List of Archived Posts

2011 Newsgroup Postings (05/06 - 06/06)

The first personal computer (PC)
CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?
CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
What are the various alternate uses for the PC's LSB ?
How they failed to catch Madoff
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
America's Defense Meltdown
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Clone Processors
The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Running z/OS On Your Laptop
Hey all you Old Geeks (and younger ones too), with gas heading towards $6.00/gal, remote support, satellite offices and home office will become more cost effective
Fight Fraud with Device ID
program coding pads
TELSTAR satellite experiment
program coding pads
An online bank scam worthy of a spy novel
Fight Fraud with Device ID
Fight Fraud with Device ID
Mainframe technology in 2011 and beyond; who is going to run these Mainframes?
program coding pads
TELSTAR satellite experiment
program coding pads
Congratulations, where was my invite?
Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
IBM Assembler manuals
Congratulations, where was my invite?
TELSTAR satellite experiment
Congratulations, where was my invite?
IBM Assembler manuals
z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?
The first personal computer (PC)
IBM Assembler manuals
BofA Breach: 'A Big, Scary Story'
Fight Fraud with Device ID
My first mainframe experience
z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?
My first mainframe experience
My first mainframe experience
My first mainframe experience
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
My first mainframe experience
My first mainframe experience
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'
VAXen on the Internet
What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
z/OS System Programmer Needed East Coast
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?
Stanford's Don Knuth, a pioneering hero of computer programming
The Costs of Bad Security
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
History of byte addressing
Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling
77,000 federal workers paid more than governors
We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
alignment, was History of byte addressing
Got to remembering... the really old geeks (like me) cut their teeth on Unit Record

The first personal computer (PC)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first personal computer (PC)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 18:16:21 -0400
Patrick Scheible <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
Big boxes. What database do you keep on it?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#89 The first personal computer (PC)

the technology that manages rfc index
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
and the various merged taxonomy&glossary
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote

these are relatively small scale ... tens of mbytes ... but I periodically look at much larger data collections.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 07 May, 2011
Subject: CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#90 CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012

Oil price collapse pays off for one speculator
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/06/markets/oil_prices_speculators/index.htm

TV business news this morning going strong on commodity speculation contributing to destroying our economy ("crazy ETF rules").

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 07 May, 2011
Subject: WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?
Blog: Greater IBM
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#21 WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?

I had a whole drawer of registered confidential "811" documents (defining 370-xa, supposedly "811" taken from nov78 date on many documents) in special double locked cabinet. I was contacted to interview for assistant to president of a (clone processor) company in the area. During the interview there was some veiled references to next generation processor documents (as a reply, I made some offhand reference to having suggested some improvements to the corporate employee conduct booklet because of practices that I felt were quite questionable). Later there was gov. prosecution of the foreign parent of the company (for industrial espionage), and I had a 3hr session with FBI regarding everything said during the job interview. I later wondered whether there was somebody inside the company that may have leaked list of people with registered confidential documents.

posts related to that period where I was (also) being asked to interview new hires for a new group that I would provide technical direction to. I had written speakup about being underpaid, gotten back a written response from HR saying they had reviewed my complete employment history and I was making exactly what I was suppose to. I then repackaged the whole exchange and wrote a cover letter pointing out that HR was making offers to the new hires (that I was interviewing) 1/3rd more than I was currently making. I never got a written response but I almost immediateley got a 1/3rd raise .. putting me on level playing field with the new hire offers, (for people I was suppose to provide technical direction for):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#83 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#0 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#4 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#9 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#57 U.S. begins inquiry of IBM in mainframe market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#50 "Portable" data centers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#82 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day

misc. past posts mentioning 811:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#21 S/360 development burnout?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#8 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#9 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#51 Hardest Mistake in Comp Arch to Fix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#28 ibm history note from vmshare
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#28 simple architecture machine instruction set
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#58 IBM S/370-168, 195, and 3033
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#6 If the x86 ISA could be redone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#24 |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| questions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#42 Longest Thread Ever
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#42 Moving assembler programs above the line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#34 IBM Plugs Big Iron to the College Crowd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#35 IBM Plugs Big Iron to the College Crowd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#18 address space
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#26 IEH/IEB/... names?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#28 Multiple address spaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#20 Old PCs--environmental hazard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#31 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#16 On the 370/165 and the 360/85
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#16 Is the teaching of non-reentrant HLASM coding practices ever defensible?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#57 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#28 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#71 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007t.html#76 T3 Sues IBM To Break its Mainframe Monopoly
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#30 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#0 It keeps getting uglier
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#42 New Opcodes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#54 Throwaway cores
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#14 Kernels
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#31 IBM announced z10 ..why so fast...any problem on z 9
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#29 DB2 & z/OS Dissertation Research
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#6 What is "timesharing" (Re: OS X Finder windows vs terminal window weirdness)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#39 The Internet's 100 Oldest Dot-Com Domains
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#19 What happened to computer architecture (and comp.arch?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#74 Now is time for banks to replace core system according to Accenture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#100 "The Naked Mainframe" (Forbes Security Article)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#2 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#3 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#8 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#10 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#22 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#72 "SIE" on a RISC architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#45 PROP instead of POPS, PoO, et al
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#15 Mainframe Slang terms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#21 Dataspaces or 64 bit storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#32 IBM Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#18 IBM Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#43 CKD DASD
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#70 vm/370 3081
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#62 z/OS 1.13 preview
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#67 IBM Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#20 New job for mainframes: Cloud platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#39 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#42 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#46 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#48 A brief history of CMS/XA, part 1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#50 Dyadic vs AP: Was "CPU utilization/forecasting"

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 07 May, 2011
Subject: CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#90 CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#1 CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012

Fed Has Power To Pop Commodity Bubble
http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/05/08/fed-has-power-to-pop-commodity-bubble/

from above:
I don't know about you, but I'm fed up with being a victim of Wall Street speculators who are driving food and fuel prices up through the roof. The recent plunge in commodities prices confirms what everyone knew all the time -- inflation is being driven by commodities speculators who are profiting from everyone else's collective misery.

... snip ...

a little x-over from the "Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report" discussion ... allowing pure speculators to play in commodities is example of "misaligned business process where individuals are motivated to do the wrong thing" (i.e. earlier rule that speculators couldn't play because they resulted in wild, irrational price swings) ... and significantly increasing regulation difficulty.

misc. past posts mentioniong "misaligned business process"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#25 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#78 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#82 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#86 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report

more (wild, irrational) price swings:

Goldman Sees Commodity Recovery as Slump Erases $99 Billion
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-09/goldman-sees-commodities-recovery-as-week-long-rout-wipes-out-99-billion.html

... followup from last week ..

TV business news is reporting this morning that commodities continue to fall, bottoming out later this summer (more wild, irrational price swings)

... and from 5/15 ... more commodity speculation:

ExxonMobil CEO Says Oil Price Should Be $60 To $70 A Barrel
http://blogs.forbes.com/robertlenzner/2011/05/14/exxon-mobil-ceo-says-oil-price-should-be-60-70-a-barrel/

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

What are the various alternate uses for the PC's LSB ?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What are the various alternate uses for the PC's LSB ?
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Mon, 09 May 2011 14:51:04 -0400
MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> writes:
The 360/67 had 31-bit addressing mode--circa 1970.

360/67 had 32bit addressing in 1967. 360/67 functional characteristics at bitsavers:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/functional_characteristics/A27-2719-0_360-67_funcChar.pdf

it also had all processors able to address all channels in smp configuration ... other 360&370 smp had dedicated io/channels ... more than 24bit addressing and smp support for all processors accessing all channels ... didn't re-appear until 1983 (370xa on 3081)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

How they failed to catch Madoff

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 10 May, 2011
Subject: How they failed to catch Madoff
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
How they failed to catch Madoff
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/10/how-they-failed-to-catch-madoff/

from above:
Bernard L. Madoff was no evil genius. He was a pretty bad liar every step of the way - and the investigators knew it.

... snip ...

also from above:
As of late 2010, two years after the Madoff scandal broke, the SEC had taken no disciplinary or other measure against anyone involved in the various Madoff investigations. The SEC officials' collective failure is, as Madoff himself put it, astonishing. It will surely rank as one of the greatest regulatory failures ever, not just because of the size of the fraud, but because it was staring them in the face.

... snip ...

One of the people that testified in the Madoff congressional hearings had tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff. One of the scenarios was about Madoff turning himself in or otherwise SEC would have never done anything.

Of course, there are also GAO reports about fraudulent public company financial filings that even showed up-tic after Sarbanes-Oxley ... which supposedly was to prevent such things (contributing to Enron was a dry run and it worked so well it has become institutionalized) ... which points to SEC doing little ... not just with respect to Madoff

at the time of the madoff hearings, one of the people testifying sent a legal representative to the public/press interviews ... the scenario was concern for personal safety because explanation for SEC not doing anything for a decade, was because both Madoff and SEC were under influence of very violent criminal elements. A year later, the scenario had changed to the reason Madoff walked in and confessed (forcing SEC to take action) was Madoff had duped some very violent criminal elements and was looking for gov. protection (dropping any explanation of why SEC didn't do anything).

misc. recent posts mentioning Madoff:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#21 New-home sales in 2010 fall to lowest in 47 years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#42 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#19 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#23 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#26 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#27 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#28 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#56 In your opinon, what is the highest risk of financial fraud for a corporation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#35 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#52 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#62 Mixing Auth and Non-Auth Modules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#82 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#88 Court OKs Firing of Boeing Computer-Security Whistleblowers

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 11:09:44 -0400
"anon and off" <invalid@invalid.invalid> writes:
Going back 30 or 40 years there was always great excitement about what we might do with our computers, either through language development or through operating system development.

I had done dynamic adaptive resource management (frequently referred to as fair share scheduler ... because default resource policy was fair share) as undergraduate in the 60s ... which was incorporated and shipped in cp67. misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

in the morph from cp67 to vm370 there was a great deal of simplification and lots of the stuff I had done as undergraduate was dropped.

during the corporate "future system" period ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

lots of 370 stuff was killed off or suspended. During this period I would ridicule the future system stuff (including drawing comparisons with the effort and cult film that had been playing non-stop down in central sq) ... and continued to do 370 stuff ... first on cp67 and then converting to vm370 ... some old email refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

with the demise of future system effort ... there was mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipeline ... which contributed to picking up some of my stuff and releasing in vm370 releaser 3 ... and then decision to package and release lots more of my stuff as the "resource manager".

the 23jun69 "unbundling" announcement (prompted by various legal action) started charging for (application) software ... but they managed to make the case that kernel software should still be free. misc. past posts mentioning 23jun69 "unbundling"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

the corporation's "future system" effort and lack of attention to 370 ... is claimed to have allowed competitition to gain market foothold with clone processors. the clone processors appeared to contribute to the decision to start charging for kernel software ... and my "resource manager" got to be original guinea pig for transition to charging for kernel software (and I had to spend a lot of time with business people on kernel software charging policies).

Somebody from corporate hdqtrs also did a review of my "resource manager" and told me that it couldn't ship without a lot of tuning knobs aka the kernel state of the art both for other corporate operating system products ... and operating systems outside the corporation had whole load of tuning parameters ... and he wouldn't approve release of the software unless I added tuning paramemters. The argument that I spent a great deal of time (a decade earlier as undergraduate) doing dynamic adaptive resource management ... eliminating the need for manual turning knobs ... fell on deaf ears (that or wasn't able to cognitively process the meaning of "dynamic adaptive").

So I put in manual tuning knobs ... but with a joke. All source was shipped with the product and what everything did was fulling document. However, in operations research there is something sometimes referred to as "degrees of freedom" ... and the "tuning knobs" had smaller "degrees of freedom" than the dynamic adaptive code (i.e. the dynamic adaptive code was able to compensate for any combination of tuning knob setting).

One of the other issues was that I had done a bunch of stuff for multiprocessor support ... and while there wasn't any actual multiprocessor support in the "resource manager" ... the "resource manager" contained a bunch of code that was required for multiprocessor support. The transition policies for charging for kernel software was that direct hardware support would still be "free" (i.e. multiprocessor support) ... and "free" software couldn't require as prerequisite paid-for software ("resource manager"). The decision to ship multiprocessor support eventually resulted in moving nearly 90% of the lines of code in my "resource manager" into the "free" kernel (w/o changing the price for the "resource manager" ... which was nearly $1k/month).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 18:37:04 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
ISTM, you had peskier problems to solve than we (TOPS-10) did. Our philosophy was, generally, don't worry about anticipating requests for resources until they actually happen. This was good for general, gentleman's timesharing. OTOH, IBM's tradeoff decisions needed to favor their batch processing, so there was more polling about availability of resources before the batch job was begun. (or at least, that was my understanding of how things tended to work wayback when.)

We did put a tweak in GALAXY which could do a similar polling of resources, e.g., magtape and empty disk drives, but I don't know anyone who actually used it.

When I read Boyd's bio, I immediately thought about our approach to servicing timesharing requests. :-)


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

the batch issues were much more dominate in the batch operating systems. cp/cms were very much online interactive. there were some number of "mixed-mode" where there was combination of interactive cms and possibly a few virtual machines running large batch operating systems.

i have this story about early/mid 75 ... an early version of the csc/vm code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

leaked to AT&T longlines. circa 1983, the national account rep for AT&T tracked me down ... that early system was still alive and running ... AT&T having it tweaked it, moved it to newer machines and allowed it to spread out to various internal mainframes inside AT&T. That csc/vm system predated the vm370 multiprocessor support ... mentioned in previous post ... also in these past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

and the company had decided to no longer sell non-multi-processors (3081 & 3083 ... before company was forced into doing the non-multi-processor 3083 ... in large part for acp/tpf) ... and for AT&T to keep running that early csc/vm system ... they would be forced to go with some other vendors new processors ... which continued to offer single-processor machines. The national marketing rep was looking for help migrating AT&T off that csc/vm system.

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

what i found interesting was that the dynamic adaptive methodology had managed to survive nearly a new decade of processor generations spanning nearly two orders of magnitude in processor power.

one of the side effects was i liked to play with doing things w/o appearing to use any instructions ... a lot of things appearing to happen automagically as a side-effect of the way other things were ordered. while this was super-efficient in terms of pathlength ... it had a downside that over a period of a couple decades ... other people might get involved in doing maintenance on the operating system ... and what might appear to relatively trivial, innocent change ... could have disastrous side-effects on carefully ordered sequences.

it probably contributed to feeling affinity for boyd when i was sponsoring his briefings at ibm ... misc. past posts mentioning boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

misc. past posts mentioning long-lines:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#14 characters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#35 Mainframes & Unix (and TPF)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#15 OSes commerical, history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#5 IBM XT/370 and AT/370 (was Re: Computer of the century)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#60 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#3 Oldest program you've written, and still in use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#4 Buffer overflow
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#11 The demise of compaq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#11 OS Workloads : Interactive etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#32 IBM was: CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#66 OT (sort-of) - Does it take math skills to do data processing ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#23 Cost of computing in 1958?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#17 vax6k.openecs.org rebirth
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#46 unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#4 1950s AT&T/IBM lack of collaboration?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#32 The attack of the killer mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#58 Shipwrecks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#31 z/VM performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#21 IBM 3090/VM Humor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#54 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#56 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#6 Open z/Architecture or Not
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#15 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#29 Need Help filtering out sporge in comp.arch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#30 hacked TOPS-10 monitors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#41 IT managers stymied by limits of x86 virtualization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#14 DASD or TAPE attached via TCP/IP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#82 Yet another squirrel question - Results (very very long post)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 12:14:49 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Sure, but wouldn't the corporate culture weight the trade-offs to batch? That would imply that a majority of project managers would shy away from dynamic assignations of resources.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#7 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

cp/cms was done at the science center at 545 tech sq. some of the CTSS people went to 5th flr of 545 tech sq and did multics (which also traces to unix) ... and others from CTSS went to the science center at 545 tech sq. and did cp/cms. so the heritage was completely different than the batch genre done at main corporate development centers (something to be said about being located next to MIT campus and not in main corporate location). the customer uptake of cp/cms tended to be totally different also.

NOTE: that even w/o generalized dynamic resource allocation ... the batch systems still had various "tuning" parameters. At the time, I was getting ready to ship my "resource manager" ... the POK favorite son (batch) operating system (MVS ... mid-70s) ... had a large (manual) tuning parameter matrix. There were (user group) SHARE presentations of what (essential random walk) different combinations of (manual/static) turning parameters had on throughput. Even with a static hardware configuration, lots of installations still would have varying workload characteristics over the course of the day ... and many of MVS (manual/static) tuning parameters would be workload specific ... which wouldn't adapt to changing workloads. This contributed quite a bit of ambiquity in their results ... since any specific manual/static tuning parameter values might only be optimal for small part of the day.

major customer/uptake for cp/cms were internal development (at all corporate locations). this contributed to the internal corporate network being larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until late '85 or possibly early '86 ... the majority of which was cp/cms. misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

similar cp/cms network technology was used for BITNET (& EARN in europe) at higher educational institutions (which for some period was also larger than arpanet/internet) ... misc. past posts mentioning bitnet/earn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet
bitnet wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
other history
http://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_bitnet.htm

a little other drift ... old email about startup of EARN:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320

the cp/cms development group had split off from the science center and took-over the boston programming center on 3rd flr, 545 tech sq. ramping up in the change-over from cp67(/cms) to vm370(/cms), they outgrew the 3rd flr and moved out to burlington mall (the old SBC bldg, which was vacant after the legal settlement and transfer of SBC to CDC).

there was an episode in the mid-70s ... after the failure of future system project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

there was mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 software&product pipeline ... including definition and work on 370 next generation. The architecture documents were referred to "811" ... supposedly for the nov78 date on most of the documents. recent reference to some industrial espionage and foreign companies attempting to obtain copies of the documents
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#2 WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?

It was going to take 7-8 yrs to do 370 follow-on (coming out in 1983) and the POK favorite son (batch) operating system managed to convince corporate that they needed all the people in the vm370 group in order to make the ship date for mvs/xa (kill vm370 product, close the burlington mall development location and move all the people to POK to support mvs/xa development).

some of this is covered in Melinda's
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future ... PDF
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/neuvm.pdf
also kindle format
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/neuvm.azw

covering the closing of Burlington Mall location in summer of 1976. There was joke that head of POK was a major contributor to vax/vms because so many of the people stayed in boston area and went to work for DEC (rather than move to POK).

Endicott managed to save the vm370 product mission (because they were seeing an exploding vm370 customer base in the mid-range), but they had to reconstitute a development group from scratch.

There apparently was a plan to not inform the people in Burlington of the closing until the last possible minute ... to minimize the possibility that they could find alternatives. However, somebody leaked the information to the group several months early ... which resulted in witch hunt to find who leaked the closing information (normal socialization in the bldg. almost disappeared ... casual conversation being done behind closed doors ... because of atmosphere of fear ... trying to find who leaked the information). Trivia: who leaked the closing information???

The mad rush to get stuff back into the product pipelines also contributed to decisions to release various stuff that i had as part of csc/vm

Now, one of the early characteristics of cp ... was small, efficient "micro-kernel". This was philosophically alien to the major corporate development centers. With the move of cp/cms into major development centers ... there was increasing influence from people with background in large, bloated, monolithic kernels. I draw an analogy to what happened to cp/cms in the 80s to the federal tax code ... any specific special exemption isn't a problem ... but the philosiphy of special exemptions eventually results in 65,000 plus page tax code ... and the resources devoted to dealing with the bloated tax code becomes a significant measurable percentage of GDP.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:43:09 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#7 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#8 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

the pok favorite son (batch) operating system in the mid-70s ... was trying to convince everybody that enormous increasing/growing number of manual/static tuning parameters was a good thing ... but that becomes analogous to enormous bloated monolothic operating system (and enormous bloated tax code) ... the paradigm is basically flawed; being able to increase until it consumes all available resources (aka can become NxM problem ... number of people times the number of provisions).

misc. past posts mentioning the enormous bloated tax code consuming significant percentage of GDP (individual special provisions aren't necessarily flawed ... it is the paradigm of allowing special provisions that is so disastrous)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#43 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
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/2010d.html#48 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
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
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#88 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#36 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#58 History--automated payroll processing by other than a computer?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#69 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#73 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#59 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#14 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#15 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#18 The first personal computer (PC)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

America's Defense Meltdown

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 13 May, 2011
Subject: America's Defense Meltdown
Blog: Disciples of Boyd's Strategy
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#55 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#75 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#93 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#0 America's Defense Meltdown

recent review of book on Galbraith:
He participated in the United States Postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, which found that the supposedly accurate air-bombing of Europe had in fact failed to destroy the munitions plants it had targeted.

