... customer support terminals, billing, sending commands down to customer TV settop boxes, etc

IMS wiki page ... mentions that most of ATM transactions in the world goes thru some IMS system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_System

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Disk replacing Tape?

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Disk replacing Tape?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 24 Jun 2010 08:55:02 -0700
SanDisk's SD card can store data for 100 years
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178428/SanDisk_s_SD_card_can_store_data_for_100_years

from above:
The WORM (write once, read many) card is "tamper proof" and data cannot be altered or deleted, SanDisk said in a statement. The card is designed for long-time preservation of crucial data like legal documents, medical files and forensic evidence, SanDisk said.

... snip ...

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc, alt.folklore.computers, comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:25:08 -0400
bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes:
More than a decade before _that_ I was using DOS on IBM hardware. In 1967 to be specific. On a system 360/30, or /40 (at this remove I've forgotten the exact model).

i got 2741 terminal at home starting mar1970 for dialup access ... later 70s switched to 300 baud cdi miniterm, then 1200 baud 3101 "glass teletype" ... some past pictures:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#oldpicts

starting in the late '60s there were a number of commerical online time-sharing service bureaus formed started out using (virtual machine) cp67 as base (later moving to vm370)

aug76, tymshare started offering their (vm370/cms based) online computer conferencing to (ibm user group) SHARE ... for "vmshare" (archives back to aug76)
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

tymshare wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare

the above mentions moving tymnet to interdata in 70s. for other topic drift ... as undergraduate in the 60s ... at the univ. i had to add tty/ascii support to cp67. as part of doing the tty/ascii support, i tried to make the terminal controller to do something that it couldn't quite do. this was somewhat the motivation for the univ. to start a clone controller project, reverse engineering the mainframe channel interface, building channel interface board and programming interdata/3 to emulate the standard terminal controller. this was later upgraded to interdata/4 (handling channel interface) ... with multiple interdata/3 handling line-scanner functions. four of us got written up as being responsible for clone controller business. misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

tymshare had also developed their own 370 timesharing system, GNOSIS. As part of m/d (now boeing) buying tymshare in the 80s ... I was brought in for audit of gnosis as part of its spin-off to key logic:
http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/upenn/Gnosis/Gnosis.html
http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/upenn/
and wiki refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOSIS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS

for other drift, minor note about internal network getting gateway in fall of '82 (before the arpanet cut-off to internetworking tcp/ip protocol)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#email821022
in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0

the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late '85 or early '86 ... some past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

I had gotten blamed for computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s.

bitnet (& later earn) was corporate sponsored network for educational institutions using technology similar to that used for the internal network ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

recent post mentioning bitnet/earn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#68 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

... slightly related to the web ... two of the people mentioned in this jan92 meeting reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

later show up at a small client/server startup responsible for something called the "commerce server". We were brought in to consult because they wanted to do financial transactions on their servers. The startup had also invented this technology called SSL they wanted to use ... oh, btw, the result is no frequently called "electronic commerce".

Part of deploying support for servers doing finanical transfer transactions was something called a "payment gateway" ... aka sat on the internet and acted interface between the webservers doing financial transactions and the payment networks. some past post mentioning payment gateway
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc, alt.folklore.computers, comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:23:55 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
starting in the late '60s there were a number of commerical online time-sharing service bureaus formed started out using (virtual machine) cp67 as base (later moving to vm370)

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#75 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

HONE was one of the largest online virtual machine based systems that started with cp67 ... after the 23jun69 unbundling announcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

it evolved into providing internal worldwide corporate sales & marketing support ... with HONE clones sprouting up all over the world. misc. past posts mentioning commercial online timesharing service bureaus.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

recent post mentioning HONE and joke about four shift workweek:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#85 Idiotic programming style edicts

local (vm) group train trip from oakland to reno. In the mid-70s, HONE had consolidated various US datacenters on the pennisula; do (sat. photo) address lookup for the (relatively new) facebook bldg. ... it was in the bldg. next door. misc. past posts mentioning HONE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
Date: 17 January 1986, 16:11:35 PST
From: xxxxx at HONE9 <HONE VM Systems Support>
To: distribution
Subject: VM Training

Hi -

I plan to call my travel agent tomorrow (Sat.) with the list of attendees to get our reservations made. If there is anyone who has had a change of plans and can NOT participate, please let me know tonight or tomorrow morning.