... snip ...

and with respect to Galbraith's "The Great Crash, 1929":
... is perhaps the funniest book ever written about economic collapse. It gains its force by telling the story of the run-up to the stock market crash, and showing how businessmen, journalists, political leaders and economists all helped prop up and sustain the widespread faith in Wall Street as an easy source of vast wealth. This made the bubble of the 1920s possible and the crash that followed virtually inevitable.

... snip ...

something similar should be done about the past decade

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 17:36:21 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#7 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#8 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#9 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

... some more NxM overhead ...

original version of cp67 delivered to univ. jan68 had dispatch/scheduling overhead that every pass through the dispatcher would search all connected users for the best user to dispatch. with 35 users this approached ten percent of elapsed processing. I changed that to have ordered list so only the 1st user needed to be examined. state changes done by other parts of the kernel would result in that specific user potentially having their position in the list updated. this is in addition to significantly redoing many other pathlengths in the system. this part of aug68 (user group) SHARE presentation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14

in the 80s I encountered similar implementation in unix ... which resulted in conjecture that both cp67 and unix implementations may trace back to CTSS (altough i replaced the cp67 implementation in the 60s).

this is reference to meeting in Ellison's conference room in Jan92 ... and cluster scale-up (in this specific case for rdbms)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
misc. old email mentioning cluster scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

two of the people (named in the above post), leave and join a small client/server startup where they are responsible for something called the commerce server. we had also left by that time and were brought in to consult on doing payment transactions. the startup had also invented some technology they called "SSL" they wanted to use. part of the effort for supporting payment transactions was something called a "payment gateway" ... which handled payment transaction flow between commerce servers on the internet and the payment networks. misc. past posts mentioning payment gateway
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
misc. other past posts related to SSL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert

In that period, the startup's webservers (as well as large number of other webservers) were experiencing 100% cpu utlization as the HTTP(S) request rate increased. It turns out that most TCP/IP stacks had assumed that there would be very few items on the TCP session close (FINWAIT) list. The problem was that HTTP transactions were using full TCP session for extremely short-life operations (something that was never anticipated, assuming that transaction/datagram oriented operations would use datagram instead of session ... and do their own reliable infrastructure). What was happening, was lots of webservers were spending 95% of processor "running" the FINWAIT list (as load increased). Lots of services were adding webserver machines as fast as possible ... in large part to deal with the FINWAIT overhead.

At one point the client/server startup switched to a single SEQUENT machine which eliminated the problem. SEQUENT had explained that they had several "commercial" installations that handled 20,000 TELNET sesssions ... and even thought they tended to be long running ... they would experience long FINWAIT lists (just from normal logon/logoff) ... and had to already address the NxM FINWAIT list overhead in their DYNIX implementation. Over the next several months, many of the other vendors got around to updating their TCP/IP protocol stack with much more efficient implementation of FINWAIT list management.

misc. past posts mentioning FINWAIT (NxM) overhead issue:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#1 Early tcp development?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#164 Uptime (was Re: Q: S/390 on PowerPC?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#3 The demise of compaq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#14 index searching
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#46 Shipwrecks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#42 TCP channel half closed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#33 X.509 and ssh
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#2 Hey! Keep Your Hands Out Of My Abstraction Layer!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#37 Curiosity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#11 What part of z/OS is the OS?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#38 Problem with TCP connection close
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#28 Yet another squirrel question - Results (very very long post)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#36 Making tea
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#7 IBM in Talks to Buy Sun
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#76 Tiny-traffic DoS attack spotlights Apache flaw
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#44 Follow up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#62 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#51 Has there been a change in US banking regulations recently?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#9 The IETF is probably the single element in the global equation of technology competition than has resulted in the INTERNET

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Clone Processors

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 15 May, 2011
Subject: Clone Processors
Blog: Old Geek Registry
re:
http://lnkd.in/db5rnJ

In the early 70s, the company had started the "Future System" effort ... which was significantly different from 360/370 and would have completely replaced 370. One of the major objectives of Future System effort was to have an extremely high level of complexity and integration ... as countermeasure to clone controllers. Discussed in this article
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

Internal politics involved in the Future System effort also killed off various 370 efforts, 1) eliminating internal competition and 2) there was not going to be any more 370. The demise of the Future System effort and empty 370 product pipeline is credited with allowing clone (370) processors to gain market foothold (370 efforts had to be restarted and it was going to take several years for them to get to the point of shipping to customers). Discussed some in these references:
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm ,
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

In the early 70s, Amdahl gave a talk at MIT and during the talk, he was asked what justification he used to raise money for his clone processor company. His reply was that customers had already invested several hundred billion in developing 360/370 software, and even if IBM was to totally walk away from 370 (possibly a veiled reference to Future System), that software base would keep him in business through the end of the century.

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

recent "clone processor" tale from "Greater IBM"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#2

I had a whole drawer of registered confidential "811" documents (defining 370-xa, supposedly "811" taken from nov78 date on many documents) in special double locked cabinet. I was contacted to interview for assistant to president of a (clone processor) company in the area. During the interview there was some veiled references to next generation processor documents (as a reply, I made some offhand reference to having suggested some improvements to the corporate employee conduct booklet because of practices that I felt were quite questionable). Later there was gov. prosecution of the foreign parent of the company (for industrial espionage), and I had a 3hr session with FBI regarding everything said during the job interview. I later wondered whether there was somebody inside the company that may have leaked list of people with registered confidential documents.

In that same period I was (also) being asked to interview new hires for a new group that I would provide technical direction to. I had written speakup about being underpaid, gotten back a written response from HR saying they had reviewed my complete employment history and I was making exactly what I was suppose to. I then repackaged the whole exchange and wrote a cover letter pointing out that HR was making offers to the new hires (that I was interviewing) 1/3rd more than I was currently making. I never got a written response but I almost immediateley got a 1/3rd raise .. putting me on level playing field with the new hire offers, (for people I was suppose to provide technical direction for)

A recent post in a.f.c. regarding "clone processors" motivating starting to charge for kernel software:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6

The 23Jun69 "unbundling" announcement started to charge for (application) software and other things (in response to various legal actions) ... however, they were able to make the case that kernel software should still be free. misc. past posts mentioning unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

During FS period, I continued to work on 370 (and would somewhat ridicule the FS efforts in various ways). With the demise of FS, there was mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipelines. That contributed to deciding to release a lot of 370 stuff, that I had been doing all during the FS period. Some of the stuff was packaged for release as the "resource manager". However, the "resource manager" got to be the guinea pig for decision to starting to charge for kernel software (apparently in response to competition from clone processors in the market) ... and I got to spend a lot of time with business and legal people regarding practices for kernel software charging. misc. past posts mentioning resource management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 15 May, 2011
Subject: The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses
Blog: IBM Alumni
The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses
http://www.refresher.com/ceo.html

I had sponsored Boyd's briefings at IBM in the 80s. One of his points was that corporate america was starting to suffer the WW2 soldiers coming to age as corporate executives. The point was that US entry into WW2 required quickly deploying huge numbers with little training and experience. In order to leverage the scarce experienced resources, a rigid, top-down command&control infrastructure was created (assuming those at the bottom didn't know what they were doing and only those at the very top understood what was going on). Victory would be obtained by leverage massive overwhelming (inexperienced) resources. The point was that (ww2 military) "management" style was then starting to permeate corporate america.

More recently there were references that the ratio of compensation for top executives to "workers" had exploded to 400:1 (after being 20:1 for a long time and 10:1 in many places in the rest of the world). One explanation is this WW2 point-of-view that only those at the very top understand anything ... and the rest of corporation has very low value.

misc. references mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

related item from old Geek Registry
http://lnkd.in/db5rnJ

mentions clone processors getting market foothold because internal politics around FS effort killed off the 370 efforts ... and then when FS failed, there wasn't anything in the 370 product pipeline. One of the references
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

One of the quotes in above was from Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993:
Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

... snip ...

the FS failure cast a dark shadow over the corporation for decades

Boyd had some pentagon tales ... somewhat representing the long term effects of ww2 strategy on the infrastructure ... as well as analogous to the enormous longterm downside that FS failure had on IBM infrastructure and executives.

One was when Boyd was head of lightweight fighterplane design at the pentagon (cut weight of f15&f18 nearly in half and responsible for f16)... his one-star commander came in one day when he was in the midst of a violent technical argument with some bright phd military officers under his command. The one-star then scheduled an event in pentagon auditorium to fire Boyd for running an unruly command. Fortunately there was a 4-star ... who a week later scheduled a similar event in the same place with the same people ... hiring Boyd back again and publicly telling the 1-star to never do that again.

Another story was about pentagon being completely removed from the conflict in se asia. Earlier boyd had been asked to review the air force air-to-air missile ... that had claims of hitting the target every time it was fired. Boyd told them they weren't using realistic targets and they would be lucky if it hit 10percent of the time. Come the conflict in se asia and it turned out boyd was correct. The local 1-star in se asia then grounded all the fighters until they had been all retrofitted with navy's sidewinder. The 1-star lasted 3months and he was brought on the carpet in the pentagon for grave offenses. Turns out sidewinder had better than twice the hit rate of the airforce missile ... as a result he was responsible for reducing airforce budget share ... loosing fewer planes and pilots. And possibly the worst offense was he was responsible for increasing navy budget share (by the use of sidewinders).

To bring it a little back to ibm ... boyd did a stint in charge of spook base in the se asia conflict ... one of boyd's biographies claims spook base was $2.5B windfall for ibm (some $17B+ in today's dollars) ... which would have helped pay for the disastrous Future System effort. This description of spook base has gone 404 ... but lives on at the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030212092342/http://home.att.net/~c.jeppeson/igloo_white.html

above mentions some number of 360/65s

another reference to Ferguson and Morris book & long term effects of FS failure:
... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr of free and vigorous debate was replaced with sycophancy and make no waves under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in the shadow of defeat (by the FS failure).

... snip ...

In the mid-80s, top executives were predicting doubling of revenue from $60B to $120B (mostly mainframes) ... and there was a massive building program to double manufacturing capacity ... this was while the business was starting to go in the opposite direction; it was only a few years later that the company went into the red

A to be or to do ... from dedication of Boyd Hall, US Airforce weapons school, Nellis, 17sep1999:
There are two career paths in front of you, and you have to choose which path you will follow. One path leads to promotions, titles, and positions of distinction.... The other path leads to doing things that are truly significant for the Air Force, but the rewards will quite often be a kick in the stomach because you may have to cross swords with the party line on occasion. You can't go down both paths, you have to choose. Do you want to be a man of distinction or do you want to do things that really influence the shape of the Air Force? To be or to do, that is the question. Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF 1927-1997

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 14:15:25 -0400
despen writes:
There are very few operations on S/360 that are done character by character.

For scanning a string for multiple values, there's TRT (translate and test). (Nothing is really translated but you can search up to 256 bytes at a time for up to 256 unique character values and get back a value that lets you branch to an appropriate routine.

When C first came to S/360 there was no hardware support for NULL terminated strings, so some of the string stuff was done byte by byte. Now there's hardware support for null terminated strings.


null terminated convention led to sloppy program with regard to lengths and contributed to enormous number of associated vulnerabilities and exploits over the years. misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

environments with "explicit" lengths avoided majority of the length related problems (i.e. the 370 pascal/vs based tcp/ip stack never had any of the length related problems that have been epidemic in c-based implementations). misc. past posts mentioning doing rfc 1044 support for mainframe pascal/vs tcp/ip product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

TR (translate) instruction had explicit length (up to 256) and would take byte at a time, index a 256-byte table and replace the original byte with the indexed (table) byte.

TRT (translate and test) instruction would take a byte at a time to index a 256-byte table and stop when it found a non-zero (table) byte.

in 360, instructions would already pretest origin and destination operands (start and end) and not start instruction if there was problem (potentially four pages ... where both origin and destination were storage and potentially crossed page boundary ... all had to be resident ... also store &/or fetch protect storage keys).

in 370, this was relaxed for the "long" instructions that executed a byte at a time ... and testing was only done for specific byte being processed ... pointers and lengths were all in registers for storage operands ... and if there was issue, the register values would be updated when there was interrupt that stopped the instruction (page fault, store &/or fetch protect).

in the past decade or so the TR & TRT instructions had a bug reported that was eventually fixed. The issue was that the source strings might be a restricted subset of possible values and not a full 256 byte table was reguired. In theory, an abbreviated table could be built at the end of a storage boundary (page fault, fetch protect) ... which wouldn't actually cause a problem based on the input string. The "fix" was that if the table address was at least 256 bytes from storage boundary ... the instructions would run as always. However, if the table address is within 256 bytes of storage boundary ... the instruction would be pre-executed ... to see if any origin input byte resulted in accessing table byte that crossed a storage boundary ... and double check if there is problem with that storage access (TR & TRT instructions run significantly faster if the table origin address is at least 256 bytes from 4k storage boundary).

misc past posts mentioning TR/TRT instructions:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#23 why the machine word size is in radix 8??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#28 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#31 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#21 High Level Language Systems was Re: computer books/authors (Re: FA:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#44 PC/370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#49 PC/370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#9 "Clean" CISC (was Re: McKinley Cometh...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#47 MVCIN instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#12 Zeroing core
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#21 Binder REP Cards
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#42 old hypervisor email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#69 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#2 History of copy on write

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 18:47:50 -0400
despen writes:
It's easy to take a length prefixed string and move it to a target area without checking if it would fit.

I remember being surprised that someone would build a library around null terminated strings, precisely because I could see the temptation to just move them around without checking lengths.

But any programmer worth his paycheck should not have fallen into that trap. I'm going to blame the programmer, not the nulls.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#14 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

the scenario is that frequency of a length problem in length prefixed environment as similar to frequency of lack of length problem in null terminated environment. the analogy is stretches of roads with high accident rates compared to other streches of roads with very low accident rates ... in both cases its drivers ... but there has been a lot learned about what contributes to increase in frequency of accidents.

in the 90s, c-language, null-terminated length related problems dominated internet exploits and vulnerabilities, in this century increase in automatic scripting resulted in reducing precentage of length related problems (although numbers didn't particular change).

while it may be as easy to have a length problem with length prefixed string ... it doesn't actually happen with the same frequency. it is possible that having length prefixed strings sufficiently changes the paradigm and the programmer (length focused) mental attitudes ... resulting in drastically reduced frequency.

the length prefixed strings paradigms also tend to have other storage areas with length prefixes (aka both the source and the destination have length prefixes). c-language, null-terminated strings also tends to have other storage areas w/o explicit lengths ... depending on programmer to manually manage all length related information.

besides not seeing the length related exploits and vulnerabilities in vs/pascal based mainframe tcp/ip stack ... there is similar analsys of pli-based multics also not having length related exploits and vulnerabilities.

past posts referencing the multics evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#42 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#44 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#45 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#8 Backdoor in AES ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#10 Backdoor in AES ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#58 The next big things that weren't
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#78 Newsgroup cliques?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#6 unix permissions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#0 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#59 grey-haired assembler programmers (Ritchie's C)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#4 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#3 Ping: Anne & Lynn Wheeler
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#48 Who said DAT?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003l.html#19 Secure OS Thoughts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#1 Password / access rights check
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003o.html#5 perfomance vs. key size
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#48 Automating secure transactions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#51 Using Old OS for Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#20 Why does Windows allow Worms?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#2 Adventure game (was:PL/? History (was Hercules))
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#29 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#41 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#21 "Perfect" or "Provable" security both crypto and non-crypto?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#25 Shipwrecks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#20 RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#2 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#3 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.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#38 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#46 Public disclosure of discovered vulnerabilities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#12 IBM's mini computers--lack thereof
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#0 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#11 Was FORTRAN buggy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#12 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#73 Is computer history taught now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#53 Drums: Memory or Peripheral?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#55 Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#58 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#50 64 gig memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#67 1401 simulator for OS/360
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007s.html#31 multics source is now open
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007t.html#8 Translation of IBM Basic Assembler to C?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007t.html#54 new 40+ yr old, disruptive technology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#31 Toyota Sales for 2007 May Surpass GM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#18 Comprehensive security?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#49 Kaspersky calls for a more secure internet
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#11 Lack of bit field instructions in x86 instruction set because of ?patents ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#19 Top 10 Cybersecurity Threats for 2009, will they cause creation of highly-secure Corporate-wide Intranets?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#38 Cybersecurity Today: The Wild, Wild West
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#69 360 programs on a z/10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#97 "The Naked Mainframe" (Forbes Security Article)
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/2010j.html#61 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#63 Information on obscure text editors wanted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#37 Mainframe Hacking -- Fact or Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#15 History of copy on write
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#8 Security flaws in software development
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#5 Multiple Virtual Memory

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Running z/OS On Your Laptop

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Running z/OS On Your Laptop
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 16 May 2011 18:48:39 -0700
Poodles511@SBCGLOBAL.NET (Dan Skomsky, PSTI) writes:
It is obvious IBM has a different direction they are pursuing. I have been re-hosting CICS applications onto Windows platforms for over ten years. From what I have seen, all the smaller accounts have been converted with only the "Big Boys" left. But even they are wavering today. It is only a matter of time...

i remember Amdahl giving a talk at MIT in the early 70s ... and somebody asked him what justification did he use to get investment in his new clone processor company. His reply was that IBM customers had already invested enormous amount in 360/370 software and even if IBM were to completely walk away from 370 (might be considered a veiled reference to Future System effort which was completely different from 370 and in fact was killing off potentially competitive internal 370 projects in progress), that software base was sufficient to keep Amdahl in business through the end of the century. misc. past posts mentioning future system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

The Future System period is credited with giving the clone processors a foothold in the market ... having killed off internal 370 competitive efforts, then when Future System failed, there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines. I had continued to do 370 stuff during the period ... and the mad rush likely contributed to decision to release various of things I had been doing.

In the 23jun69 unbundling announcement, there was start to charge for application software ... but they managed to make the case that kernel software should still be free. However, in the aftermath of Future System failure and clone processors in the market place, there was a decision to transition to (also) charge for kernel software. One of my things that was being released was my (dynamic adaptive) resource manager ... and it was selected to be initial guinea pig for kernel software charging ... and I got to spend a lot of time with legal and business people regarding kernel software charging policies. misc. past posts mentioning unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

A decade later, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at the annual, world-wide, internal communication group talk and opened it with statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The issue was that the communication group had a stranglehold on the datacenters and large amount of mainframe data was starting to flee to more distributed computing friendly platforms.

Many of the "big boys" spent billions on "re-engineering" projects (moving off mainframes) in the 90s that failed. many of them were using technology that looked marvelous in demos but failed miserably to scale-up (but may have worked for smaller operations). at least a couple years ago those failures (in the 90s) were still damping the appetite to try it again soon (somewhat analogous to the dark shadow that the FS failure cast over IBM for decades).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Hey all you Old Geeks (and younger ones too), with gas heading towards $6.00/gal, remote support, satellite offices and home office will become more cost effective

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 17  May, 2011
Subject: Hey all you Old Geeks (and younger ones too), with gas heading towards $6.00/gal, remote support, satellite offices and home office will become more cost effective.
Blog: Old Geek Registry
re:
http://lnkd.in/EPRudA

In March of 1970, I took home a "portable" 2741 (two 40lb suitcases) ... and then after a few weeks, it was replaced with a "real" 2741. I had 2741 online access at home until I moved to San Jose ... and got a CDI Miniterm (to replace the 2741). They also installed a corporate "tieline" for the 2nd phone line. old pictures ... some of home office & terminal
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#oldpicts

It was only mile to the San Jose plant site so I would walk or ride my bike. In the late 70s and early 80s, I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network ... much of the activity being done from home. The internal network was larger than arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until late '85 or early '86.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

Part of walk didn't have sidewalk (stretch that had been reserved for highway 85 which wasn't built for more than another decade) ... and during the rainy seasons, there would be complaints about my muddy shoe prints in the bldg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_85

for a little other drift ... griftopia pointed out that the last time oil spiked over $100/barrel ... there had been 19 "secret" letters allowing speculators to play in the commodity markets. Previously commodity markets required players to have significant position in the commodity because speculators resulted in wild, irrational price swings. A number of recent posts in (linkedin) "Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security" group ... following some of the recent runup and collapse (some simularities to pump&dump tactics) "CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#90 ,
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#1 ,
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#3

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Fight Fraud with Device ID

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 17 May, 2011
Subject: Fight Fraud with Device ID
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
Fight Fraud with Device ID
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/podcasts.php?podcastID=1129

from above:
Banking regulators want financial institutions to deploy multiple layers of online security - including new device identification techniques. But what does that expectation mean when it comes to investments in fraud detection?