I will be at Eric's for Lynn's weekly Friday symposium later today and can be reached at home at (415) xxx-xxxx.


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

references from recent facebook discussion about san jose plant site:
When Eric's first opened across from bldg. 28 ... the backroom was usually kept closed ... but for some reason they had my name on the door and they would open it up fri. nights. they would also give us half-price on pitchers of anchor steam

... snip ...

comment about san jose plant site earthquake retrofit
some people that complained were issued industrial hearing protection gear; seemed to discount productivity issues in noisy workplace (this is research, we don't need to worry about productivity?).

they started with bldg. 14 ... moved everybody to offsite bldg (86) while doing construction for the earthquake retrofit. Then doing bldg. 28 ... which was external addition wrapped around the old bldg. ... story was that old bldg. was attached/hung from the external skeleton. They didn't evacuate "old" bldg. 28 during construction and the noise was really deafening ... there were some complaints filed with gov. about noise in the workplace.


... snip ...

one of the bldg. 28 distinctions was that was where the work on the original relational/sql System/R occurred on vm370 370/145 ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

plant site sat. photo:

5600 Cottle Rd ... (at least) bldg 12, 25, 26, 28 (old research), homestead, pond between bldg 28 & homestead ... various other ... all gone.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode&q=5600+Cottle+Road%2C+San+Jose%2C+CA&sll=37.0625%2C-95.677068&sspn=65.047864%2C48.779297&ie=UTF8&hq&hnear=5600+Cottle+Rd%2C+San+Jose%2C+Santa+Clara%2C+California+95123&ll=37.245293%2C-121.799154&spn=0.015869%2C0.011909&t=h&z=16

msnmaps is still showing 1998 satellite photos, before all the bldgs had been plowed under.
http://msrmaps.com/image.aspx?T=1&S=11&Z=10&X=1516&Y=10306&W=1&qs=5600+cottle+rd|san+jose|ca|&Addr=5600+Cottle+Rd%2c+San+Jose%2c+CA+95123-3696&ALon=-121.8040000&ALat=37.2495300

... snip ...

for a little drift back to internet ... misc. past posts about being in booth at interop '88
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#interop88

there were monthly (baybunch) vm user group meetings at SLAC ... which regularly saw several of the local customers (like tymshare) as well as number of vendors (Amdahl, NAS, 2pi, etc)

slac also had the first webserver (outside cern) on their vm370 system:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

reference to original cern webserver being hacked up sgml
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/

SGML was the ISO standard version of GML ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml

which had been invented at the science center in 1969 ... science center was 4th flr, 545 tech sq ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

which was also did virtual machine system cp67/cms as well as the technology for the internal network (later also saw use in bitnet & earn).

melinda has history reference to early period
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

available in a number of formats:
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.listing
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.ps
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/25paper.pdf

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:15:49 -0400
Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:
Indeed. Didn't stop them from going out of business, though.

DEC had big upswing in business with vax machines in the mid-range market starting in the late 70s. there were quite a lot of new business in this market segment ... a decade of vax sales ... sliced and diced by model, year, US/non-US
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction

endicott mid-range 370 4341/4331 also saw similar big upswing selling in the same market segment ... selling about the same as vax in single or few machines at time ... but overall outsold because of large corporate orders of several hundreds at a time.

there was similar volume expectation for the 4341/4331 follow-ons (4381 & 4361) ... which didn't materialize ... seeing similar effect to the vax numbers (reference above) with the mid-range market starting to move to workstations and larger PCs in the mid-80s.

370 mainframe sales survived this ... but it was mostly the high-end machines ... which then started to see the "killer micro" scenario in the 90s.

some posts in recent mainframe thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#43 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#45 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#46 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#49 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#52 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#53 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#54 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#55 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#56 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#58 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#59 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#62 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#64 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#65 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#67 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#68 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#69 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc, alt.folklore.computers, comp.os.linux.advocacy,
 microsoft.public.mail.misc
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:17:11 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
There was a major obstacle to a free Internet then, the AUP. (Acceptable Use Policy, enforced by the then Internet core, NSFnet. Academic traffic only. )

Back then, the NSFnet acted as perfect clybabies excluding all commercial traffic (Non-AUP) until they were forced away from being the provider of last resort in what was called the "cix wars". What were these morons thinking ?

The "CIX wars" lasted from mid 1990 until late january 1992, when NSFnet silently caved in and annouced the routes, without telling anyone.

However, the major battle was won in january 1991, when autonomous routing was chosen as the paradigm for all the "regionals" that made up the NSFnet customers. From then on it was just a game of attrition against NSFnet. They caved in as silently as they could manage sometime in late january 1992. By then a third of the regionals had made separate peering agreements with commercial operators.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#75 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#76 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

possibly part of the nsfnet & AUP was telcos. going into mid-80s, there was huge amount of excess bandwidth (dark fiber, other stuff) ... but big telcos were in chicken&egg scenario; they had huge fixed run-rate ... new bandwidth hungry applications wouldn't appear until tariffs came down significantly ... and tariffs wouldn't come down significantly w/o the new generation of bandwidth hungry apps (i.e. just lowering tarrifs significantly would have resulted in big telcos operating at loss for extended period until the new generation of bandwidth hungry apps appeared).

winning nsfnet backbone bid was $11.2M ... but estimate that commercial interests contributed well over four times that for the backbone ... with the possible hope that there wouldn't be any commercial traffic bleeding off onto the backbone ... but at the same time providing significant available bandwidth as technology incubator for the evolution of the bandwidth hungry applications.

misc. old email mentioning nsfnet backbone RFP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

we had T1 operational with internal backbone prototype ... and was anticipating getting the nsfnet backbone RFP (some conjecture that one of the reasons that the backbone RFP specified T1 ... was our example of operational T1 infrastructure). there were some internal politics and we weren't allowed to bid on the RFP. The director of NSF tried to help by writing a letter to the company 3Apr1986, NSF Director to IBM Chief Scientist and IBM Senior VP and director of Research, copying IBM CEO) ... ... but that just resulted in aggravating the internal politics (little statements like what we already had running was at least five years ahead of all RFP bid submissions ... to build something new).

misc. past posts mentioning nsfnet backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

btw, the winning nsfnet T1 backbone bid ... didn't actually install T1 links ... 440kbit links were installed ... and then somewhat to meet the letter of the RFP ... T1 trunks were installed with telco multiplexor running multiple 440kbit links over the T1 trunks.

then possibly trying to quiet the sniping ... I was asked to be the red-team on the nsfnet T3 backbone rfp ... while something like 30 people from 7-8 labs around the world were the blue team. at the final review ... I got to present first ... followed by the blue team. something like 5-10 minutes into the blue team presentation ... the person running the review, pounded on the table and said that they would lay down in front of a garbage truck before they let any but the blue team proposal go forward.

it turns out that some of the people involved in the nsfnet backbone internal politics were also later involved in transferring the cluster scale-up work and stating that we weren't allowed to work on anything with more than four processors. ... reference to jan92 cluster scale-up meeting before effort was transferred
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

misc. old email related to cluster scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

and past posts mentioning the work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

shortly after the transfer at the very end of jan ... there started to be press things like:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters1 17feb92
and then something later that summer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters2 11May92

other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#66 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#68 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#70 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#75 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#76 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#80 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#81 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#85 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#0 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header time-stamp?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#4 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#9 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

zVM training

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: zVM training
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 25 Jun 2010 18:11:00 -0700
gahenke@GMAIL.COM (George Henke) writes:
Just read the manual 3 times and do it once. It's a whole lot less expensive. Especially when IBM makes the manuals all available for free on the internet.