... snip ...

One of the things in our "AADS" patent portfolio (all "assigned" patents)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

various "device-id" technologies are form of something you have authentication that is hard to counterfeit.

there was lots of work in the mid-90s about combination of something you have authentication coupled with a trusted transaction environment (eliminates lots of impersonation attacks using counterfeit credentials as well as using real credentials to perform unauthorized transactions). it also eliminated evesdropping attacks that would could result in impersonation as well as databreach attacks that would result in impersonation (did nothing to prevent evesdropping and databreaches ... just eliminated ability to use the information for fraudulent transactions).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

There is still compromised endpoints (endpoint trusted transaction environment has been violated) being able to use valid credentials.

There is also compromised servers and/or server impersonation. We had been brought in to consult with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their servers ... they had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use. Some amount of work on assumptions regarding "SSL" deployment for trusted end-to-end environment. For various reasons, many of those assumptions were almost immediately violated .... opening things up for a variety of exploits and vulnerabilities.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

program coding pads

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 12:00:53 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
All successes, even great successes, must come to an end.

The 9700 (from 1977) was quite successful, and so was another one that I think sold for something like $20,000 that, at the time, took laser printers into new territory - they could even be used with minicomputers!


ibm 6670 was basically (laser) copier3 with computer interface to operate as printer in feb79. done by office products division for their word processing products.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/reference/faq_0000000011.html

SJR did hardware development to add support for APA/SHERPA (all points addressable) and input (operate as scanner) ... connected to mainframe via line interface.

somewhat different heritage than ibm 3800 high speed mainframe laser printer (1975)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer

wiki "xerography"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerography

misc. past posts mentioning sherpa
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#48 1403 printers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#44 Materiel and graft
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#49 Materiel and graft
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#1 Materiel and graft
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#27 The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#72 Parse/Template Function
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#51 It has been a long time since Ihave seen a printer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#68 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#69 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#74 Apple iPad -- this merges with folklore
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#43 Boyd's Briefings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#59 IBM 029 service manual
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#49 GML
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#1 Is email dead? What do you think?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#82 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#10 History of APL -- Software Preservation Group

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

TELSTAR satellite experiment

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TELSTAR satellite experiment
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 19:14:44 -0400
despen writes:
If the satellite is being used for telephone, geostationary is a big problem.

Unless you consider quarter second delays between sender and receiver to not be a problem.

You can see it on nightly news when the talking head is talking to someone in a foreign country when one sides asks a question and there is a perceptible delay between question and answer.

Take the orbit height (22K miles) and divide by the speed of light and magically, you get a significant number.

We even had satellite delays mess up our communications between NJ and Houston. Our System 34s were running BI-SYNC and when the call got routed to a satellite link the alternate ACK0/ACK1's would get lost in the ether. IBM came in and adjusted something to make the problem go away.


early 80s, STL & Hursley were looking at off-shift load balancing (i.e. 8hr difference) between the two locations. They setup to have "hi-speed" (56kbit) over double-hop satellite (west coast up to satellite, down to east coast, up to satellite over atlantic and down to england) with VNET for initial tests. Everything worked fine ... so pro-SNA forces insisted that the link be switched to JES2<->JES2 (instead of VNET<->VNET) ... resulting in absolutely nothing getting through. Switched back to VNET<->VNET, and all files went through fine with no problems.

The pro-SNA forces would then claim that there actually wasn't valid signal getting through and VNET was "too dumb" to realize that there was no signal.

I started doing HSDT project (high-speed data transport) starting with T1, both terrestrial and satellite. misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

one of the issues for the internal network was all links had to be encrypted ... in the mid-80s there was claim that internal network had more than half of all link encryptors in the world
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

early on there were lots of issues with various gov. entities around the world when internal network links cross national boundaries.

in the early 80s, hardware link encryptors were just about mandatory for HSDT ... since simple software DES of T1 stream took full 3081K processor ... and full-duplex T1 sustained transmission would take both 3081K processors. I had number of issues, T1 link encryptors were really expensive, faster than T1 had to do custom hardware (wasn't any off-the-shelf products) and any synch'ing link encryptors took noticeable elapsed time ... even single bit error ... which was significantly aggravated by satellite propagations delay.

As a result, I got involved in designing encryption hardware that would run significantly faster than T1, was significantly less expensive than off-the-shelf products, and eliminated much of the resynch delay. Misc. past references discovering there was 3-kinds of crypto:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#87 New test attempt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#86 Own a piece of the crypto wars
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#43 What is "timesharing" (Re: OS X Finder windows vs terminal window weirdness)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#32 Getting Out Hard Drive in Real Old Computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#27 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#43 Internet Evolution - Part I: Encryption basics

another thing done for HSDT ... in part, motivated by satellite propagation delay ... was developing support for rate-based pacing & congestion control (as alternative to window-based pacing)

HSDT got a transponder on SBS4 ... and also invite to SBS4 launch that went up on 41-d ... misc. past posts mentioning 41-d:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#27 Tysons Corner, Virginia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#14 Ping: Anne & Lynn Wheeler
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#23 Health care and lies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#21 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#11 An Out-of-the-Main Activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#16 Why I use a Mac, anno 2006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#31 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#41 Year-end computer bug could ground Shuttle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#61 Damn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#19 IBM-MAIN longevity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#20 IBM-MAIN longevity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#44 IBM-MAIN longevity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#27 My Vintage Dream PC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#76 And, 40 years of IBM midrange
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#36 U.S. students behind in math, science, analysis says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#57 watches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#69 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#76 Other early NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#61 End of an era
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#77 End of an era

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

program coding pads

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 10:00:44 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
ibm 6670 was basically (laser) copier3 with computer interface to operate as printer in feb79. done by office products division for their word processing products.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/reference/faq_0000000011.html

SJR did hardware development to add support for APA/SHERPA (all points addressable) and input (operate as scanner) ... connected to mainframe via line interface.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#19 program coding pads

we also modified the 6670 driver to print random quotations on the "separator" page (different colored paper loaded into the alternate paper drawer ... analogous but different to using colored punch card for the "job card", making it easy to separate jobs in the tray when returning to users).

in sjr/bldg28, the 6670s were going into each department office/supply areas. one year we had a security audit and was having quite a bit of conflict with the auditors since they were insisting that all demo programs (aka games) be removed from the computers ... and we pointed out 1) there was management approval for the games and 2) they would just go underground with people disquising their use.

the auditors also did after hrs sweep of the bldg. looking for classified material left unsecured ... including printed classified material left at (departmental) 6670s. At one of the 6670s, they found one output with the following quotation on the separator page:

[Business Maxims:] Signs, real and imagined, which belong on the walls of the nation's offices:
1) Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing; It Wastes Your Time and It Annoys the Pig.
2) Sometimes the Crowd IS Right.
3) Auditors Are the People Who Go in After the War Is Lost and Bayonet the Wounded.
4) To Err Is Human -- To Forgive Is Not Company Policy.


... snip ...

and tried to escalate an issue with executives that we were ridiculing them.

one year, the last friday in march, somebody from the east coast sent me a parody. I distributed it to a few local people. copy reproduced in this old post.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#52 A Beautiful morning in AFM.

Apparently that weekend, somebody printed it on departmental 6670 loaded with official corporate letterhead paper and placed it in all the bldg. bulletin boards (dated sunday, the 1st of the following month). Monday morning some number of people took it as a valid corporate memo (totally ignoring the date and/or corporate memos aren't dated sunday). Those that were duped got quite angry, there was a witch hunt for the culprit ... and new regulation that all corporate letterhead paper had to be kept under lock&key.

I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing in the late 70s and early 80s. Somebody took a collection of the material and printed couple hundred pages "double-sided" on 6670 (duplex printing from copier3 heritage), packaged in Tandem corporation 3-ring binders and set copies to each member of the executive committee (somewhat startling for them both the existance of the internal network as well as online computer conferencing; folklore is that 5of6 wanted to fire me).

From ibm jargon:
Tandem Memos - n. Something constructive but hard to control; a fresh of breath air (sic). That's another Tandem Memos. A phrase to worry middle management. It refers to the computer-based conference (widely distributed in 1981) in which many technical personnel expressed dissatisfaction with the tools available to them at that time, and also constructively criticized the way products were [are] developed. The memos are required reading for anyone with a serious interest in quality products.

... snip ...

semi-related ... also from ibm jargon:
MIP envy - n. The term, coined by Jim Gray in 1980, that began the Tandem Memos (q.v.). MIP envy is the coveting of other's facilities - not just the CPU power available to them, but also the languages, editors, debuggers, mail systems and networks. MIP envy is a term every programmer will understand, being another expression of the proverb The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

... snip ...

reference to copies of MIP Envy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing

Tandem Memos weren't so much MIP Envy ... but some observations that I had distributed after visit to Jim at Tandem (after he had left IBM)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

An online bank scam worthy of a spy novel

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 19 May, 2011
Subject: An online bank scam worthy of a spy novel
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
An online bank scam worthy of a spy novel
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/17/6655775-an-online-bank-scam-worthy-of-a-spy-novel

from above:
Red Tape: One moment of weakness -- single click on a bogus e-mail link or website -- by an employee has cost many U.S. companies nearly $1 million apiece, the FBI said. And it has transported them into a world of international intrigue worthy of a spy novel,

... snip ...

Over the past couple decades there have been periodic discussions about crime being a profit center for financial institutions. Enormously increasing security and integrity would effectively commoditize many parts of the financial infrastructure (lowering the barrier for entry and increasing competition).

Debit Fraud and Interchange
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=3661

In theory there is huge gap between interchange fee between the lowest and highest fraud transactions (with significant profit from the highest fraud interchange fees). moving significant percentage of transactions to lowest fraud rate (by increasing security & integrity) supposedly would drastically cut overall profit (potentially a much larger issue than the actual security and integrity costs).

and ...

Account Takeover: Where's the Progress?
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=3656

Approx. 15 yrs ago, there was industry conference with presentations about online banking.

The "consumer" online operations were saying that they were moving from "dial-up" operations to the internet because it shifted all the support costs for operating "dial-up" facility to the ISPs.

The "cash-management/commercial" online operations gave presentation that they would NEVER move to the internet (from private dial-up) ... outlining long list of exploits & vulnerabilities ... pretty much everything that we've since seen.

two years ago, one of the prominent recommendations was for businesses to have specially dedicated secure PC that was used *ONLY* for online banking (and *NEVER* used for any other purpose). This approach was to minimize many of the (internet-based) exploits and vulnerabilities highlighted 15yrs ago.

pieces of past threads on the "crime as profit" subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose5 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose7 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose8 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose9 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose10 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose11 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose12 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose13 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose14 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose15 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm8.htm#rhose16 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm8.htm#rhose17 [Fwd: Re: when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm8.htm#softpki8 Software for PKI
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm8.htm#softpki9 Software for PKI
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm9.htm#softpki23 Software for PKI
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#tamper Limitations of limitations on RE/tampering (was: Re: biometrics)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio3 biometrics (addenda)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio7 biometrics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#keygen2 Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm13.htm#20 surrogate/agent addenda (long)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#23 Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm15.htm#37 VS: On-line signature standards
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm20.htm#42 Another entry in the internet security hall of shame
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#39 a fraud is a sale, Re: The bank fraud blame game
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#40 a fraud is a sale, Re: The bank fraud blame game
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#43 a fraud is a sale, Re: The bank fraud blame game
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#44 Threatwatch: how much to MITM, how quickly, how much lost
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#45 Threatwatch: how much to MITM, how quickly, how much lost
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm28.htm#18 Lack of fraud reporting paths considered harmful
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm28.htm#81 not crypto, but fraud detection

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Fight Fraud with Device ID

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 19 May, 2011
Subject: Fight Fraud with Device ID
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#18 Fight Fraud with Device ID

A decade ago ... there were a number of something you have SAFE internet transaction products pitched to merchants & financial institutions. They found high acceptance from large merchants accounting for something like 70% of internet transactions.

Then came the cognitive dissonance. The merchants were expecting that the SAFE products would reduce interchange fees to transactions with the lowest fraud rate (having been conditioned for decades that rate was large part proportional to risk&fraud). The merchants were then told that the new SAFE products would effectively have interchange rate that was a surcharge on top of the highest rate they were already paying.

misc. past posts mentioning cognitive dissonance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#15 Public Computers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008b.html#75 Toyota Sales for 2007 May Surpass GM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#79 PIN entry on digital signatures + extra token
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#4 GPG
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#5 GPG
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#29 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#32 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#51 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#60 Cobol hits 50 and keeps counting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#62 Solving password problems one at a time, Re: The password-reset paradox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#64 What happened to X9.59?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#51 64 Cores -- IBM is showing a prototype already
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#49 Hacker charges also an indictment on PCI, expert says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#62 August 7, 1944: today is the 65th Anniversary of the Birth of the Computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#1 IT Story New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#17 Chip and PIN is Broken!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#21 Should the USA Implement EMV?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#54 Trust Facade
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#69 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#10 Wal-Mart to support smartcard payments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#26 Root Zone DNSSEC Deployment Technical Status Update
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#39 Compressing the OODA-Loop - Removing the D (and maybe even an O)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#52 Payment Card Industry Pursues Profits Over Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#42 Looking for a real Fortran-66 compatible PC compiler (CP/M or DOSor Windows

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Fight Fraud with Device ID

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 19 May, 2011
Subject: Fight Fraud with Device ID
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#18 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#23 Fight Fraud with Device ID

recent "SSL" item:

Eureka! Google breakthrough makes SSL less painful
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/19/google_ssl_breakthrough/

above references this older article from last month:

How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways; Blunders expose huge cracks in net's trust foundation
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysis/

back 15+ yrs ago, I had coined the term merchant comfort certificates to highlight that the way SSL was being deployed resulted in more of a facade of security than actual security.

misc. past SSL refs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Mainframe technology in 2011 and beyond; who is going to run these Mainframes?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 19 May, 2011
Subject: Mainframe technology in 2011 and beyond; who is going to run these Mainframes?
Blog: MainframeZone
re:
http://lnkd.in/Ry2TmQ

other mainframe clone processor was NAS (there also were some smaller ones like 2pi which was also sold by NCSS under their logo running their proprietary version of cp67/vm370).

long ago and far away there was a group that came to IBM and asked if IBM would produce their workstation. There was meeting scheduled at Palo Alto Science Center which included people from YKT, SJR, and Boca. Groups from YKT, SJR, and Boca all claimed that they would be producing something superior to the described workstation and IBM shouldn't adopt it. The group then went off and got some seed funding and started their own company called SUN.

past posts mentioning SUN/PASC meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#67 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#63 Moving assembler programs above the line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#74 Convergent Technologies vs Sun
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#30 Stanford University Network (SUN) 3M workstation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#67 IBM in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#7 IBM in Talks to Buy Sun
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#6 IBM take-over of SUN
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#52 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#80 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#28 someone smarter than Dave Cutler

misc recent posts mentioning clone processors:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#14 IBM Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#52 speculation: z/OS "enhancments"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#91 Mainframe upgrade done with wire cutters?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#5 Mainframe upgrade done with wire cutters?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#61 VM13025 ... zombie/hung users
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#77 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#87 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#7 RISCversus CISC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#17 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#19 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#13 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#47 junking CKD; was "Social Security Confronts IT Obsolescence"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#50 Dyadic vs AP: Was "CPU utilization/forecasting"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#2 WHAT WAS THE PROJECT YOU WERE INVOLVED/PARTICIPATED AT IBM THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#12 Clone Processors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#13 The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#16 Running z/OS On Your Laptop

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

program coding pads

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 16:26:04 -0400
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#19 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#21 program coding pads

found on the web ...
http://www.froess.com/IBM/3800printer.htm

from above:
IBM 3800 Laser Printer Development Technical Exchange presented February 1970

In the late '60s, IBM San Jose began development of an electrophotographic printer to replace the mechanical chain printers. The project code name was Jubilee, later became Argonaut, and the product was announced in 1975 as the IBM 3800. Using continuous forms rather than sheet feed paper, it printed at a speed was 32in/sec or about 180 pages per minute. The fastest IBM printer at that time was 1,100 lines per minute or about 17 pages per minute.


... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

TELSTAR satellite experiment

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TELSTAR satellite experiment
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 21:14:12 -0400
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
In any case, the issue has to do with the "slow-start" way in which TCP/IP responds to lost packets - treating them as due to congestion. The protocol is not designed for a high-latency environment. Giving it a bigger window may help, but the appropriate thing to do to obtain efficient use of a link with a long delay, such as through a geosynchronous satellite, _is_ to use a different protocol.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment

or much of any latency environment. The same month that slow-start was presented at ietf meeting ... acm sigcomm had paper on why slow-start was non-stable in bursty enviornment. increasing bandwidth tends to aggravate bursty activity.

same ietf meeting there was presentation on number of bits outstanding in gbit coast-to-coast terrestrial fiber link was about the same as number of bits outstanding in T1 satellite link.

as previously mentioned that was one of the reasons for doing rate-based pacing.

one of the congestion problems is multiple back-to-back packets arriving at intermediate node. one of the issues in non-stable slow-start with windowing paradigm ... was that returning ACKs can have a tendency to "bunch" at intermediate node ... arriving at origin all at one time ... opening large window ... resulting in multiple back-to-back packets being sent. slow-start doesn't actually directly space-out back-to-back packets (just hoping that happens as side-effect of the slow-start ... which then is defeated by the vagaries of returning ACKs).

One of the trivial ways of doing rate-based pacing is dynamically adjusting delay interval between packet transmissions (directly controlling packet interval transmission). I periodically conjectured one of the reasons for slow-start was the poor timing facilities of many of the platforms of the period. Note that several newer protocols have done various kinds of rate-based pacing &/or controlling inter-packet transmission delay.

some past discussions on the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#44 Rewrite TCP/IP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#45 Rewrite TCP/IP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#54 Rewrite TCP/IP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#1 FAST - Shame On You Caltech!!!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#46 Fast TCP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#19 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#8 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#9 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#12 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#13 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#16 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#17 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#18 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#37 FastTCP Commercialized Into An FTP Appliance

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

program coding pads

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 10:08:07 -0400
Charles Richmond <frizzle@tx.rr.com> writes:
The TI Silent 700 terminals had thermal printers on them, but I *never* heard of a terminal that used electrostatic printing technology and aluminum-coated paper.

I had cdi-miniterm (same/similar to TI silent) at home office in the late 70s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#oldpicts

(after having 2741 since mar70) before getting (ibm 3101) glass teletype

picture shows compact microfiche viewer next to the cdi miniterm. san jose plant site had microfiche printer that could route mainframe computer output ... so could have complete set of listings and documentation.

past posts in this thread
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#68 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#72 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#83 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#84 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#19 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#21 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#26 program coding pads

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Congratulations, where was my invite?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Congratulations, where was my invite?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 10:34:41 -0400
"Dave Wade" <dave.g4ugm@gmail.com> writes:
Congratulations, and sorry you missed your trip to Japan!.

Not so sure about pioneering "open source", wasn't "open source" the way of the world and shouldn't we be blaming IBM for the change to closed source software? I see from the VM Share archives that IBM only went OCO in the 1980's?

http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse.cgi?fn=OCOCARD&ft=MEMO


note that VM ... somewhat in contrast to other corporate products ... not only had "open source" ... but actually supported source code maintenance ... as part of routine (monthly) maintenance distribution to customers.

23jun69 unbundling announcement started charging for application software ... in response to various litigation, however, they managed to make the case that kernel software would still be free. some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

in the early 70s, IBM started FS effort ... radically different from 360/370 ... a major objective was to have high complexity and integration as countermeasure to clone controllers. misc. past posts mentioning FS effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

In the 60s as undergraduate I was involved in clone controller effort ... four of us were written up as being responsible for some part of the clone contrller business ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

During the FS effort, internal politics was killing off 370 efforts ... viewed as competitive with FS. Then when FS was killed ... there was mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines ... however the lack of newer 370 processors during the period is credited with allowing clone processors to gain market foothold.

I had continued to do 370 stuff all during the FS period ... even periodically ridiculing FS activity. The mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipeline contributed to decision to release bunch of stuff I had been doing ... old email referring to migrating a bunch of stuff from cp67 base to vm370 base ... and doing "csc/vm" internal product distribution:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

part of my stuff was decided to package as resource manager ... and somewhat because of the rise of clone processors ... there was decision to change and start charging for kernel software ... and my resource manager was selected to be guinea pig ... and I got to spend time with legal & business people about kernel software charging policies. misc. past posts mentioning dynamic adaptive resource management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

Transition to charging for kernel software charging was incremental staging ... starting with selected components that weren't directly involved in hardware support. This continued in stages with parts charged for and parts not charged for until the early 80s when all of the kernel software was being charged for. After the change-over to charging for all kernel software ... then there was decision for "object-code-only" (aka *OCO*, no more source). This was much more traumatic for vm370 customers ... since they were not only use to having access to the source ... but the whole maintenance process was done at source level.

for other drift ... in the mid-80s, Melinda contacted me about the development of the original source code maintenance process ... from early 70s and cp67 days. I had early copies on archived tapes and provided them to Melinda. It was fortunate timing ... since a few months later ... the tapes were in the Almaden tape library ... and Almaden went through a period where random selected tapes were being mounted as scratched ... and all the tapes were wiped out (over the years I had copied the tape contents from 800bpi, to 1600bpi, to 6250bpi, etc)

misc. recent posts mentioning Melinda and/or source code maintenance:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#15 545 Tech Square
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#44 CKD DASD
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#64 Two terrific writers .. are going to write a book
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#72 Speed of Old Hard Disks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#73 Speed of Old Hard Disks - adcons
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#76 Speed of Old Hard Disks - adcons
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#98 History of copy on write
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#4 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#13 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#18 Melinda Varian's history page move
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#23 A brief history of CMS/XA, part 1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#25 Melinda Varian's history page move
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#29 A brief history of CMS/XA, part 1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#33 A brief history of CMS/XA, part 1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#35 Colossal Cave Adventure in PL/I
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#39 1971PerformanceStudies - Typical OS/MFT 40/50/65s analysed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#61 VM13025 ... zombie/hung users
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#81 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#0 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#2 Other early NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#3 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#4 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#31 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#32 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#71 IBM and the Computer Revolution
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#87 A History of VM Performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#90 A History of VM Performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#81 Multiple Virtual Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#82 Multiple Virtual Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#2 Multiple Virtual Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#4 Multiple Virtual Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#80 TSO Profile NUM and PACK
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#8 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 21 May, 2011
Subject: Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#82 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#86 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report

JPMorgan Said to Face SEC Subpoena Along With Credit Suisse
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-06/jpmorgan-chase-said-to-be-subpoenaed-by-sec-over-mortgage-debt-documents.html
JPMorgan Is in 'Advanced' Negotiations to Resolve CDO Probe
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-06/jpmorgan-chase-is-in-advanced-negotiations-to-resolve-sec-probe-of-cdos.html
Goldman's Blankfein Faces Investors Amid 'Lingering Problems'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-06/goldman-s-blankfein-faces-investors-amid-lingering-problems-.html

more email: NY AG Investigation: Why Haven't Wall Streeters Gone to Jail
http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/05/19/ny-ag-investigation-why-havent-wall-streeters-gone-to-jail/

Sizing up a sweeping mortgage settlement; Mortgage lenders like Bank of America and Wells Fargo are fighting the fight on all fronts, with the latest being False Claims Act violations. Here's what to look for in any settlements.
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/20/sizing-up-a-sweeping-mortgage-settlement/

above article mentions possibly $30B in fines ... note this article estimated that there was $27T in transactions (nearly 1000 times as much, three orders of magnitude greater):

Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

misc. past posts mentioning above article ... w/$27T in (triple-A rated toxic CDO) transactions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#7 Are Ctibank's services and products so vital to global economy than no other banks can substitute it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#9 HSBC is expected to announce a profit, which is good, what did they do differently?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#16 The Formula That Killed Wall Street
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#30 I need insight on the Stock Market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#36 Bernanke Says Regulators Must Protect Against Systemic Risks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#40 Bernanke Says Regulators Must Protect Against Systemic Risks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#59 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#64 Should AIG executives be allowed to keep the bonuses they were contractually obligated to be paid?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#77 Who first mentioned Credit Crunch?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#31 What is the real basis for business mess we are facing today?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#35 US banking Changes- TARP Proposl
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#38 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#41 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#49 Is the current downturn cyclic or systemic?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#53 What every taxpayer should know about what caused the current Financial Crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#56 What's your personal confidence level concerning financial market recovery?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#65 Just posted third article about toxic assets in a series on the current financial crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#1 Future of Financial Mathematics?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#5 Do the current Banking Results in the US hide a grim truth?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#27 Flawed Credit Ratings Reap Profits as Regulators Fail Investors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#3 Consumer Credit Crunch and Banking Writeoffs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#10 China's yuan 'set to usurp US dollar' as world's reserve currency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#25 The Paradox of Economic Recovery
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#29 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#49 IBM to Build Europe, Asia 'Smart Infrastructure'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#60 In the USA "financial regulator seeks power to curb excess speculation."
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#35 what is mortgage-backed securities?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#8 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#10 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IBM Assembler manuals

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Assembler manuals
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 21:53:03 -0400
hancock4 writes:
I don't recall a "Language reference" for _assembler_, but rather the Principles of Operation.

The high level languages, like COBOL, Fortran, PL/I had a "Language Reference" and a "User Guide" as you describe. I found the "User Guides" to be very well written--they were more conversational in tone and had lots of tips on increasing efficiency and throughput--stuff the basic manual did not include.

Most shops had a counter with a metal stand with manuals mounted in it for reference. Sometimes programmers were able to get their own JCL, COBOL, and other manuals.

There were also manuals for other products, such as Syncsort and Librarian.

Bitsavers has lots of these manuals. Some of them are still usable today.

As you said, the full mainframe complement was quite large. For instance, there were manuals for each peripheral--mostly stuff for systems programmers to install and tune stuff.


i have vaque recollections of claims that ibm had larger operation than the gov. printing office

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Congratulations, where was my invite?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Congratulations, where was my invite?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 21:17:16 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
in the early 70s, IBM started FS effort ... radically different from 360/370 ... a major objective was to have high complexity and integration as countermeasure to clone controllers. misc. past posts mentioning FS effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#29 Congratulations, where was my invite?

one of the FA references:
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

has this quote from ferguson&morris:
Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

... snip ...

a little more serious results (also on 60mins tonight): The Secret Sharer; Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer

from a few years ago

The Success of Failure
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?filepath=/dailyfed/0407/040407mm.htm
The Success of Failure
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080220_1637.php

from above (similar to FS):
Many employees associated with Trailblazer knew it wasn't working and probably wouldn't work. But killing Trailblazer meant killing other pet projects associated with it, or slashing funding for whatever office was nominally in charge at the time

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

TELSTAR satellite experiment

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TELSTAR satellite experiment
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 06:25:23 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
same ietf meeting there was presentation on number of bits outstanding in gbit coast-to-coast terrestrial fiber link was about the same as number of bits outstanding in T1 satellite link.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#27 TELSTAR satellite experiment

round-trip satellite is almost 90,000 ... while coast-to-coast terrestrial is around 7,000 ... making it a little over order of magnitude. similar bit-in-transit product for t1 satellite would be around twice ENET ... less than half T3, well less than FDDI or gbit.

big congestion problem was burst of back-to-back packets at intermediate and/or destination. windowing and slow-start only indirectly addressed back-to-back packets. real-life multi-hop network would periodically bunch returning ACKs resulting in burst of back-to-back packets being transmitted ... exactly what was trying to be prevented.

changing the paradigm from window to rate-based ... would directly address the back-to-back packet transmission issue.

this had been done in HSDT in the early to mid-80s ... misc. past posts mentioning HSDT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

then in the late 80s, I was on the XTP technical advisery board (despite strong objections from the corporate communication group) and wrote it up for XTP protocol. misc. past posts mentioning XTP (and/or trying to get XTP standardized in ISO/ansi x3s3.3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Congratulations, where was my invite?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Congratulations, where was my invite?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 06:31:23 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
from a few years ago

The Success of Failure
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?filepath=/dailyfed/0407/040407mm.htm
The Success of Failure
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080220_1637.php


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#29 Congratulations, where was my invite?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#32 Congratulations, where was my invite?

besides similarities between Trailblazer and Future System failures ... the Success Of Failure articles were used in highlighting how gold-plated beltway bandits & large systeme integrators have created a culture of failures in large federal IT re-engineering efforts ... since it is much more profitable to have a string of failures for an effort than to have it start out a success. misc. past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#25 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#41 U.S. house decommissions its last mainframe, saves $730,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#19 STEM crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#26 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#38 F.B.I. Faces New Setback in Computer Overhaul
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#18 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#78 TCM's Moguls documentary series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#5 Off-topic? When governments ask computers for an answer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#69 No command, and control
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#0 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#45 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IBM Assembler manuals

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Assembler manuals
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 09:53:57 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
POPs has at least doubled in size in recent years. At PPOE we ordered copies for the SYSPROGs and it's really too big to handle easily. My copy is boxed right now, si I can't give a measurement or page count.

One of the nice things IBM has done is have BookManager copies of many manuals online, so it's easy to look up a specific piece of information without having to download the whole manual.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#31 IBM Assembler manuals

old ibm-main thread about latest principles of ops available in pdf (but not bookmanager) 2007:
http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.ibm-main/browse_thread/thread/db23258092ef9249/4347feff67c39bd4?q=latest+principles+of+operation+group%3Abit.listserv.ibm-main&lnk=ol&

old posts in the thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#25 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#26 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#43 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#44 latest Principles of Operation

sa22-7832-03 principles of operation (bookmanager) from 2004
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9ZR003/CCONTENTS?SHELF=DZ9ZBK03&DN=SA22-7832-03&DT=20040504121320

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 23 May 2011 08:49:09 -0700
steve@TRAINERSFRIEND.COM (Steve Comstock) writes:
Ahhh! The memorable Mass Storage System. Pluck, shuck, and play. ISTR it was the 3950, but I could be wrong. I wrote training for it back when I was with IBM; even had it translated into German. But I can't find the books now (this was 1974-75 after all).

close, 3850
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850.html

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The first personal computer (PC)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The first personal computer (PC)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 15:18:09 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
3yrs ago, I got a deskside database server machine, latest 4core @3ghz, 8gbyte memory, a couple tbyte disks, etc. this week, i got a deskside database server machine, latest 4core @3.4ghz (also has hyperthreading), 16gbyte memory, a couple tbyte disks, etc. New machine is less than 1/3rd the price of the old machine.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#89 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#0 The first personal computer (PC)

new machine also has liquid cooling and runs much quieter than the older machine ... and simple overclocking to 3.6ghz ... it still runs at least 15 degrees cooler.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IBM Assembler manuals

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM Assembler manuals
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 19:40:28 -0400
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
As an undergrad around 1969 I had both, purchased for a few dollars each. The assembler reference manual mostly dealt with the macro language. Although they were both regular IBM-style 3-hole-punched manuals, the Principles of Operation was nicely typeset, while the assembler reference manual had obviously been printed on a 1403 with a TN chain.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#31 IBM Assembler manuals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#35 IBM Assembler manuals

principles of operation than moved to cms script and become 1403 TN print chain. the issue was that the "full" manual was the (internal-only) architecture redbook (for practice of being distributed in red 3ring binder) ... which was about twice the size of the principles of operation ... lots of engineering notes, justification, and trade-offs intermixed with the actual principles of operation content. cms script command line parameter then would print the whole architecture redbook or just the principles of operation subset.

cms script originally was re-implementation of CTSS RUNOFF command with "." (dot) formating commands. Then in 1969, GML was invented at the science center ... misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

GML actually was the first letter of last names of the three inventors (as opposed to "G"eneralized "M"arkup "L"anguage) and GML tag support was added to cms script. A decade later GML was standardized as SGML ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml

"bookie/bookmanager" was form of gml/sgml.

Another decade plus ... SGML morphed into HTML (at CERN)
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/

and first webserver/html outside cern was on the vm/cms system at SLAC:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

misc. past posts mentioning architecture "redbook":
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#35 Why IBM use 31 bit addressing not 32 bit?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#39 serialization from the 370 architecture "red-book"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#43 IBM 1800
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#52 Spotting BAH Claims to Fame
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#69 history of CMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#2 Handling variable page sizes?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#76 reviving Multics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#52 ECPS:VM DISPx instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#45 text character based diagrams in technical documentation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#57 PLO instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#1 Oldest running code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#6 If the x86 ISA could be redone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#51 [OT] Lockheed puts F-16 manuals online
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#27 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#45 August 23, 1957
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#50 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#5 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#25 360POO
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#53 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#45 Moving assembler programs above the line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005i.html#40 Friday question: How far back is PLO instruction supported?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#39 A second look at memory access alignment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#43 A second look at memory access alignment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#1 More on garbage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#58 Book on computer architecture for beginners
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#48 Good System Architecture Sites?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#45 HASP/ASP JES/JES2/JES3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#45 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#55 History of first use of all-computerized typesetting?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#59 Why no double wide compare and swap on Sparc?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#53 Is the teaching of non-reentrant HLASM coding practices ever defensible?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#32 Running OS/390 on z9 BC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#7 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#23 Abend S0C0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#56 CSA 'above the bar'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#30 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#21 It keeps getting uglier
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#46 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#29 New Opcodes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#67 Throwaway cores
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#47 Intel: an expensive many-core future is ahead of us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#90 z/OS Documentation - again
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#24 Can TOD (STCKE) be compressed into 12 bytes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#1 PDP-10s and Unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#11 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#53 IBM 029 service manual
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#41 Unix systems and Serialization mechanism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#60 Daisywheel Question: 192-character Printwheel Types
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#54 Downloading PoOps?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#86 The first personal computer (PC)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

BofA Breach: 'A Big, Scary Story'

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 26 May, 2011
Subject: BofA Breach: 'A Big, Scary Story'
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
BofA Breach: 'A Big, Scary Story'
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=3673&rf=2011-05-25-eb

from above:
$10 Million Loss Highlights Risks, Sophistication of Internal Breaches. According to news reports, a BofA employee with access to accountholder information allegedly leaked personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, bank account numbers, driver's license numbers, birth dates, e-mail addresses, family names, PINs and account balances to a ring of criminals.

... snip ...

A decade or so ago, there was some study that majority of breaches involved an insider ... and it had been that way forever. At least in the early 80s there were multi-party operations as countermeasure to many kinds of individual transgression ... and then because there was collusion (insiders attempting to circumvent multi-party safeguards) ... there was also work on anti-collusion efforts.

In the 90s, and the rise of the internet ... there has started to be a lot more focus on outsider attacks ... even though insider fraudulent activity didn't actually decrease (the ambiguity about outsiders might be involved, can even work to the benefit of insiders).

item from 2004:

Study: ID theft usually an inside job; Up to 70 percent of cases start with employee heist
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5015565

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Fight Fraud with Device ID

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 26 May, 2011
Subject: Fight Fraud with Device ID
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#18 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#23 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#24 Fight Fraud with Device ID

Up thread I mentioned we were brought in by small client/server startup that wanted' to do payment transactions on their server. We did a lot of stuff for being able to deploy the technology in association with financial services. One of my recommendations ... before allowing deployment of merchant e-commerce servers was that everybody associated and/or allowed to touch anything in the e-commerce environment (including at all merchant sites) be required to have detailed FBI background check. As history has shown, obviously nobody took me seriously on that point. There is periodic joke about what profession has the highest percentage of convicted felons (supposedly US congressmen).

Note that in the Madoff congressional hearings, there was somebody that had tried for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff. There was lot of pressure for the person to do public interviews, but he sent a legal representative instead. There were off-hand comments that possibly the only reason that Madoff went on for that long was that both Madoff and SEC were under influence of (violent) organized crime family. A year later, that speculation had changed ... in a book tour ... there were comments that the only reason that SEC did anything was because Madoff turned himself in (which forced SEC to do something) ... and speculation that Madoff turned himself in looking for gov. protection (that he had possibly duped some violent organized crime figures).

I believe a Madoff due diligence would have turned up less useful information than what the person had been sending to the SEC for a decade about Madoff's practices ... which is more like financial forensics of his business operations (and apparently being ignored by the SEC).

Then Madoff may have been a bad example ... since he apparently would have passed most due diligence. Due diligence just is initial weeding process ... notice recent comments in BofA insider fraud ... and requiring multi-party operations and anti-collusion.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#39 BofA Breach: 'A Big, Scary Story'

TV business news this morning had segment on SEC didn't do anything about Madoff even though several people had come to the SEC. They mentioned SEC refusing to perform "due diligence" on Madoff's business (as opposed to Madoff).

The comment about BofA recent insider fraud ... involved multi-party operations. This presumes that the parties are independent ... and anti-collusion efforts are to make sure they are independent. This would also apply to organization independence having businesses, auditors, and regulators all operating independently and correctly performing their duties. This obviously fell down with regard to Madoff, Enron, AIG and bunch of others.

In the wake of Enron, SOX was passed that supposedly tightened business practices. However, GAO started doing reports about public company financial filings that showed uptic in fraudulent filings ... even after SOX ... somewhat given rise to recent comment seen on internet: Enron was a dry run and it worked so well it has become institutionalized

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 26 May 2011 21:02:32 -0700
chrismason@BELGACOM.NET (Chris Mason) writes:

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/admg1a05/6.3.4

Table 8 has all the numbers.

3174 was a 3270 control unit.

4341 was a processor, a "mainframe".