After all what is a consultant anyway. Just someone who has read the manual because nobody else wants too and more often than not its the client's manual anyway or through the client's internet.


given this is friday ... old email about VM training (oakland to reno) ... recently posted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#email860117
in this post from today
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#76

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Idiotic programming style edicts

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Idiotic programming style edicts
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:23:39 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
They actually did have one for the Apple II, if memory serves. But, no, there weren't third-party maintenance manuals for things like the IBM 650. The documents of that nature were proprietary to the manufacturer for computers of that vintage.

that loosened up after 23jun69 unbundling announcement (prompted by various gov. pressure/litigation) ... some past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

maintenance was split off (& separately charged for), hardware interface/operation manuals published, SE services split off (& separately charged for), and starting to charge for application software (although case was made that kernel software continued to be free).

The starting to charge for SE services was part of the original motivation for HONE ... online cp67 virtual machine services available to branch office ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

prior to unbundling, a lot of SE training was sort of apprentice program ... part of large team, onsite at customer shop. after unbundling ... all those people were being charged for ... and nobody was able to figure out the charge for SEs in-training. HONE (Hands-On Network Environment) started out with several cp67 datacenters ... providing online access for SEs in branch offices to sharpen their skills ... practicing with (guest) operating systems running in virtual machines.

the science center had also done port of apl\360 to cms for cms\apl. there started to be some number of sales & marketing support applications done in cms\apl ... which eventually started to dominate all HONE activity and the SE training activity eventually disappeared.

univ. had started work on clone controller before unbundling ... so figuring out the channel interface had to be done by reverse engineering. a few recent posts mentioning clone controller:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#19 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#75 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header

as mentioned ... clone controller business was major motivation for future system effort ... that was going to completely 360/370 and was significantly different ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

during future system effort ... the 370 software and hardware product pipeline was allowed to dry up. some reference here:
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

the lack of 370 products during the period is attributed with allowing clone processors to gain market foothold. with the failure of the future system effort (w/o even being announced), there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines. this possibly contributed to deciding to release a lot of 370 work I had been doing all during the period (as well as sometimes making less than flattering comments about the future system effort). The decision was also made to start charging for kernel software ... and my resource manager was selected as the guinea pig to start the transition for charging for kernel software. some past posts related to resource management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

In Apple II period ... my brother was regional apple market rep (had largest physical region in CONUS). one of the things he had setup was using his Apple II to call into Apple corporate hdqtrs S/38, to monitor the hardware build and delivery schedules.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 26 Jun 2010 09:05:21 -0700
Peter.Farley@BROADRIDGE.COM (Farley, Peter x23353) writes:
Attention to details like this (and some similar optimizations) saved one application I have worked on almost 50% of its previous CPU utilization without changing the application algorithm in any other way.

the science center had pioneered a lot of performance tools in the 60s & 70s, workload profiling ... and stuff that eventually turned into things like capacity planning. misc. past posts mentioning science center, 4th flr, 545 tech sq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

they had activity counter snap shots ... starting with the science center cp67 ... eventually every 5-10 mins, 7x24 for nearly decade. the convention was followed by internal systems installing first cp67 and then vm370 ... so there were hundreds of systems with lots of different workloads & configurations with years of data.

another activity was several system simulators ... some written in pli others in apl ... that could simulate effects of different algorithms. one of the apl simulators ... using the enormous amount of snapshot information evolved into the performance predictor ... made available on the worldwide sales & marketing hone system; customer support people could enter profiles of their customers workload & configuration ... and then ask what-if questions regarding what happens selling an additional mbyte of memory (or other configurations changes) &/or what happens when there are workload changes. in the 90s, rights to a descendent of the performance predictor were sold ... the person ran it thru and apl-to-c convertor and then made a living doing consulting at number of high-end datacenters around the world.

the science center also did some number of other kinds of hot-spot monitoring. not at cambridge ... but from palo alto science center (by people that brought you the 370/145 apl microcode assist) ... they gen'ed up a 145 microcode path for me that sampled instruction address. I used this for help in identifying pieces of code to be dropped into microcode for the ECPS performance assist. this is old post with result of some of the other kinds of analysis done on the kernel code as part of selecting what went into the microcode:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

The science center also did a project that started out with the POK "redcap" instruction simulator (recorded information about each instruction simulated ... was used in helping design processors &/or new instruction). Several changes to the information recording were made at the science center ... which was then used as input into a virtual memory simulator. Science center eventually released this as "vs/repack" product ... which included ability to do semi-automated program re-organization. It was used by a number of corporate products ... both as an instruction "hot-spot" identifier ... as well as helping in transition from real storage environment to virtual memory environment (i.e. products like IMS made a lot of use of it).