3272 was controller for 3277

3274 was introduced as controller for 3278.

besides other changes from 3272/3277 to 3274/3278, a lot of the electronics were moved out of the terminal head and back into the 3274 controller .... reducing manufacturing costs and drastically increasing communication chatter over the coax (and reducing response). we complained about the significant worse human factors characteristics for 3274 controller. eventually we got a response that 3274/3278 wasn't designed for interactive computing ... but for data entry (basically updated keypunch technology).

past post with old reference to 3272/3277 & 3274/3278 comparison
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#19 3270 protocol

3274 was "slow" in other ways ... it had very high "channel busy" overhead doing command processing. I did a project for STL (now SVL) writing support for HYPERchannel channel extender ... allowing local 3274 controlers to moved to offsite building. As a side-effect of moving real 3274 off the channels ... being replaced with HYPERchannel boxes, significantly reducing channel busy for doing the same 3274 operations ... and increasing overall system thruput by 10-15%. ... misc. past posts mentioning various efforts ... some involving HYPERchannel
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

later in terminal emulation in ibm/pc ... a 3277 terminal emulation card had much better upload/download thruput compared to 3278 terminal emulation card (because of design with the electronics back in the controller ... requiring significant increase coax protocol chatter ... cutting effective upload/download thruput). some old references about terminal emulation thruput
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#17 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#10 IBM System/3 & 3277-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#80 3270 Emulator Software

other posts with references to terminal emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

4341 was "mid-range" done by endicott. some number of old emails related to 4341
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341

POK was surprised that 4341 was beating 3031. in the wake of failure of FS effort, there was mad rush to get products back into 370 product pipeline ... some part of that was 303x which was largely warmed over 370; 3031 was warmed over 370/158-3. clusters of 4341s had higher thruput, were lower cost and required significant reduced physical resources compared to 3033 (there is folklore about internal dirty tricks that cut in half the allocation of critical 4341 manufacturing component)

4341 increased performance, reduced costs, reduced physical requirements ... and there was big explosion in the numbers sold. Many corporations were facing running out of physical space in datacenters ... and it was possible to place 43xx machines out in dept. supply rooms and conference rooms. Large corporations had orders for several hundred at a time that went all around the corporation ... the leading edge of the distributed computing wave. internally, so many were going into dept. conference rooms, that conference rooms started to become scarce corporate resource. the explosion in number of 43xx machines internally helped spike the number of internal network nodes:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

hitting 1000 nodes summer of 1983 ... old reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112

list of corporate sites with new network nodes added during 1983 (very large percentage being vm/43xx machines):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#8

old post with picture of 1000th node desk ornament
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#43
above has copy of old email on the subject
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#email830422

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: z/OS SYSLOG to UNIX syslog daemon?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 00:23:53 -0400
rfochtman@YNC.NET (Rick Fochtman) writes:
Rumor had it at one time: the MSS cartridges contained all the left-over tape from the 2321 strips. Seems that the tape was over-stocked 'cuz the 2321 never took off like someone hoped it would.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#36

2321 capacity was 400mbyte.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell

length of 2321 strip was height of a cell
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/datacell.html

ibm 2321 archives:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2321.html

3850 cartridge was about 50mbytes
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/attic3/attic3_019.html

... the smallest 3850 had 706 cartidges or 35B bytes and the largest held 472B bytes.

more 3850
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/mss.html

... 2000 cartidges of 50MB each, it was used to hold the entire 1980 USA Census and was made available to users of Columbia's IBM mainframe

single 3850 likely held more than total of all the 2321s strips made.

when I was undergraduate, the univ. library got an ONR grant to do online catalog ... part of the money was used to get a 2321. the project was also selected to betatest for the original CICS product ... and I got tasked to support/debug that CICS installation. misc. past posts mentioning bdam &/or cics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 27 May 2011 08:28:20 -0700
ps2os2@YAHOO.COM (Ed Gould) writes:
Back in the 70's & 80's the place I worked had 1500 (or so) local 3270's off of a 168MP. We were truly at the UCB # limit for MVS. We were forever having to do sysgens as our VP was a hungry for drives. The conversion to 3350's did save us a bit. But what truly helped us was the 3274L's (1 UCB and 32 address's) (SNA local controller). Our monitoring of channel's we did not tend to see much busies on the byte channel's even with the 3705 we rarely saw anything that concerned us (say more than 10 percent busy). BTW the online CICS application was a really big fullscreen transfer user. I am not sure where the chatty part you were talking about but we never saw it and the people that were entering the data were no slouches for entering lot's of data.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41
& unnrelated old CICS reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#42

interactive computing tended to have a lot more interactions that pure data entry. 3270s in general were half-duplex ... so from the time enter was hit until it was safe to type again ... increased with 3274 ... because so much electronics had been moved out of the terminal and back to the controller. the half-duplex problem also showed up if the system as doing something asynchronously while typing ... if system went to write to the screen while key was being hit, the keyboard would lock and then person would need to stop and hit reset (again horrible human factors).

the reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#19 3270 protocol

gave comparison timing between 3272/3277 and 3274/3278 for just internal hardware part of the controller ... base 3272/3277 hardware processing was .086 seconds ... with 90percentile trivial interactive CMS response of .11sec ... that gave effective human perceived response of .196 seconds. base 3274/3278 hardware processing was .530 seconds. The corporation had started doing a lot in the area programmer productivity and human factors ... establishing quarter second response time as a goal. The reference numbers were from a internal ibm study that showed that it was impossible to meet the objectives with direct channel attached 3274 controllers.

going to SNA made the latencies and delays much worse ... and going to any kind of remote made human interactive intolerable. That was what initially prompted the HYPERchannel channel extender for the STL development lab. STL was bursting at the seams and 300 people from the IMS group were being moved to off-site building. They had done some experiments with remote 3270 and found the human factors totally unacceptable. The channel extender from the offsite building back to STL datacenter, allowed the local channel attached 3270 controllers to be placed at the remote building and human response and interactive characteristics appeared as if they werer still in the STL bldg. As it turned out, getting the direct channel 3270 controllers off the real channels had a side-benefit of increasing overall system throughput by 10-15%

with the electronics in the head of 3277 it was possible to further improve the human factors ... including eliminating the half-duplex keyboard locking ... when there is normal interactive operation going on concurrently between system and user (user potentially constantly typing while the system might do something that would asynchronously update part of the screen). Open the 3277 keyboard and little soldering ... and could adjust the key repeat delay and the key repeat rate ... to a much more human acceptable rate. Also got a vendor to build a small fifo box ... unplug the keyboard from the 3277 head, plug the box into the 3277 head and plug the 3277 keyboard into the fifo box. This provided a keystroke buffer to eliminate keyboard getting locked if key was being pressed same time screen was getting something written.

in the 3274/3278 ... with all the electronics moved back into the controller, it was no longer possible to perform these human factor hacks. also with much of the electronics back in the controller ... there was enormous increase in protocol chatter over coax cable between what was going on in the 3278 terminal head and the electronics back in the controller.

later with terminal emulation ... is was possible to program the PC for human factors ... compensating for the (lack of) 3270 human factor characteristics. However, the enormous increase in protocal chatter over coax cable drastically reduced upload/download throughput for 3274/3278 terminal emulation ... compared to what could get from 3272/3277 terminal emulation (since 3274/3278 had both lot more extranous protocol chatter as well as significantly more handshaking operation latencies doing any data movement between controller and head).

the terminal emulation paradigm shows up later with the controllers supporting token-ring and PCs with T/R adapters. The PC/RT workstation (with AT ISA bus) had done its own 4mbit T/R adapters for distributed computing. For the RS/6000 workstation (with 32bit microchannel bus), the group had been told that they could not do their own adapters and had to use standard corporate adapters, including the 16mbit (microchannel) T/R adapters. The problem was that the 16mbit (microchannel) T/R adapters had been designed for terminal emulation paradigm with possibly 300 or more stations all sharing the same T/R bandwidth. As a result, the standard corporate individual (32bit microchannel) 16mbit T/R adapters had lower per adapter thruput than the PC/RT (16bit AT bus) 4mbit T/R adapter.

The new Almaden research bldg was coming online in that era and had been heavily provisioned with CAT4 for T/R ... however, they eventually had nearly all (non-ibm vendor) ethernet adapters (running over CAT4) since it had much higher thruput (10mbit enet delivered higher sustained aggregate thruput than 16mbit T/R), lower latency, as well as higher per adapter thruput. misc. past references terminal emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

in the early 80s, the corporations attention on development productivity had been somewhat spiked by Jim's "MIP Envy" tome as he was leaving for research
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#email800920

in this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17

which also has URL for slightly later version at microsoft research
https://web.archive.org/web/20081115000000*/http://research.microsoft.com/~gray//papers/CritiqueOfIBM%27sCSResearch.doc

as Jim was leaving, he was palming some amount of stuff on me ... like DBMS consulting for the IMS group (unrelated to work I did for the IMS group supporting channel extender), RDBMS consulting, and misc. other stuff ... misc. old references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801016

in this old post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1

from IBM jargon:
MIP envy - n. The term, coined by Jim Gray in 1980, that began the Tandem Memos (q.v.). MIP envy is the coveting of other's facilities - not just the CPU power available to them, but also the languages, editors, debuggers, mail systems and networks. MIP envy is a term every programmer will understand, being another expression of the proverb The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

... snip ...

Note that "MIP Envy" wasn't directly start of Tandem Memos. I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s (folklore is that when executive committee was told about online computer conferencing and internal network, 5of6 wanted to fire me). Tandem Memos was more kicked-off by a trip report I wrote after visiting Jim at Tandem (this was after Jim had left IBM and had joined Tandem).

from IBM Jargon:
Tandem Memos - n. Something constructive but hard to control; a fresh of breath air (sic). That's another Tandem Memos. A phrase to worry middle management. It refers to the computer-based conference (widely distributed in 1981) in which many technical personnel expressed dissatisfaction with the tools available to them at that time, and also constructively criticized the way products were [are] developed. The memos are required reading for anyone with a serious interest in quality products.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 27 May 2011 09:00:33 -0700
Jim_Petersen@HOMEDEPOT.COM (Petersen, Jim) writes:
How about 2260's was a terminal control unit for terminals which only had 12 lines by 80 Cut my teeth on 360/65 and a 360/50 and a 360/40 and they had a 360/20 down at one of our sites for RJE.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#42
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43

not display ... but 2741&TTY terminals.

As undergraduate, I had been doing a whole lot of work with OS/360 & HASP ... prior to getting involved with (virtual machine) cp67. I would tear apart stage2 output from stage1 sysgen and re-organize all the move/copy steps & statements to careful order files and PDS members. For typical univ. student jobstream this got nearly three times thruput (with hasp, each student job as 3step fortran compile, link & go ... before installing watfor for student jobs).

initial cp67 installed at the univ. had support for 2741 & 1050s. The univ. had some number of TTY/ascii terminals so I decided to add TTY support to CP67. CP67 2741&1050 support did automatic terminal identification ... playing dynamic games with 270x controller SAD command (would change which line-scanner was associated with which line/port). I tried to put in TTY support so it would do automatic terminal identification consistently. It would work for leased lines ... but I wanted to have single dialup number that could be used for all terminals (common "hunt group" and pool of lines). Turns out it wouldn't quite work since 2702 took shortcut and hardwired the line speed to each port.

this was somewhat the justification for the univ. starting clone controller effort ... reverse engineering the channel interface and building channel interface board for Interdata/3 (programmed to emulate 270x) ... and being able to do both dynamic line-speed and terminal type identification. later, four of us got written up being blamed for some part of clone controller business.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

later, P/E bought Interdata and the box was sold for many years under the perkin/elmer logo. In the late 90s, I ran into such a box in large east coast datacenter handling large percentage of merchant dial-up payment card swipe terminals in the us (ran into former P/E salesman that said he didn't think they ever changed the channel interface board design)

in any case, I also decided to hack 2741 & TTY terminal support into side of HASP (removing 2780 support to cut down real storage footprint). I implemented a conversational editor from scratch ... with CMS editor syntax ... for a form of CRJE (and I considered much better than early TSO from the period).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 27 May 2011 11:28:01 -0700
gerhard@VALLEY.NET (Gerhard Postpischil) writes:
The 2260s were attached to a 2848 control unit. I worked at ADR when they were announced, and a couple of us used them for playing games (e.g., a battleship game by Dave McBride). {partly as a result of our experience, we won a CIA contract for interactive text scanning that seems horribly antiquated by today's standards.

If you started on a 360, you're a newbie <G> Some of us on the list worked with 70x and 709x "mainframes."


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#44 My first mainframe experience

the univ. had 2250m1 (direct channel attach) and I hacked the cms editor to use it (early fullscreen editor, borrowing 2250m1 software library that lincoln labs had done for cms).

later at the science center, there was a 2250m4 (aka 1130+2250 combo ... the 2250m4, including 1130 ... was about the same price as the 2250m1). somebody had ported spacewar to the 2250m4 ... where the keyboard was split in half ... with keys on two sides of keyboard used for controls for two-person game. i would bring my kids in on the weekends and they would play spacewar on the machine.

original on pdp1 (before porting to 1130/2250):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!

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

a decade or so later, there was a distributed multiuser cms spacewar game done by the author of rexx (played on 3270). somebody would have spacewar controller/server running ... and users could run clients on their own cms ... it used spm for inter-virtualmachine communication with the spacewar server (would work with the server on the same machine or through the internal network from other machines around the company).

then some number of people wrote "robot" spacewar clients that would make moves much faster and beat human players. the spacewar server was then modified to dramatically increase energy use as the interval between client operations decreased (attempting to somewhat level the field between robot and human players).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 28 May 2011 10:25:30 -0400
Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> writes:
There's a tremendous variation in what's covered in an OS class.

At one extreme, I've encountered students who have had OS classes that consisted of nothing but how to make OS calls for some example OS (typically Windows).

At another, students whose OS class was all about writing extensions to some OS.

At an (orthogonal) other, students whose OS class was completely theory of OS algorithms, and no actual exposure to a computer.

The vast majority are some mix of those three.


I got to modify huge portions of OSes as undergraduate ... but wasn't in class ... I was hired to support the production (mainframe) operating systems ... the modifications had to work ... but also supported for production operation (including things like payroll, administration, payments & receivables, etc). I was sometimes called on to lend help to graduate students.

Normally they would shutdown the datacenter for the weekend ... so frequently I could have the whole place to myself from 8am sat. until 8am monday. I learned fairly early to start off with cleaning all the tape drives, disassembling the printer/punch (2540) cleaning it and putting it back together, etc.

I wonder if there is any correlation between the difference between IETF and ISO standards bodies. During the OSI/TCPIP wars ... when the gov. had mandated that TCP/IP would be eliminated and replaced by OSI (GOSIP), it was periodically pointed out that IETF required at least two interoperable implementations before progression in standards process ... while ISO didn't even require any demonstration that something could work before being passed as standard.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 28 May, 2011
Subject: Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'
Blog: Financial Cryptography
Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'
http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001316.html
and The 48-year itch
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/05/britains_auditing_oligopoly?fsrc=nwl|wwp|05-19-11|business_this_week

In the wake of Enron, congress passed SOX that was supposedly to prevent a repeat of Enron and enormously increased audit requirements. However, for SOX to actually have any meaning (other than large gift for the audit industry), it required regulatory agencies like SEC to do something. Note that SOX also required SEC to do something about the rating agencies (implicated in recent financial mess with estimated $27T ... that's like ten to the twelfth ... in triple-A rated toxic CDO transactions during the period).

However, a repeated theme in the Madoff hearings, SEC was doing little during the period. The person that testified they tried for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff, also mentioned that tips (whistle blowers) turn up 13 times more fraud than audits.

In the middle of the last decade, I was at a financial conference in Europe ... with CEOs of European companies and presidents of European exchanges ... and the major discussion was that SOX audit burden was starting to leak into Europe (I took position that possibly the only provision that might make a difference was the whistle blower section ... this was well before the Madoff hearings; but as seen for it to be effective, it required action by regulatory agencies).

Also, apparently because (even) GAO didn't believe that SEC was doing anything during the last decade, GAO started doing reports showing uptic in public company fraudulent financial filings (even with the enormously increased SOX audit burden). From recent quote on the web: Enron was a dry run and it worked so well it has become institutionalized.

tv business news shows past week or so have had periodic rants against SEC issuing guidelines on whistle blower provisions (nearly a decade after whistle blower section showed up in SOX) ... seemingly much stronger opposition than the rants against SOX audit provisions;

since SOX audit provisions actually cost quite a bit more than whistle blowers ... could the rants against whistle blowers be because they actually turn up 13 times more fraud (than audits; not because they cost significantly less).

misc past posts mentioning Madoff hearings and/or GAO reports about public company financial filings:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#96 Bush - place in history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#25 IBM's 2Q2008 Earnings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#36 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#48 The blame game is on : A blow to the Audit/Accounting Industry or a lesson learned ???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#52 What has the Global Financial Crisis taught the Nations, it's Governments and Decision Makers, and how should they apply that knowledge to manage risks differently in the future?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#54 In your opinion, which facts caused the global crise situation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#73 What can we learn from the meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#0 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#20 Decision Making or Instinctive Steering?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#29 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#3 Congress Set to Approve Pay Cap of $500,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#37 NEW SEC (Enforcement) MANUAL, A welcome addition
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#42 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#47 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#61 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#37 How do you see ethics playing a role in your organizations current or past?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#2 CEO pay sinks - Wall Street Journal/Hay Group survey results just released
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#29 What is the real basis for business mess we are facing today?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#51 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#67 Just posted third article about toxic assets in a series on the current financial crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#7 Just posted third article about toxic assets in a series on the current financial crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#29 Transparency and Visibility
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#33 Treating the Web As an Archive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#17 REGULATOR ROLE IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT FINANCIAL SCANDALS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#60 In the USA "financial regulator seeks power to curb excess speculation."
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#12 IBM identity manager goes big on role control
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#30 An Amazing Document On Madoff Said To Have Been Sent To SEC In 2005
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#71 "Rat Your Boss" or "Rats to Riches," the New SEC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#47 Audits VII: the future of the Audit is in your hands
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#15 The Revolving Door and S.E.C. Enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#16 The Revolving Door and S.E.C. Enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#31 In the News: SEC storms the 'Castle'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#41 Profiling of fraudsters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#67 The Python and the Mongoose: it helps if you know the rules of engagement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#34 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#84 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#46 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#38 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#35 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#37 WHAT, WHY AND HOW - FRAUD, IMPACT OF AUDIT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#71 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#6 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#7 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#68 TCM's Moguls documentary series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#31 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#21 New-home sales in 2010 fall to lowest in 47 years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#42 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#36 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#35 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#82 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#88 Court OKs Firing of Boeing Computer-Security Whistleblowers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#5 How they failed to catch Madoff

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 10:03:44 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
I would expect so since the plug'nplay devices were created and a lot of the disk intelligence is now off in the controllers. The tradeoff with the latter seems to be non-symmetric pathways to the disk.

a decade ago there were a number of "safe" financial transaction products developed for the internet.

some involved smartcards and give-away program of smartcard readers for personal PCs where give-away program used obsolete serial-port readers (instead of new generation of USB readers). after tens of thousands were given out ... they started finding enormous customer support costs because of interrupt & install problems involving the serial-port readers (large number of consumers having to re-install windows from scratch). becuase of the enormous serial-port customer support costs, those programs were eventually abondoned with a widely spread rumor in the financial industry that smartcards weren't not practical in the consumer market (not because of actual problems with smartcards but because of problems with the serial-port readers that they had been giving away).

the issue here was a major objective for USB & plug&play was to eliminate the enormous consumer problems with (especially after-market) serial-port related installations.

One of the interesting issues was that in the 95/96 time-frame, there were a number of financial industry conferences on the internet. there were serveral industry presentations about dial-up home banking moving to the internet because of the enormous industry support costs for serial-port dial-up modems (several operations claiming having to support libraries of large scores of different device drivers for variety of different modems, pcs, operating systems, operating system versions, etc) ... as well as all the serial-port dial-up issues. With the move to internet ... all those proprietary dial-up infrastructure support costs were transferred to ISPs.

In the short 5-6yr time-frame all that institutional knowledge of serial-port infrastructure constomer support costs & issues appeared to evaporated (from moving off proprietary dial-up online banking with serial-port dial-up modems and the disastrous forey into serial-port smartcard readers).

As an aside, at those same financial conferences in the 95/96 time-frame, the dial-up online commercial/cash-management operations claimed that they would NEVER move to the internet because of a long list of security issues. Since then nearly all have moved to the internet and have experienced most of the exploits that had been previously detailed. Two years ago, one of the federal agencies issued recommendation for corporate online (internet) banking to have a dedicated PC that was NEVER used for any other purpose (as work around for many of the internet vulnerabilites detailed from 95/96 era). recent posts on subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#22 An online bank scam worthy of a spy novel

Note that the serial-port problems weren't the only inhibitor to "safe" internet operation. Some of the "safe" products that didn't involve serial-port cardreaders also got high marks and early acceptance from both the large merchants (transaction volume highly skewed, less than hundred or so large merchants accounting for over half of all transactions) and financial institutions. Then came the cognitive dissonance. Merchants have been indoctrinated for decades that a major component of "interchange fee" (that they pay for each financial transaction) is proportional to risk/fraud. They were anticipating that the "safe" products would result in significant reduction in interchange fee they were paying. Then they were told that the financial institutions had instead decided to make the interchange fee (for the "safe" products) basically a surcharge on top of the highest fee (that the merchants were already paying). recent post mentioning the merchant cognitive dissonance when they were told about interchange fee for "safe" products.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#23 Fight Fraud with Device ID

related followup about some of the internet security issues from 95/96
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#24 Fight Fraud with Device ID

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 29 May 2011 12:39:47 -0700
lindy.mayfield@SSF.SAS.COM (Lindy Mayfield) writes:
I seem to recall one OS had a command to crash the computer. Kill command or some such. Took the fun out of everything I guess, or I perhaps that was their intention.

internally, in the 70s&80s, large percentage of systems ran vm ... that had constant system activity monitoring ... conventions dating back to mid-60s with cp40 and cp67. as a result, there built up quite a large body of information about system configurations and workload profiles. misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech csc/vm (&/or sjr/vm) posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#cscvm

as part of various performance work at the science center (some of which eventually matured into capacity planning) ... built automated logon at system startup to initialize synthetic workloads for benchmarking purposes. part of the performancing modeling work at the science center was analytical model done in APL. This was eventually made available on HONE (online virtual machine worldwide sales&marketing support) as the performance predictor ... where sales & SEs could characterize customer configuration and workload and then ask "what if" questions about what would happen if hardware configuration &/or workload was changed. misc. past posts mentioning HONE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

i used the autolog startup & command for extensive benchmarking leading up to release of my (dynamic adaptive) resource manager. part of the process could include automatically building a new kernel, crashing (the current system) & rebooting the new kernel, running benchmark ... and then repeating the process automatically thousands of times. Final sequence for release of my resource manager invovled 2000 automated benchmarks that took three months elapsed time to run.