about the turn of the century had a chance to look at a large, 450+K statement cobol application that ran all night on something like 40+ CECs (billion plus in mainframe equipment). the consultant that was using the descendent of the performance predictor had been called in on the project ... to look for possible system and application bottlenecks. the operation also had a large performance group that had been tending the application for years (decades?) ... mostly with hotspot analysis. the consultant turned up some things that had gone unnoticed by the group doing hot-spot analysis ... but there was still strong feeling that there was significant thruput inefficiencies (in part based on cpu processing/operation from decades earlier and currently).

One of the things done at the science center decades earlier was multiple regression analysis of the activity counters. I decided to try something similar for this application; collected fairly large number of application counts from several nights run across large number of CECs. It turned up some "meta" level activity that was quite anomolous ... and when reworked, resulted in significant thruput improvement. Part of the issue was that the system analytical models and the hot-spot analysis had been highlighting "micro" level activity ... but didn't catch the application doing several anomolous unnecessary passes of whole operations.

misc. past posts mentioning performance predictor &/or "vs/repack":
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#7 IBM 7090 (360s, 370s, apl, etc)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#68 The Melissa Virus or War on Microsoft?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#30 Could CDR-coding be on the way back?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#83 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#31 database (or b-tree) page sizes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#33 database (or b-tree) page sizes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#20 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#46 Withdrawal Announcement 901-218 - No More 'small machines'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#64 ... the need for a Museum of Computer Software
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#28 OS Workloads : Interactive etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#45 cp/67 addenda (cross-post warning)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#46 cp/67 addenda (cross-post warning)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#49 Swapper was Re: History of Login Names
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#50 IBM going after Strobe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#50 Blade architectures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#28 Origin of XAUTOLOG (x-post)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#15 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#21 "Super-Cheap" Supercomputing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#53 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#15 Disk capacity and backup solutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#8 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#32 Language semantics wrt exploits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#29 Sun researchers: Computers do bad math ;)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#14 Holee shit! 30 years ago!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#21 PSW Sampling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#42 command line switches [Re: [REALLY OT!] Overuse of symbolic constants]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#31 capacity planning: art, science or magic?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#22 Lock-free algorithms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#55 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#7 Integer types for 128-bit addressing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#10 Multi-processor timing issue
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#73 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#76 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#4 Athlon cache question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#1 Self restarting property of RTOS-How it works?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#6 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#33 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#41 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#48 Secure design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#1 Single System Image questions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#15 Exceptions at basic block boundaries
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#12 Performance and Capacity Planning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#62 More on garbage collection
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#17 More on garbage collection
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#28 IBM's mini computers--lack thereof
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#18 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#5 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#30 auto reIPL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#34 Not enough parallelism in programming
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#15 {SPAM?} Re: Expanded Storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#17 {SPAM?} Re: Expanded Storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#23 Seeking Info on XDS Sigma 7 APL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#20 About TLB in lower-level caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#46 using 3390 mod-9s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#22 A very basic question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#30 A very basic question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#34 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#25 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#37 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#18 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#22 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#24 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#3 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#11 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#23 Strobe equivalents
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#25 CPU usage for paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#26 Cache-Size vs Performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#12 Trying to design low level hard disk manipulation program
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#24 Curiousity: CPU % for COBOL program
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#28 Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#1 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#16 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#31 Wylbur and Paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#65 Non-Standard Mainframe Language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#55 Capacity and Relational Database
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#53 Virtual Storage implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#57 ACP/TPF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#68 High order bit in 31/24 bit address
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007s.html#41 Age of IBM VM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#21 Distributed Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#24 Job ad for z/OS systems programmer trainee
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#78 CPU time differences for the same job
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#35 Interesting Mainframe Article: 5 Myths Exposed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#16 Kernels
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#36 Object-relational impedence
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#81 Intel: an expensive many-core future is ahead of us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#42 APL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#69 Speculation ONLY
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#41 Automation is still not accepted to streamline the business processes... why organizations are not accepting newer technologies?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#65 APL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#5 Why do IBMers think disks are 'Direct Access'?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#76 A Math Geek's Plan to Save Wall Street's Soul
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#43 SNA: conflicting opinions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#17 How to reduce the overall monthly cost on a System z environment?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#62 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#48 Knuth Got It Wrong

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:24:13 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#81 Percentage of code executed that is user written

for slightly different slant on the subject ... in the early 70s ... Amdahl gave a talk at MIT in large auditorium on subject of forming his own clone processor company. one of the questions from student in the audience was what was the pitch/spin he used to get venture capital & funding for his corporation. his reply was something about customers had already spent billions in 360 software development ... that even if IBM was to completely walk away from 360/370 ... that software base would be enough to keep him in business through the end of the century.

the reference to possibility of IBM completely walking away from 360/370 ... might be considered a veiled reference to future system effort ... which was planning on doing just that. misc. past posts mentioning future system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

this has some reference to the future system period letting 370 software & hardware product pipeline go dry:
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

and this fergus & morris book reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984??

makes mention that letting the 370 product pipeline go dry, in large part contributed to letting clone processor vendors gain market foothold.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:14:05 -0400
Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> writes:
Since this appears in several places now, and you constantly nest your references, are you referring to:

Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology (1993) or Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World (2003)

both by

Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris ? ^^^


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#81 Percentage of code executed that is user written
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#82 Percentage of code executed that is user written

come from reply to somebody's post in 2001 ... their post included the reference ... since in was 2001 ... it most likely wasn't the 2003 book
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984??

so presumably has to the Ferguson & Morris 1993 book
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Wars-Future-Western-Technology/dp/0812921569

another in similar genre is:
https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm
https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm

from above:
After 40 years of unrivalled success, IBM is now in serious trouble. What has happened? Jean-Jacques Duby explains how the company's values and the cogs and wheels of its internal management system doomed IBM to failure, in the light of long developments in the technical, economic and commercial environment. But why there should have been such a sudden shock remains a mystery. Perhaps IBM's mighty power had delayed its downfall, making this all the more brutal as a result, like the earthquake which follows the sudden encounter of two continental plates.

... snip ...

sort of at the height of the killer micros ... & after the company had gone in the red ... recent reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#77 Idiotic programming style edicts

also from same article ... referring to at least part of future system motivation was clone controller business:
IBM tried to react by launching a major project called the 'Future System' (FS) in the early 1970's. The idea was to get so far ahead that the competition would never be able to keep up, and to have such a high level of integration that it would be impossible for competitors to follow a compatible niche strategy. However, the project failed because the objectives were too ambitious for the available technology. Many of the ideas that were developed were nevertheless adapted for later generations. Once IBM had acknowledged this failure, it launched its 'box strategy', which called for competitiveness with all the different types of compatible sub-systems. But this proved to be difficult because of IBM's cost structure and its R&D spending, and the strategy only resulted in a partial narrowing of the price gap between IBM and its rivals.

... snip ...

misc posts mentioning future system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. posts mentioning clone controllers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

and a couple recent references to clone controllers:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#4 360 programs on a z/10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#64 SYSENTER/SYSEXIT_vs._SYSCALL/SYSRET
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#53 SWTL and 522
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#62 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#9 Entry point for a Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#11 IBM And Microsoft Clash Over Unbundling Policy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#34 someone smarter than Dave Cutler
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#18 How many mainframes are there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#33 45 years of Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#11 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#19 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#57 Article says mainframe most cost-efficient platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#75 What is the protocal for GMT offset in SMTP (e-mail) header
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#80 Idiotic programming style edicts

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:29:47 -0400
USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks
http://slashdot.org/submission/1269056/USPTO-Grants-Bezos-Patent-on-60s-Era-Chargebacks

from above ...
Another example of why it's not wise to grant software patents when people don't know much about computer history.

... snip ...

the charging scenarios came up frequently in the various online commercial time-sharing service bureaus ... misc. reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

recent posts with one of the "recoverables" was that the equipment (in the 60s) was leased ... and companies being billed based on the "system meter":
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#13 An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 6: The IBM 360
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#57 An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 6: The IBM 360
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#13 A "portable" hard disk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#34 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#35 IBM Rational Developer for System z
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#37 Idiotic programming style edicts

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:00:51 -0400
John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
You might want keep in mind that nearly everything on Slashdot is wrong, so you should read the claims in the patent. It's # 7,743,001.