For this final sequence, the configuration and workload profiles were preselected (as representive of all the internal & customer systems that had information on) for the first 1000 benchmarks. For the final 1000 benchmarks a specially modified version of the performance predictor was used to select configuration and workload profiles, predict the result, run the benchmark, compare the predicted and benchmark results, and then repeat process.

misc. past posts mentioning performance modeling and benchmarking work from the 70s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bench

a couple old emails about porting bunch of cp67 code to vm370 and then supporting "csc/vm" system for internal distribution:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430

above mentions autolog command that I had originally done for the benchmarking process. cp67 already had automatic kernel reboot after system crash ... but it came up (automatically) just enabled for (manual) logins. As more and more services were done as service virtual machines (currently sometimes referred to as virtual appliances), just having system back up for login wasn't sufficient ... all the service virtual machines had to be brought up also. the work I had done for automated benchmark increasingly became used for automated restart of the service virtual machines.

the above also mentions SPM command which was used for various automated operator mechanisms ... i.e. a (disconnected service) virtual machine could have anything that would show on physical terminal ... available to software (it was also used for multi-user spacewar implementation) ... SPM had originally been done for CP67 at the Pisa science center (and converted to vm370 at one of the POK datacenters).

recent posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#44 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#45 My first mainframe experience

adventure had been done in fortran on pdp10 ... and was available on the stanford (pdp10) system.
http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html

my impression was somebody at Tymshare (provider of commercial online vm370 timesharing services) had copied it (fortran version) to Tymshare pdp10 and then got in running on Tymshare vm370/cms system. Tymshare also made their system available to SHARE for online computer conferencing (as VMSHARE) starting in Aug76:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

triva ... Stanford, HONE datacenter and Tymshare were all within couple miles of each other. I set up process for Tymshare to mail me monthly tapes of everything on VMSHARE (later included PCSHARE) and I would make it available on the internal network hosted on number of internal systems (including HONE).

Adventure was also ported to stanford orvyl system ... aka a number of univ. had been sold 360/67 to run IBM's tss/360 ... when tss/360 was floundering, many univ. just used the machine as 360/65 ... however, Univ. of Michigan wrote the virtual memory MTS system for 360/67 and Stanford wrote virtual memory orvyl for 360/67 (with wylbur a orvyl application later ported to MVS). Some flavors of adventure on 370 show up with orvyl tread/twrite ... and have an assembler subroutine that emulates tread/twrite by mapping to TSO tget/tput ... and runs on both TSO and on CMS (with standard cms tso tget/tput emulation)

misc. past posts mentioning assembler routine using tget/tput to emulate orvyl tread/twrite
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#41 Colossal Cave Adventure in PL/I
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#44 Colossal Cave Adventure in PL/I

misc. other recent posts mentioning stanford orvyl
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#6 IBM 360 display and Stanford Big Iron
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#73 Speed of Old Hard Disks - adcons
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#86 Utility of find single set bit instruction?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#56 Drum Memory with small Core Memory?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#73 Wylbur, Orvyl, Milton, CRBE/CRJE were all used (and sometimes liked) in the past
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#75 Wylbur, Orvyl, Milton, CRBE/CRJE were all used (and sometimes liked) in the past
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#78 Wylbur, Orvyl, Milton, CRBE/CRJE were all used (and sometimes liked) in the past

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

My first mainframe experience

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: My first mainframe experience
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 29 May 2011 18:09:50 -0700
ps2os2@YAHOO.COM (Ed Gould) writes:
Hehe Gerhard, obviously a type that of course should have been 25 years ago. I have no experiance on LINUX but would guess it does not come with a FORTRAN compiler. My memory is iffy here but IIRC both (three) source programs had to be babied to work in the FORTRAN G1 that we had. I think waterloo had a FORTRAN compiler but we were semi afraid that they wouldn't be to good at support. Can anyone confirm the Waterloo Fortran?

mentions careful re-ordering of stage-2 sysgen resulting in improving student job thruput by nearly factor of 3 times (careful arm seek positioning)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#44 My first mainframe experience

student jobs had run approx. second elapsed time under tape-to-tape ibsys on 709. moving student jobs to 360/67 (running as 360/65) with MFT ... was well over a minute (3 step fortran g compile, link-edit and go). Adding HASP got it down under a minute per student job.

old post with part of presentation i gave at aug68 share meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18

had gotten student jobs to little over 11seconds (with careful ordering of files & pds members). other trivia ... as part of recrafting stage2 sysgen also allowed me to do it in production job stream.

it wasn't until waterloo watfor that student jobs got back down to 709 IBSYS thruput. watfor ran as its own monitor ... taking card tray of large number of student jobs (as single job step) ... compiling each student job into "in-memory" allocated storage area, executing it, and then doing the next student job. supposedly watfor could compile something like 20,000 "cards" per minute on 360/65 (with actual execution of typical student jobs being minimal). watfor/watfiv, etc (also mentions later work in mid-80s for running in ibm/pc):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WATFIV

common on linux systems is GCC ... which comes with a large number of different (language) front-ends and backends ... wiki reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection

from above:
Originally named the GNU C Compiler, because it only handled the C programming language, GCC 1.0 was released in 1987, and the compiler was extended to compile C++ in December of that year.[1] Front ends were later developed for Fortran, Pascal, Objective-C, Java, and Ada, among others.[7]

... snip ...

also from above:
The standard compiler release 4.6 includes front ends for C (gcc), C++ (g++), Java (gcj), Ada (GNAT), Objective-C (gobjc), Objective-C++ (gobjc++) and Fortran (gfortran).[16] Also available, but not in standard are Go (gccgo), Modula-2, Modula-3, Pascal (gpc), PL/I, D (gdc), Mercury, and VHDL (ghdl).[17] A popular parallel language extension, OpenMP, is also supported.

The Fortran front end was g77 before version 4.0, which only supports FORTRAN 77. In newer versions, g77 is dropped in favor of the new gfortran front end that supports Fortran 95 and parts of Fortran 2003 as well.[18] As the later Fortran standards incorporate the F77 standard, standards-compliant F77 code is also standards-compliant F90/95 code, and so can be compiled without trouble in gfortran.


... snip ...

other past posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#45 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#49 My first mainframe experience

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 11:23:46 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
On the contrary. After we managed to bury the ISA bus hardware is very cooperative. But no outboarding. A post-2.6.24 Linux can receive hundreds of ip packets without even interrupting, it just needs to schedule routing action for them, and needs an occational interrupt to negotiate buffers with the hardware.

Packet rates through such servers is simply staggering. Linux and BSD boxes are back to being really good routers again.


long ago and far away there was presentation at IETF meeting about being able take interrupt, route packet, and send it on its way in 110 instructions, later that was reduced to something like 85 instructions.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 30 May, 2011
Subject: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Blog: LinkedIn
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
http://www.cnbc.com/id/35836210/

from above:
ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room is the inside story of one of Americ's greatest business scandals, in which top executives of the country's seventh largest company walked away with more than $1 billion while investors and employees lost everything

... snip ...

recent quote from the internet: Enron was a dry run and it worked so well it has become institutionalized. In the wake of Enron, congress passed SOX with significant audit burdens to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Possibly because GAO didn't believe SEC was doing anything, it started doing reports on public company financial filings ... showing uptic in fraudulent filings

One of the people testifying in the congressional Madoff hearings had tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff. He also pointed out that tips (whistle blowers) turn up 13 times more fraud than audits. When asked about recommendations for new regulation, he replied that possibly some were needed, but much more important would be to have transparency and visibility (antithesis of wallstreet trader culture)

requirement for (honest) auditors and regulators increase enormously w/o transparency and visibility. Also lack of transparency and visibility creates a lot more analogies with war/conflict

SOX included whistleblower provisions and SEC is now soliciting comments regarding whistleblowers (nearly decade later). For the past week or so, TV business news shows have been ranting against whistleblower provisions (can't be because SOX whistleblower is enormously less expensive than SOX audits ... so it may because whistleblower is 13 times more effective).

There were comments that reason for informant/whistle-blower section in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was that one of the people involved had been FBI agent (of course all the stuff in SOX is meaningless if SEC isn't doing something).

recent posts mentioning enron &/or madoff:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#21 New-home sales in 2010 fall to lowest in 47 years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#42 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#23 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#26 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#7 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#9 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#36 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#38 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#56 In your opinon, what is the highest risk of financial fraud for a corporation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#35 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#52 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#62 Mixing Auth and Non-Auth Modules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#64 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#82 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#86 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#88 Court OKs Firing of Boeing Computer-Security Whistleblowers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#5 How they failed to catch Madoff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#40 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#47 Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 15:15:33 -0400
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
So, hundreds of packets can be routed per interrupt. 85 instructions is _very_ low. Even with a no-copy design transit packets must be copied once, from input to output buffer. But instructions are cheaper now.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#51 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

misremembered off the top of head ... from long ago and far away

Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1989 09:35:55 PDT
From: wheeler
Subject: >2klocs;

He was actually conservative. He used some of Van Jacabson's numbers from a couple weeks ago, showing the IP-router function can be done in around 120 instructions (plus device-driver pathlength). Van was at the presentation and said that he now had it down under 60 instructions. At 100,000 packets a second, a 60mip workstation has an easy 600 instructions/packet processing time available and reaches gbit rates with 1250 byte packets.


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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 08:44:36 -0400
Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> writes:
Why do they need to be copied? The incoming network card DMAs into memory, the outgoing network card DMAs out from the same memory.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#51 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#53 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

XTP did some things to eliminate buffer copies & allow asynchronous processing while packet was being received/transmitted. one of the tcp/ip tweaks done in XTP was to take the checksum out of header and move it to append/trailer; that way checksum generation/checking could be done as packet moved thru receiving/transmission ... rather than requiring the whole packet synchronous processing (part of intelligent outboard processing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpress_Transport_Protocol

one of the things mentioned (in above) for XTP was rate-based control ... but above also states that XTP lacked congestion avoidance ... however as recently mentioned, congestion avoidance can be achieved by dynamic rate-based pacing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment

i was member of the xtp technical advisery board for a time ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

several of the people involved in xtp were from SGI (including a person involved in UUCP when he had been at bell labs) and they would periodically use SGI's pipelined graphics processing as model for network processing.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 31 May, 2011
Subject: Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'
Blog: Financial Crime Risk, Fraud and Security
Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-30/mobius-says-fresh-financial-crisis-around-corner-amid-volatile-derivatives.html

from above:
Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management's emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven't been resolved.

... snip ...

In 2007, there was analysis about similarities between stock market crash of '29 (speculation fueled by brokers' loans) and recent real estate crash (speculation fueled by unregulated loan originators able to pay for triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs as source of funds). The real estate crash would then deflate to at least pre-bubble levels (news this morning for top 20 markets), if not lower (because of overbuilding as a result of the enormous speculation, one of the differences between the stock market crash/speculation and the real estate market crash/speculation).

Home Prices Fall Below 2009 Lows; Values now at 2002 levels
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2011/05/home-prices-fall-below-2009-lows.html

During the congressional hearings into rating agencies selling triple-A ratings (on toxic CDOs), one of the periodic speculations (on TV business news) was that the rating agencies would be able to avoid gov. prosecution with blackmail, threating to lowering the gov's credit rating.

misc. past posts referencing the rating agency blackmail/threat speculation:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#8 Global Melt Down
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#40 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#69 Moody's hints at move that could be catastrophic for US debt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#21 Ernst & Young called to account -- should Audit firms be investigated for their role in the crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#40 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#53 Programmer Charged with thieft (maybe off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#43 Massive Fraud, Common Crime, No Prosecutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

VAXen on the Internet

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VAXen on the Internet
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:50:11 -0400
Tim Shoppa <shoppa@trailing-edge.com> writes:
Pre TCP/IP but still "network":

Older versions of DECNET for the VAX came with something better than a virus, pre-installed and essentially enabled by default... aka TELL.COM. Allows any random guy to execute most commands over the network without any authorization. Not quite as insecure as it sounds but simply doing a SHOW USERS and/or a MCR NCP SHOW KNOWN NODES on other random computers was invaluable to hacking in the 80's.


recent post mentioning multiuser spacewar (done by author of rexx)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#45 My first mainframe experience

using SPM ... which allowed various kinds of messages to intercepted under software control (rather than displayed at terminal) ... it also allowed messages to be generated under software control.

SPM was used by VNET to intercept messages sent to it ... running as service virtual machine (current nomenclature is sometimes virtual appliance). some more in thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#49 My first mainframe experience

VNET then supported syntax that forwarded to other VNET/machines on the network. The fowarded messages could be sent to other users at remote machines ... VNET also supported syntax to execute (subset of) commands at remote machines and return results. There was even TELL EXEC that supplied some of the wrapper for remote messages and commands. misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

there was a "bug" in the early VNET implementation that checked for subset of commands permitted for remote execution ... which might allow somebody to shutdown the remote machine (or other undesirable operations).

BITNET (& EARN in europe) used similar VNET technology ... misc. past posts mentioning BITNET & EARN
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

random item from long ago and far away:

Date: 28 March 1987, 10:28:33 PST
From: wheeler
Subject: bitnet/tcpip;

there are two parallel discussions currently going on in tcpip digest (arpanet/csnet forum) on particular aspect of bitnet addressing and tcpip/csnet addressing.

The bitnet discussion stream started out with the comment that the monthly RSCS nodeid table distribution is beginning to swamp bitnet, a couple nodes with 200 or more copies queued for several days waiting to be forwarded. The discussion has degenerated into what is the bandwidth of .... person with pack of CDROMs walking across the country (100 days delay, but bandwidth >56kbit) or a station wagon of 6250bpi tapes (5 days delay bandwidth >1mbit) or a 747

The csnet/tcpip discussion is intertwined with the bitnet discussion but is focusing on the reliability of getting dynamic address/node information propagated across a very large number of nodes ... and what is the no. of "hello" broadcast messages per second in a 2,000+ node network (even if each node only says hello 3-4/min.).


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

note that internally, VNET had "distribution list" support ... so that only single physical copy had to be forwarded over a link. misc past ref. to distribution list support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#12 Timeline: The evolution of online communities

with regard to internet ... this came up when we were called in to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server (they also had this technology they invented that they called "SSL" & wanted to use; the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce"). part of the effort was something called the payment gateway (interfaced to merchant servers on the internet and financial payment networks) ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

I had done redundant payment gateway with no single point of failure and multiple links into different parts of the internet. When started, was planning on advertising multiple routes to the payment gateway ... but during the project, the internet switched to hierarchical routing (eliminating being able to advertise different routes to same ip-address). That left just using DNS mutliple A-record to mask failures. I had sign-off authority on webserver implementation and mandated DNS multiple A-record support. However, I didn't have similar authority for their browser. They gave me all sorts of push back about support too complicated and "advanced" ... even when I provided them example client code from 4.3 tahoe/reno. It took another year or so to eventually get multiple A-record support in their browser. The issue was there were some number of larger e-commerce servers with multiple redundant links into the internet. There was one specific large adapter that advertised on sunday national football ... and were expected huge activity during half-time. This was when some number of the ISPs still had rolling maintenance outages on sundays

and misc. other stuff from long ago and far away

Date: 17 Feb 89 19:32:42 GMT
Newsgroups: info.nets
Subject: "world net" size
To: info-nets@Think.COM


>   Does anyone have a current table of size estimates for the academic
>   and research networks?
>
>   Network   as of     count Description
>   --------  --------  ----- -----------------------------------------------
>   BITNET    01/18/85    435 University/nonprofit/research network
>   Arpanet   01/22/85   1155 DoD related

The December 1988 BITNET nodes file contains 2691 entries. This includes BITNET/NETNORTH/EARN nodes.

The growth of the Internet has been explosive.


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

and

Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1988 11:00:30 EDT
From: MKL@SRI-NIC.ARPA (Mark Lottor)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: New domain charts available

I've updated the domain chart once again. This time it is 12 pages long and no longer fits on my wall. So, I made a second version that only shows the 2nd level domains. The abbreviated version is only 7 pages. Also, ASCII text listings of the domain names used are also available. For printing the domain charts you will need a Postscript printer.

While collecting data for the chart I came up with a few random incomplete statistics (these are minimum values):
domains: 1180
Internet hosts: 56000
MX-only entries: 3500

You can retrieve the files via anonymous FTP to host SRI-NIC.ARPA, or by sending mail to SERVICE@SRI-NIC.ARPA and placing "send pathname" in the Subject line.

The file pathnames are:
Full postscript chart: NETINFO:DOMAIN-CHART.PS
Full ascii listing: NETINFO:DOMAIN-CHART-LIST.TXT
Abbreviated chart: NETINFO:DOMAIN-CHART-ABBREV.PS
Abbreviated listing: NETINFO:DOMAIN-CHART-ABBREV-LIST.TXT


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

and ...

Date: Fri, 12 May 89 15:24:59 EDT
Reply-To: IBM TCP/IP For VM List <IBMTCP-L@CUNYVM>

BITNETII is a project that envisions the next phase of the BITNET network. BITNETII is essentially a method by which the RSCS/NJE traffic between to ends of a NJE link are transported by utilizing TCP/IP protocols conducted over the regional networks instead of using telephone lines.


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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 1 Jun 2011 08:24:12 -0700
john_w_gilmore@MSN.COM (john gilmore) writes:
These optimizations are also devised by groups whose full-time job is to optimize code skeletons that are used stereotypically in compiler-generated code; and these groups inevitably come to have a vested interest in cleverness, i.e., non-standard, less than obvious ways of doing things.

more recent state-of-the-art ... is to build a model of the hardware & instruction operation ... and have code that selects instruction combinations based on specified cycles (or some other criteria) ... that code is now finding non-standard, possibly non-obvious, instruction sequences (also makes it easier to do large number of backends across variety of different machine architectures). Part of machine model includes things like out-of-order execution dependencies.

long ago and far away, early cp67 (virtual machine precursor to vm370, ran on 360/67) shipped with virtual address tables initialized pointing to a special "zeros" page on disk. I changed that to indicate a "zeros" page and just cleared the storage to zeros. Common operation of the period was to use (multiple) overlapping MVC. I did implementation that saved registers, zero'ed ten registers and did BXLE STM loop for those ten registers (significantly faster than overlapping MVC ... on 360/67).

GCC 4.6
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.6/changes.html

from above:
S/390, zSeries and System z9/z10, IBM zEnterprise z196

Support for the zEnterprise z196 processor has been added. When using the -march=z196 option, the compiler will generate code making use of the following instruction facilities:

Conditional load/store Distinct-operands Floating-point-extension Interlocked-access Population-count

The -mtune=z196 option avoids the compare and branch instructions as well as the load address instruction with an index register as much as possible and performs instruction scheduling appropriate for the new out-of-order pipeline architecture.

When using the -m31 -mzarch options the generated code still conforms to the 32-bit ABI but uses the general purpose registers as 64-bit registers internally. This requires a Linux kernel saving the whole 64-bit registers when doing a context switch. Kernels providing that feature indicate that by the 'highgprs' string in /proc/cpuinfo.

The SSA loop prefetching pass is enabled when using -O3.


... snip ...

other recent reference of gcc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#50 My first mainframe experience

... and recent reference to out-of-order pipeline introduced
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#46 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened

mentions that introduction of out-of-order in most recent mainframe accounts for significant part of throughput increase (although it has been in other architectures for decades).

decades ago, out-of-order was given as major rise of advanced compilers for high-throughput optimization ... since internal machine processing was getting a lot more complex with various kinds of instruction interdependencies and complex dataflow ... becoming harder and harder to address with manual effort.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:09:51 -0400
Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> writes:
If you mean that the packet could be detected as erroneous, you throw it away and the sender eventually resends a correct copy.