The claims are all about dynamically adjusting the price for web services based on predicted demand. I'm not sure whether that's new enough to merit a patent, but it's considerably more than 1960s style chargebacks.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#84 USPTO Grants Bezos Patent on '60s-Era Chargebacks

online timesharing service bureaus frequently tried to shift more use offshift & low-usage periods by offering various kinds of pricing incentives (with peak charges for periods of peak demands) ... somewhat analogous to telco offshift tariffs.

dynamically predicting low-usage gets more interesting ... somewhat akin to what i was doing as undergraduate in the 60s with dynamic adaptive resource management and (attempting) scheduling to the bottleneck.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

taking down the machine - z9 series

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: taking down the machine - z9 series
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:19:22 -0400
hancock4 writes:
Anyone know how much power 1,000 square feet of solar panels would generate?

recent articles:

Solar's Great Leap Forward
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25565/page1/

Solar prices fall due to nanotech
http://www.reportage-enviro.com/2010/05/solar-prices-reduce-thanks-to-nanotechnology/

Highly Efficient Solar Cells Could Result from Quantum Dot Research
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=38787

Nanotech could make solar energy as easy and cheap as growing grass
http://www.physorg.com/news109253445.html

.. some amount of trade-off between cost of manufacturing versus efficiency. satellites would see some of this since quite a bit of the cost is putting weight into orbit. higher efficiency (power per pound) would easily pay for increased cost of manufacturing.

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

taking down the machine - z9 series

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: taking down the machine - z9 series
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:29:34 -0400
Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:

http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm


past posts mentioning reversable pumps for columbia basin irrigation effort ... providing both water for irrigation as well as peak power generation.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#43 VR vs. Portable Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#14 Geothermal was: VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#7 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#62 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#13 A "portable" hard disk

... originally over million across were planned, but currently only little under 700k acres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project
http://users.owt.com/chubbard/gcdam/html/irrigate.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20111007024826/http://www.usbr.gov/pn/project/columbia_index.html
http://www.nwcouncil.org/history/ColumbiaBasinProject.asp

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

taking down the machine - z9 series

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: taking down the machine - z9 series
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:59:23 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
For some reason, politicians are behaving less intelligently than is normally to be expected with respect to an issue of this seriousness.

one might look for large amount of lobbying and potentially different special interests in conflict.

there was article in the 60s about solar power generation ... that the power utilities were in conflict ... solar power farms where power passed thru current utility facilities and they still collected revenue vis-a-vis solar panels on homes where utilities wouldn't collecting fees.

past post about annual economic conference ... making reference to congress is the most corrupt institution on earth ... and going to flat tax would eliminate enormous amount of the corruption ... since it would eliminate the enormous amounts of money spent on lobbying for special tax provisions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#49 Taxes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#87 Fraud due to stupid failure to test for negative
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#20 China's yuan 'set to usurp US dollar' as world's reserve currency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#13 64 Cores -- IBM is showing a prototype already
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#31 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#39 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#77 Now is time for banks to replace core system according to Accenture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#49 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#40 F.B.I. Faces New Setback in Computer Overhaul

regardless of all the other pros & cons regarding "flat tax" ... significantly reducing the enormous corruption would be sufficient justification. there was also reference to going to flat-tax could increase GDP by 3-6% because of enormous resources devoted to dealing with current (complex) tax provisions (i.e. lost productivity could be applied to something more useful). they concluded with semi-humorous about ireland was (also) lobbying against US flat tax ... since companies had given complexity dealing with US tax code as part of motivation for setting up in ireland.

read an article recently ... where barney frank canceled all fund raisers and meetings with special interests during work on the financial regulation bill ... to avoid being exposed to demands. the article also expressed surprise that frank had opened the deliberations to cspan ... which have been doing quite a bit of reruns (a lot of frank's quips during the deliberations were humorous ... don't know if he was just playing to the cameras or not).

--
42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970




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