If you mean a page fault, it doesn't make sense to store network packets in pageable memory. They are processed quickly; paging a packet out and then in would incur unacceptable latency.

If you mean a TLB fault, that would be handled transparently to the networking stack, either by hardware or very low-level operating system software.


from long ago and far away ... we had 15/16ths reed-solomon ecc that gave quite a lot bit-error-correction. then there was work on if the packet was uncorrectable ... the sender (selectively) transmits the 1/2 rate viterbi ecc (rather than retransmitting the original packet) ... there was high probability that even if both packets arrived with errors (original and 1/2rate viterbi) ... that it would still be correctable. as bit-error-rate increased there could be adaptable switch to transmitting original with 1/2 rate viterbi ecc (trading off error-correcting latency with bandwidth when there aren't uncorrectable errors).

reference to old presentation at stanford (by one of the companies we were working with):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#email860414
random reference to founder of the above mentioned company
http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2011/elwyn-berlekamp-delivers.htm

old posts mentioning reed-solomon (we also had engineer who had been graduate student at caltech and had done work on reed-solomon):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#28 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#115 What is the use of OSI Reference Model?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#210 AES cyphers leak information like sieves
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#38 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#80 Disks size growing while disk count shrinking = bad performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#71 Encryption + Error Correction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#53 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#53 Free Desktop Cyber emulation on PC before Christmas
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#27 shirts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#3 Calculations involing very large decimals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#73 1950s AT&T/IBM lack of collaboration?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#37 Why doesn't Infiniband supports RDMA multicast
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#11 Mainframes (etc.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#43 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#25 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#27 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#52 Go-Back-N protocol?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#44 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#45 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#29 Just another example of mainframe costs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#4 Even worse than UNIX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#62 Damn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#82 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#19 IBM-MAIN longevity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#61 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#46 Follow up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#79 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#0 Anyone going to Supercomputers '09 in Portland?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#26 Tapes versus vinyl
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#23 Program Work Method Question

past posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#6 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#7 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#8 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#9 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#11 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#14 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#15 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#46 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#48 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#51 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#53 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#54 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:29:27 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
This is pretty much the standard usage (IMO). TSO used to swap everything for a user to disk when necessary, back in the day when TSO used a single address space for all users. Segmented machines like Burroughs, or OS/2 1.x would swap segments to and from disk as a unit.

cp67 & vm370 had always done demand page fault. the issue as systems got faster and disk technology didn't keep pace ... the relative latency penalty for demand page fault increased significantly. Transfers of larger units decreased avg. latency delay per page ... but tended to increase real storage.

old post with reference to pointing out that in period between cp67 in the 60s to vm370 in the 80s ... the relative system throughput of disks declined by order of magnitude:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#31 Big I/O or Kicking the Mainframe out the Door

some disk division executives objected to the claims and assigned the division performance department to refute it; however after a couple weeks they came back and basically said that I had slightly understated the situation. one of them, then turned the analysis into a presentation on how to optimize disk configuration for system thruput ... a few past references to share 63 presentation b874
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#46 MVS History (all parts)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#18 AS/400 and MVS - clarification please
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#3 using 3390 mod-9s

one of the things then done for both VM370/CMS and MVS (including TSO) was to implement "big pages". for outgoing, an address space's pages would be collected into groups of 10 virtual pages (a full 3380 track) and written as one operation. Subsequent page fault ... would fetch all ten pages in the associated "big" page. This would take advantage of the fact the 3380 transfer rate increase by factor of 10 (compared to 3330) while only marginally inproving avg. access (and tended to noticeably increase aggregate real storage since frequently virtual pages would be fetched that otherwise wouldn't be used).

old email mentioning implementation problems with big pages, >16mbyte support and page replace algorithm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#email870320
in this recent post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#27 Multiple Virtual Memory

misc. other past posts about problems in the implementation of "big pages" (along with greater >16m support and page replacement selection):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#15 Exceptions at basic block boundaries
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#51 Q ALLOC PAGE vs. CP Q ALLOC vs ESAMAP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#37 REAL memory column in SDSF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#43 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#9 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#42 Interesting presentation

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:16:01 -0400
blp@cs.stanford.edu (Ben Pfaff) writes:
What made your networks so unreliable that you needed to use error-correcting codes in packets?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#58 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

the two scenarios were FM digital broadcast (something akin to long haul wifi) and (high-speed) satellite. misc. past posts mentioning HSDT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

Things were aggravated by corporate requirement that all transmission leaving corporate premises had to be encrypted ... and technology of the period used (stream) link-encryptors ... where uncorrected bit-error also resulted in the link-encryptors loosing sync. in the mid-80s, there were comments that the internal network had over half of all hardware link encryptors in the world
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

15/16ths reed-solomon would take a nominal 10**-9 bit-error-rate channel and provide 6orders of magnitude improvement ... effectively 10**-15. selective resend (of 1/2 rate viterbi) would still hiccup stream cipher ... but if things degraded that would be masked by switching to 1/2 rate viterbi transmission (being able to handle degraded channels with 10**-6 or even 10**-4 raw bit-error-rate and still have reasonable thruput; lightening near either uplink or downlink could still temporarily wipe packets).

In part because T1 hardware link encryptors were so expensive and it was hard to even find anything that ran faster than T1 ... I started working on something different ... significantly higher thruput, significantly cheaper and would also eliminate the stream resync'ing latency problem (somewhat tighter intergration of crypto and ECC). That was when I found out (at least back then) there were 3-kinds of crypto (kind they don't care about, kind you can't do, and kind that you can only do for them) ... misc. past mention (I was eventually told I could make as many as I wanted to ... but they all had to be shipped somewhere on the east coast):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#87 New test attempt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#86 Own a piece of the crypto wars
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#43 What is "timesharing" (Re: OS X Finder windows vs terminal window weirdness)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#32 Getting Out Hard Drive in Real Old Computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#27 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#43 Internet Evolution - Part I: Encryption basics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#19 The IETF is probably the single element in the global equation of technology competition than has resulted in the INTERNET
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment

the implementation bore a slight resemblance to SSL ... minor recent drift mentioning SSL:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#11 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#18 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#24 Fight Fraud with Device ID
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#56 VAXen on the Internet

old crypto related email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#crypto

included some discussion of a PGP-like implementation proposal in 1981.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

z/OS System Programmer Needed East Coast

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: z/OS System Programmer Needed East Coast
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 1 Jun 2011 12:47:21 -0700
etech@TULSAGRAMMER.COM (Eric Chevalier) writes:
Why do the letters "N S A" keep popping into my mind??? :-)

from long ago and far away:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

one of the "benefits" of cp67 and then vm370 was complete source as well as tradition of doing maintenance in source (customer could rebuild exact duplicate of production system from source).

there is folklore in the 80s about a request for something similar for MVS ... all the source exactly corresponding to particular production system ... supposedly after spending millions on the investigation ... the company decided that it wouldn't be practical.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:41:23 -0400
Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
How does this differ from windoze users who didn't get the devices?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#48 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

they blamed the financial institution ... they would call the institution ... and customer support calls were running $100 or more per (beside enormous customer aggravation) ... significantly exploding the budgeted deployment costs.

there was the analysis of "frozen" corporate machines ... carefully provisioned, tightly controlled, and then replicated for possibly tens of thousand users. some number of corporations that looked at providing similar "free" authentication technology for each employee-machine ... estimated $500/machine, adding to already installed machine ... again, it turned out because selection of (obsolete) serial-port rather than USB.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:12:36 -0400
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Exec is the piece of the monitor which runs everything on TOPS-10. It is not swappable. For instance, there is an exec page map page which contains the page address of the monitor's data base/code. For each job, there exists a user page map page which contains the job's data/code page numbers. The latter can be swapped; the former not.

In the early 70s, there was a project which tried to separate the pieces of the monitor which could be swapped. this was called DAEMON.


in the 60s as undergraduate at the univ, one of the changes i made to cp67 was splitting pieces of the fixed kernel and making it "pageable". While a lot of stuff I was doing as undergraduate was picked up and shipped in standard product ... this didn't show up in standard product until vm370 (when some of the pageable cp67 stuff was incorporated).

this is recent post in rexx n.g. describing some of the cp67 pageable kernel changes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#71 how to get a command result without writing it to a file

one of the changes (not mentioned in the above) ... as adding the symbolic loader table to the end of the pageable kernel area (wasn't included in the vm370 changes).

standard cp67 process started out with all the card decks arrainged with the "savecp" routine at the end and a copy of the "BPS" loader put on front. The "BPS" loader would read all the card decks into memory, doing the load process and when perform transfer to the specified starting location (in this case "savecp"). "savecp" would then write the memory image to disk with added disk initialization to be able to IPL/boot the image on disk back into memory.

One of the things that "BPS" loader did transferring to the program was it passed in registers the pointer to the start of the "BPS" loader table and the number of entries. Modification for pageable kernel including changes to savecp that copied the loader table entries to the end of the memory image ... so it was also included in the image written to disk. All the "BPS" loader table entries then were part of the (pageable) kernel image.

misc. past posts mentioning "BPS" loader:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#11 REXX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#15 cp disk story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#9 ** Old Vintage Operating Systems **
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#135 sysprog shortage - what questions would you ask?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#32 20th March 2000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#58 360 Architecture, Multics, ... was (Re: X86 ultimate CISC? No.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#23 Linux IA-64 interrupts [was Re: Itanium benchmarks ...]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#26 HELP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#27 HELP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#38 Playing Cards was Re: looking for information on the IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#35 Computers in Science Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#2 Where did text file line ending characters begin?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#62 PLX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#71 bps loader, was PLX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#72 bps loader, was PLX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#51 windows office xp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#26 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#38 Virtual Cleaning Cartridge
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#45 command line switches [Re: [REALLY OT!] Overuse of symbolic constants]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#10 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#16 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#52 Software for IBM 360/30
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#50 Various kinds of System reloads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#40 All Good Things
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#44 Binder REP Cards (Was: What's the linkage editor really wants?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#20 Binder REP Cards (Was: What's the linkage editor really wants?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#52 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#51 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#1 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#57 IBM System/360 DOS still going strong as Z/VSE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#59 IBM System/360 DOS still going strong as Z/VSE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#2 what does xp do when system is copying
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#23 T3 Sues IBM To Break its Mainframe Monopoly
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#43 IBM 029 keypunch -- 0-8-2 overpunch -- what hex code results?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#56 Computer History Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#64 Computer History Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#65 Computer History Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#8 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#9 Is SUN going to become x86'ed ??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#12 IBM Mainframe: 50 Years of Big Iron Innovation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#76 CMS IPL (& other misc)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#25 PDP-10s and Unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#26 PDP-10s and Unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#14 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#42 IBM 029 service manual
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#42 Which non-IBM software products (from ISVs) have been most significant to the mainframe's success?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#3 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:03:35 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
One of the things that "BPS" loader did transferring to the program was it passed in registers the pointer to the start of the "BPS" loader table and the number of entries. Modification for pageable kernel including changes to savecp that copied the loader table entries to the end of the memory image ... so it was also included in the image written to disk. All the "BPS" loader table entries then were part of the (pageable) kernel image.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#63 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

one of the problems ... in mapping pieces of the cp67 fixed kernel into 4k pageable chunks ... I increased the number of external symbol "entry points". It turns out that BPS loader had fixed maximum of 255 which I exceeded ... for cp67, I then had to do all sorts of hacks to stay within the 255 entry point limit.

later at the science center ... wandering around a storage room (9?th flr 545 tech sq) ... I ran across a card cabinet with source for BPS loader ... which I could then modify to significantly increase the loader table size.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:11:13 -0400
ArarghMail106NOSPAM writes:
I was getting out of IBM mainframes about the time 370s were coming in, so I never got into a 370 very much.

I do remember one rather neat bug on (I think) early 158 microcode. If the end of a BAL instruction was at the end of a 4k block, the return address was 4K off. Crashed the system a few times. Q&D solution, relink the OS to move the instruction. :-)


all 360 instructions prechecked the start and end of storage operands for fetch&store protect (and in virtual memory mode for page fault) before the start of the instruction. in case of SS instructions two storage operands were checked. 360/67 had 8 entry associative array (for hardware page address translation) which was minimum for maximum storage access; i.e. execute instruction that spanned 4k page boundary (2 entries) with target SS instruction that spanned 4k page boundary (2 entries) and each storage operand crossed 4k page boundary (4 entries).

370 instructions introduced "long" instructions ... which were defined as executing a byte at a time ... w/o prechecking ending address. long instructions executed byte at a time and if encountered some exception condition, the associated registers were updated to reflect current storage address (and residual length).

early vm370 startup implemented a MVCL instruction setup with no source length, pad of zero and target address with maximum length of 16mbyte ... which resulted in clearing storage to zero and interrupting with pointer to end of storage.

Norwegian shipping firm with office in manhatten wanted to use vm370 on 256kbyte 370/125 ... which wasn't supported configuration ... and I was asked to do something. I had gotten pageable cp67 kernel down to little over 60kbytes fixed kernel requirements ... while vm370 (fixed kernel) out of the box was well over 100kbytes (even with parts of the kernel paged). i did some simple fiddling to get vm370 fixed kernel down to around 80kbytes. recent pageable kernel posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#63 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#64 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

After that I found MVCL microcode bug on 125 ... it was prechecking ending address and aborting instruction w/o even starting (aka using old 360 rules ... instead of new 370 rules for long instructions) ... making vm370 believe it had zero storage machine. I then had to patch vm370 startup sequence to not use the MVCL instruction.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 2 Jun 2011 04:12:51 -0700
dcrayford@GMAIL.COM (David Crayford) writes:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246515.pdf

There is one programming aspect that is relevant, although only slightly linked to the use of a split cache. For many years, it has been an axiom among S/360 - S/390 users that assembly language programmers probably produce faster code than high-level language compilers. This is no longer true. Processors that use pipelines (including z800 and z900 machines) require a certain amount of nonsequential code to obtain the best performance. For example, if an instruction loads a register and the next instruction uses the register, we do not have optimum code. This sequence will stall the pipeline for several processor cycles. (The instructions work correctly, of course, but they take longer than necessary.) The best technique is to interleave several unrelated instructions between loading a register and using the new contents of the register.

This is not natural, sequential thinking for an assembly programmer, although he could learn to do it. IBM's recent S/390 compilers contain logic to produce this sort of optimized code.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#67 What is the current feeling for MVC loop vs. MVCL?

which makes highly optimized code start to be more like old-time horizontal microcoding (high-end pok machines, 3830 controller, etc) ... where the programmer was dealing in concurrent operations with various latencies ... and trying to maximize overlapped operation.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Stanford's Don Knuth, a pioneering hero of computer programming

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Stanford's Don Knuth, a pioneering hero of computer programming
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:25:48 -0400
x-over from post in another venue

Stanford's Don Knuth, a pioneering hero of computer programming
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/june/knuth-engineering-hero-060111.html

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The Costs of Bad Security

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 02 June, 2011
Subject: The Costs of Bad Security
Blog: Information Security
The Costs of Bad Security
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/37675/

from above:
Mounting threats to the security of information are forcing companies to make more sophisticated cost-benefit analyses when they craft their security strategies.

... snip ...

brings to mind a bumper sticker ... something about if you think education is expensive ... try ignorance. also

Making the Case for Security
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/37676/?p1=BI

and roads & highways (similar analogies that I've used periodically)

Francis Maude goes back 110 years for cybersecurity strategy; Net is like the roads of 1900: full of horse sh*t
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/02/maude_speech/

there was article about the reason why old row houses in large cities had 1st floor so far above ground (steep front stairs) ... was because of the large amount of horse manure piled high on the street.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:36:48 -0400
Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> writes:
It's the fact that host operating system software needed to worry about it that surprised me.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#58 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#60 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

most of it didn't involve host software ... all outboard ... mostly hardware stuff ... modulo scenario involving selective resend of 1/2rate viterbi instead of selective resend of original packet.

as this old email (related to crypto) ... 3081k processor getting 150kbytes/sec DES ... so two dedicated processors would be required for T1 full-duplex
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#email841115

as mentioned, I could get T1 hardware link encryptors ... but they were expensive ... and difficult to find faster than T1 (tended to be custom & really expensive)

passing reference to "MIB guys" showing up (2nd kind of crypto, can't do)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#33 network history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#26 IBM microwave application--early data communictions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#36 The verify first editor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#74 Is SUN going to become x86'ed

and passing reference to "MIB guys" and 3rd kind of crypto
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#57 high speed network, cross-over from sci.crypt

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

History of byte addressing

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: History of byte addressing
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:48:53 -0400
Alex McDonald <blog@rivadpm.com> writes:
Perhaps (and I must admit to speculating here) BCD, EBCDIC and the 80column punch card played a part when used in column mode. Some early IBM machines used row mode (1 row for two 36bit words, giving the 72 data columns that became just about a standard in column mode too), but lots of punchholes per row or column gave the cards less than an ideal stiffness. I only vaguely remember machines with row mode binary cards.

The commonly adopted maximum punch was 3 in a column, one in 3 of rows 12, 11, 0, one or two for 1-9 (the 8 or 9 was the 3rd punch) giving a 6bit BCD encoding. EBCDIC extended that to more holes/column with backward compatibility with 6bit BCD (hence the discontinuous nature of the A-Z encodings), but that was a later development (1977??) and used 4 punches for the extended bits; 5 for some really obscure encodings. I do remember that hand keypunches were difficult to use beyond 3 punches per column.

Perhaps 8bits was the maximum encodable without causing backward compatibility problems and having too many holes in a card? Perhaps.


punch card 80 columns and 12 rows; 360 (announced 1964, with 8bit "bytes" rather than 6bit "bytes") extended 6-bit BCD to (single) 8-bit EBCDIC punch card encoding (eliminating column binary encoding).

my 1st programming job at univ. was porting 1401 MPIO (card->tape & tape->printer/punch; where 1401 acted as front end for 709; that normally ran tape->tape) to 360/30; the 360/30 had 1401 hardware emulation mode (that would directly run MPIO) ... so it apparently was univ. was just gettting familiarity with 360 as part of planned transition to replace 709/1401 with 360/67. I got to design&implement my own monitor, device drivers, interrupt handler, storage management, error recovery, multitasking (concurrent card->tape while tape->printer/punch), etc.

input cards could either be (6-bit) BCD or column binary. ... basically "column binary" was two six-bit "bytes" per column rather than 6-bit BCD. I would read "BCD" ... if got an error (reader would generate error if there were any columns with punch hole combinations not valid/defined for BCD) reread as column binary ... before doing feed-selectstacker. on 360, the two six-bit bytes would be stored in two eight-bit bytes (80 column binary card would occupy 160bytes). bytes would then be written to 7-track tape (6bit byte plus parity). going tape->punch ... had to recognized whether to punch 80byte BCD or 160byte column binary.

i have done a Q&D conversion of IOS3270 "green card" to html
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html

lists for newer generation reader/punch I/O command codes, but mostly same for old 360 2540 reader/punch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html#23

read-only: 11D0F010 ; "D" =0 ebcdic, =1 "card image", aka column binary

and for (old) 7-track tape
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html#25

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 03 Jun, 2011
Subject: Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling
Blog: Facebook
Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/us/politics/01fiscal.html?_r=1

note that toxic asset repurchase program supposedly was to purchase toxic assets ... however only $700B was appropriated ... and then they found that just the four largest too-big-to-fail institutions had something like $5.2T toxic assets being carried offbook ... the $700B wouldn't even make a dent. they then found something else to do with the $700B and other ways to deal with the enormous amount of toxic assets. There is also estimate that something like $27T in triple-A rated toxic CDO transactions were done during the bubble. As to SS ... is there similarity between Hoffa and the federal gov. with regard to looting the pension fund.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

The other way to look at it was that it needed trillions ... not hundreds of billions. It was left to Federal Reserve to lend both trillions as well as buy trillions in toxic assets (behind the scenes ... it took over year of court battles to get Federal Reserve to release some of the details).

If you bought real estate in the bubble, you possibly got caught. Loan originators being able to pay rating agencies for triple-A ratings provided the funds for fueling real-estate bubble (it was the equivalent of Brokers' Loans that provided the fuel for the '29 stock market bubble). Tuesday, numbers were that real-estate market had deflated to pre-bubble (something I've been predicting for some time, but the speculation resulted in there appearing to be more demand than actual and significant overbuilding, the oversupply may take market still lower; difference between '29 and this time).

motivation on wallstreet side was that wallstreet bonuses spiked over 400% during the bubble on estimated $27T in triple-A rated toxic CDOs transactions (since then a lot of effort to prevent their bonuses from returning to pre-bubble levels ... as housing prices have).

TV business news just had item that European financial workers were going to move to manhatten because wallstreet bonuses hadn't deflated to pre-bubble levels (like housing prices and rest of the world). wallstreet was heavily motivated to play in the whole scam because of the enormous amounts they skimmed off the $27T in triple-A rated toxic CDO transactions.

Early in collapse, a few tens of $B in triple-A rated toxic CDOs sold at 22cents on the dollar. If it hadn't been for offbook accounting slight-of-hand, FDIC would have been required to step in and liquidate the too-big-to-fail institutions. FED than buys trillions at 98cents on the dollar ... and made $9+T in loans to them at zero (or near zero); which they then invest and use the spread to pay bonuses and pay back TARP w/interest. Supposedly this is to create a temporary paper facade while making fundamental structural corrections. It is beginning to look more like they just postponed the reakoning (phrase "stitch in time saves nine", or not as it may be).

FED alternative might have been to buy $14T in federal debt, accepting zero interest (and eliminating the wallstreet skim).

past reference to FED actions:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#17 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#23 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#46 TCM's Moguls documentary series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#58 Programmer Charged with thieft (maybe off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#66 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#45 Productivity And Bubbles

past posts mentioning the wallstreet bonus spike during bubble:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#6 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#8 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#28 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#3 Congress Set to Approve Pay Cap of $500,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#33 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#69 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#15 The Revolving Door and S.E.C. Enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#42 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#48 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#33 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#40 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#55 The 10 Highest-Paid CEOs Who Laid Off The Most Employees
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#59 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#70 Compressing the OODA-Loop - Removing the D (and maybe even an O)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#6 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#27 WikiLeaks' Wall Street Bombshell
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#80 Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America's Lunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#27 The Zippo Lighter theory of the financial crisis (or, who do we want to blame?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#42 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#59 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#23 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#34 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#7 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#36 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#43 Massive Fraud, Common Crime, No Prosecutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

77,000 federal workers paid more than governors

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 03 Jun, 2011
Subject: 77,000 federal workers paid more than governors
Blog: Facebook
77,000 federal workers paid more than governors
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/31/77000-feds-paid-more-than-governors/?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4de6e2ce6bc68a5f%2C0

one of the past justification for enormous growth in gov. outsourcing was so many positions reached level requiring congressional approval (if things are bad now ... add several tens of thousands of positions). and the enormous increase in outsourcing has helped institutionalize the Success Of Failure culture

Obama campaigned on bringing lots of the outsourced jobs back in house; 1) reduced costs overall and 2) they didn't have the best interest of gov; aka Success Of Failure culture. We actually reviewed some where they openly said what they were doing wouldn't work but current contract had 3yrs to run ("don't leave money on the table") and they might consider doing correct in follow-on contract.

the lack of accountability has promoted a culture of doing nothing in gov. jobs. however, outsourcing frequently promoted a culture of doing the wrong thing. decide which one has better chance of periodically doing the right thing. that is independent of question of whether gov. should be involved or not (employee counts & outsourcing sometimes has been used to obfuscate that the gov. is still heavily involved).

note: 60mins did segment on Medicare part-d. GAO lists it as a $40T unfunded mandate that eventually totally swamps all other budget items. 60mins followed the Republicans responsible for moving bill through congress. At last minute they insert a single sentence that eliminates competitive bidding and then blocked release to members of congress, the CBO estimate regarding effect of that (single sentence) change. 60mins showed drugs under VA (which allows competitive bidding) that were 1/3rd the cost of identical drugs under Medicare part-d. Shortly after passage, all the responsible Republicans had resigned and were on drug company payrolls. One of the points made by the (GAO) comptroller general was that the fiscal responsibility act expired in 2002 and congress almost immediately get much worse, including Medicare part-d in 2003.

misc. past references to fiscal responsibility act expired in 2002
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#60 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#9 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#34 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#46 not even sort of about The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#79 Idiotic take on Bush tax cuts expiring
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#75 origin of 'fields'?

misc. past posts reference Success Of Failure:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#25 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#41 U.S. house decommissions its last mainframe, saves $730,000
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#19 STEM crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#26 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#38 F.B.I. Faces New Setback in Computer Overhaul
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#18 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#78 TCM's Moguls documentary series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#5 Off-topic? When governments ask computers for an answer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#69 No command, and control
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#0 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#45 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#32 Congratulations, where was my invite?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#34 Congratulations, where was my invite?

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 4 Jun 2011 06:26:19 -0700
ps2os2@YAHOO.COM (Ed Gould) writes:
I am not sure any numbers you can come up with would tell a story (thats accurate). I suspect even IBM (in some cases) does not have a clue as to what is running on any given machine. Especially in the "sensitive areas" of the government. I knew of one place that was forbidden to call IBM for software service. I know IBM has people that have the right clearances (heck I know/knew (he has passed away) one that worked in one of the basements of the Whitehouse and he couldn't tell me too much what he was working on) He may have told me too much just about the existance but we both had clearences at the time.

i can imagine that the person scanning the PROFS backup tapes in response to the congressional subpoena (iran/contra/north), required quite a few clearances.

more recent ...

Hacking of White House E-Mail Affected Diverse Departments
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/technology/04hack.html
Gmail Hack Targeted White House
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576361863723857124.html

a little topic drift in this recent post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#61 z/OS System Programmer Needed East Coast

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 4 Jun 2011 11:48:15 -0700
ps2os2@YAHOO.COM (Ed Gould) writes:
Funny you mentioned that. He was part of the team that looked through the watergate email (profs) and he was also involved in trying to get data from some of the drives. He didn't go into a lot of detail but there was some effort to try and recover overwritten data. I also did not press him for details.

One thing he did tell me was that the White House was using fiber optics for channels. That was decade before IBM made it GA. Something about not having large cables between rooms so if a bomb hit nothing could be leaked between rooms.


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#73 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

i think escon was knocking around POK from the late 70s ... just took a long time to leak out ... in part because many uses would cross datacenter walls ... and communication group "owned" everything that crossed the datacenter walls ... and they thot high-speed was 56kbits; my wife had numerious battles with communication group over such details when she did a stint in POK in charge of loosely-coupled architecture ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

Early 80s, there was enormous amount of dark-fiber (i.e. not yet lit) going in all over the place. When new Almaden research bldg opened in the mid-80s, telco put something like six fiber bundles into Almaden bldg.

one of rs6000 engineers (in conjunction with rochester) had taken the original escon spec, tweaked to be about ten-percent faster, full-duplex, commodity, more reliable drivers and it was released as SLA. Then in early 90s, we talked him out of doing 800mbit version ... instead to work in fiber-channel-standard (group we had been working with for few years ... had come out of some work originally at LLNL). This became fiber-channel standand. Then some of the POK channel engineers caused a lot of turmoil by layering some unnatural half-duplex stuff on top of base fiber channel standard for FICON (I still have a bunch of old fiber channel standards mailing list from the period). passing reference about jan92 meeting in Ellison's office
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

In HSDT, I was doing a bunch of stuff ... including having custom stuff built on the other side of the pacific. misc. old HSDT email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#hsdt
and past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

friday before a trip across the pacific early spring '85, communication group announced a new online discussion group on high-speed with the following definitions:
low speed: <9.6kbits medium-speed: 19.2kbits high speed: 56kbits very high speed: T1

monday morning on wall of conference room on the other side of pacific:
low speed: <20mbits medium speed: 100mbits high-speed: 200-300mbits very high speed: >600mbits

old '89 email with copy of the spring '85 announcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email890731

notice that internal network and nearly whole internal corporation ran on vm370 back then ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 4 Jun 2011 12:49:17 -0700
lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler) writes:
old '89 email with copy of the spring '85 announcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email890731


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#73 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#74 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

oops, correction, URL should be
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email890731

the post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#40 Other early NSFNET backbone

also has communication group related email from the following day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email890801

and a 2nd one from the following day ... i had gotten on the xtp technical advisery board (which the communication group strongly objected to):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email890801b

where part of XTP specification included reliable multicast which was being used in some environments that might experience an enormous amount of damage but the signals still need to get through.

recent post doing channel extender support in 1980 for 300 people/terminals from IMS group that were being moved out of STL to remote bldg (they had tried "remote 3270" and found human factors intolerable)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43 My first mainframe experience

In 60s, 2701 supported T1 data rates ... and lots of gov. institutions were still using them in the 80s (since the communication group didn't have products w/T1 support). Many customers were moving to products from other vendors (like HYPERchannel) to get T1 and higher speed support. Special T1 RPQ Series/1 Zirpel card was product for gov. accounts where their 2701 were starting to completely fail.

Now part of the VTAM problem was that it handled latency on higher speed links, very poorly (even when terrestrial). Part of 3737 was to have a mini-VTAM ... get the transmission from mainframe ... look inside the RU and if possible, immediately tell the host VTAM that it had already arrived at the other end ... and then use (effectively) non-SNA for 3737 to 3737 transmission (lots of VTAM spoofing to effectively compensate for poor VTAM latency handling). from long ago and far away

Date: Mon, 6 Jun 88 12:46:05 est
From: wheeler
Subject: 3737

3737 is the product version of zebra. zebra has a mini-vtam buried in its guts and will only handle connections with a vtam system. 3737 looks like a ctc connection to host vtam. In zebra/3737, it is doing a lot of SNA session management ... it transparently forwards all control RUs to the host vtam at the remote end ... but it does early ACKs for all data RUs (i.e. tells the local host vtam that the data has completed transmission before it has even been sent). The logic/design is somewhat similar to the PVM/S1 support ... but in this case it can only be used with host VTAM system.


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

Date: Wed, 5 Oct 88 15:30:42 EST
From: wheeler
Subject: 3737

note don't confuse the 3737 with a standard T1 inteface box. 3737 is specifically VTAM only. The 3737 contains a mini-embedded VTAM and can only be directly channel attached to an IBM mainframe and can only be driven by IBM mainframe VTAM system. It is also slow, and what SNA performance it does get is via SNA protocol spoofing (it does early "ACKS" to the local mainframe, as a result packets can be lost w/o any way of notifying higher level protocol layers).


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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 04 Jun, 2011
Subject: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Blog: Facebook
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers/dp/1586486918

from above:
Previously published as The Trillion Dollar Meltdown Now fully updated with the latest financial developments, this is the bestselling book that briefly and brilliantly explains how we got into the economic mess that is the Credit Crunch.

... snip ...

mentions that home buying followed demographics until last decade when it was speculation scam by financial industry. baby boomer bubble was four times previous generation and twice following generation. boomers started to reach peak earning yrs in late 80s, spiking economy, tax&SS collections, home buying, etc. Early part of century, boomers started to move into retirement being replaced with following generation, half-as-many, poorer educated and lower skilled (prospect that ratio of aggregate worker earnings to pension payouts decreases by at least factor of 8 times). With following generation that is half the size, poorer educated and lower skilled; economy, tax&SS collections & home buying drop off significantly.

recent related posts here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#71 Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#72 77,000 federal workers paid more than governers

misc. past posts reference the baby boomer population bubble
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#26 The Return of Ada
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#98 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#13 Michigan industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#20 Michigan industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#58 Everyone is getting same deal out of life: babyboomers can't retire but they get SS benefits intact
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#64 August 7, 1944: today is the 65th Anniversary of the Birth of the Computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#72 August 7, 1944: today is the 65th Anniversary of the Birth of the Computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#24 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#45 not even sort of about The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#72 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#2 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#66 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#72 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#75 origin of 'fields'?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#44 Ratio of workers to retirees

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2011 12:03:51 -0400
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
one of the things mentioned (in above) for XTP was rate-based control ... but above also states that XTP lacked congestion avoidance ... however as recently mentioned, congestion avoidance can be achieved by dynamic rate-based pacing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment

i was member of the xtp technical advisery board for a time ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp


re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#54 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

recent post x-over from ibm-main about how the 3737 had to do SNA-spoofing and early ACK at the local host interface (before transmission) to get around lack of handling latency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#75 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

above includes these old email discussing 3737
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#email880606
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#email881005

part of this thread started out mentioning gov. mainframes and use of fiber-optics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#73 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#74 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

other recent thread about handling latency (xtp, &/or rate-base):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#4 Is email dead? What do you think?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#40 Other early NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#42 Multiple Virtual Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#20 TELSTAR satellite experiment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#27 TELSTAR satellite experiment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#33 TELSTAR satellite experiment

another 3737 old email from long ago and far away

Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1988 11:06:38 PST
From: wheeler
Subject: 3737;

The 3737 is an outgrowth of the ZEBRA prototype done in Raleigh. It originally was four 68000s and somelike 100k of code (I'm not really sure the details of the product version). It emulates a local CTCA to vtam ... but the 100k of code is to hide propagation delays. The local 3737 has a fair amount of buffering and does detailed analysis of every RU. Some RUs it passes to the remote end transparently ... other RUs it does an "early" ack to the local VTAM before sending on over the T1 link. Most of the simpler data-transport RUs it can do local ACKs for ... while the more complex RUs .... like session initiation, etc. are forwarded to the remote end. Its a complex bit of code that somewhat simulates a full-blown 370 VTAM ... although a bit more complicated since it has to keep track of things that it has simulated and things that it hasn't ... and in the case of errors ... it has to remember which it has to retry "internally" and which it might have to reflect back to the local host.

It is actually quite a bit more nasty than the design of PVM/PC, which actually emulates a full-blown 370/PVM node in the AT. The basic design is to "speed-up" SNA without having to admit to changes in the architecture or VTAM implementation (i.e. SNA/VTAM doesn't have a really high-speed flow-control architecture over high-speed links). The 3737 avoids having to "externally" changing the SNA/VTAM architecture/implementation by SPOOFING the low-speed SNA flow-control with "early" ACKs at the local 3737 and then using a high-speed flow-control architecture over the communications link for the bulk of data-movement RUs.

It allows the appearance that VTAM/SNA actually has a high-speed thru-put design point since the majority of the traffic are data-movement RUs that are "spoofed" by the 3737. It however, creates something of an integrety problem for some applications since the early ACKs give the appearence to the local applications that the data has actually arrived safely at the remote end.

It is also, a very specific VTAM/SNA CTCA box, since the 3737 operation is very much tailored to only processing VTAM/SNA RUs


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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:50:29 -0400
Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@newsguy.com> writes:
It sounds not so terribly different from IMS (as far as message routing between terminals and applications goes). Or CICS, when transaction routing is used.

AIUI, the original IMS (IMS/DC) is basically a message control system plus a hierarchical database. (DB2 is so named because it was IBM's second database architecture - ie, relational - coming as it did after the hierarchical database in IMS.) IMS/TM, which was introduced later, adds a transaction monitor.

CICS is frequently set up with a "terminal-owning region" (TOR) and an "application-owning region". Users (or other clients) connect to the TOR and issue "transaction requests", which is CICSish for commands. Those are routed to the AOR, where the processing actually happens. It's basically a simple message-passing architecture - not as feature-rich as IMS. You can set up multiple AORs and TORs, though.


in between IMS and DB2 was EAGLE ... which then had major crash&burn, followed by asking SYSTEM/R (& SQL/DS) people how fast they might be able to ship a relational product on MVS. misc. past posts mentioning original relational/sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

one of the people listed in this jan92 meeting in ellison's conference room claims to have done most of the sql/ds technology transfer from Endicott to STL (for DB2)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

... this is after system/r technology transfer from SJR to Endicott (for sql/ds) ... SJR & STL on west coast only about 5miles apart (I used to ride by bike between two bldgs) and Endicott on the other coast.

IMS wiki ... originally done at customer site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_System

CICS also originally done at customer site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS

As undergraduate at univ, the univ. library had gotten an ONR grant to do computer catalog; some of the money went to getting 2321 data-cell. Effort was also selected to be one of the original beta-test site for CICS "product" ... & I got tasked to support and debug CICS. misc. past posts mentioning CICS &/or BDAM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics

when Jim left SJR for Tandem ... he palmed off dealing with some of the customer System/R sites, consulting with IMS group and some number of other things ... old email refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801016

mentions that possibly EAGLE was going to be called DB1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#41 Mainframe Applications and Records Keeping?
more discussion here
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-DB2.html

"DB2" wasn't originally going to be production transaction DBMS ... but for decision support.

other misc. past posts mentioning EAGLE (the only major effort that started out as an official development group product):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#29 DB2 & z/OS Dissertation Research
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#81 How powerful C64 may have been if it used an 8 Mhz 8088 or 68008 ?microprocessor (with otherwise the same hardware)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#42 Mainframe Hall of Frame. List of influential mainframers thoughout history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#52 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#54 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#55 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#16 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#8 New job for mainframes: Cloud platform

unrelated to DBMS consulting with IMS group ... recent mention of doing support for channel extender in 1980 for the IMS group (STL overflowed and 300 people from IMS group was being moved to offsite bldg)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#85 Two terrific writers .. are going to write a book
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#0 coax (3174) throughput
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#41 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#43 My first mainframe experience
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#75 We list every company in the world that has a mainframe computer

-- <b>virtualization</b> experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

alignment, was History of byte addressing

Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: alignment, was History of byte addressing
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:32:21 -0400
nmm1 writes:
If you want real fun, there are some shared memory codes where unaligned accesses can double the number of lines that are on the wrong core when they are needed!

And, while their architecture is unusual, it isn't exempt from inefficiencies due to such conflicts!


aka early 80s, at least MVS & VM370 operating systems had major work item to make internal kernel storage cache-line sensitive (i.e. started on cache line and ended on cache-line). claim was that it got 5-6% system thruput improvement in 4-way configuration (eliminating cache-line thrashing where different storage areas ... in use by different processors, shared cache line).

another way of looking at some of the current stuff ... is that relative latencies for fetches have increased so ... there is lots of time to overlap/mask all sorts of stuff (as well as lots of extra circuits to perform the additional operations). for instance ... current generation is quoted as having 50% higher thruput than previous generation ... some comes from faster machine cycle ... but also 20% comes from the (new) introduction of out-of-order exectuion. all those spare circuits also help account for big expansion in instruction set ... compared to KISS from 360 days.

one example (early instruction KISS) associated with was the introduction of compare-and-swap. Charlie invented compare-and-swap (CAS are charlie's initials) when he was doing work on multiprocessor fine-grain locking in cp67 (360/67 had test&set). Initial attempt to get compare-and-swap into 370 were rejected with reference to the POK favorite-son operating system believing that (360) test-and-set was more than adequate for multiprocessor implementations. The 370 architecture people said that in order to get compare-and-swap included in 370 architecture some non-multiprocessor uses would have to be created. Thus was born the multiprogramming (aka multi-threaded) application uses (like large DBMS operations) ... being able to do various kinds of atomic storage updates (w/o requiring kernel lock/serialization).

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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Got to remembering... the really old geeks (like me) cut their teeth on Unit Record

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 06 Jun, 2011
Subject: Got to remembering... the really old geeks (like me) cut their teeth on Unit Record.
Blog: Old Geek Registry
re:
http://lnkd.in/hGm6Pp

student keypunch room had sorter, 407 and couple other boxes. the 407 had plug-board setup for student listing their card deck. the other equipment was possibly only still used during semester class registration (started out with sense marked cards).

univ. had 709 running tape-to-tape with 1401 front-end running MPIO doing card->tape and tape->printer/punch (tapes manually carried between two machines). I was hired in the summer to port 1401 MPIO to 360/30. I got to design my own monitor, device drivers, interrupt handlers, storage manager, etc. In theory the univ. could have continued to run MPIO on 360/30 in 1401 hardware emulation .... but they possibly was looking to get experience for the planned move from 709/1401 to 360/67 (and tss/360).

I also got to write part of redo of student registration. Idea was that each registration card was read in on 2540 and went to "stacker 3" (shared with punch). Info was evaluated and if error was found, then a blank card (with colored stripe across the top) was punched behind it (in stacker 3). At the end of the process ... all the cards were in some number of card trays ... and then pick out the cards with errors ... by the color striped blank card right behind them.

recent post in a card BCD/EBCDIC topic drift in (usenet) comp.arch thread
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#70

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970




previous, next, index - home