erik quanstrom wrote:
lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote:
but by 1990 with microchannel &c. things were much more closed off.
i thought only one company ever really made microchannel,
and even they weren't terribly in earnest in the end,
except on non-PC things like RS6000.
IBM tried to recover control over the PC market by introducing MCA,
bargaining that public sentiment would swing in their favour.
They might have had that in mind as a secondary reason - but I doubt even that.
wikipedia agrees with lucio on this point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture#Marketshare_issues
'Wikipedia' does not always compute.
That article ass u me s that the MCA was needed ONLY for PC's.
Wrong answer as far as IBM goes.
The majority within IBM never wanted into that part of the market in the first
place, as it was seen as cannibalizing not only 3XXX terminal sales, but the
entire, highly profitable, big-iron+interface+network+services infrastructure
behind said terminals.
do you have a reference for this?
Probably an hpfs-386 disk or three full - but half a century on [1] from my
first IBM 701 run, and with Irish Alzheimer's and senile dementia don't expect
me to *find* them.
i worked at a company around 1990
that was heavily into ibm mainframes. (so much so, that they
sold PROFS to ibm.) we all had 3270 terminals, and if you were lucky,
you had a pc. email, calandaring, all that great stuff was done centrally
1500 miles away on ibm mainframes. the pc could do none of the
criticial functions that the mainframe system could perform. we didn't
have networking for the pc. heck, there was only one machine fat enough
to run windows 3.1, which didn't even do networking.
You waz bein' robbed.
The secret to high 'PC" peformance as at 1990-94?
Fast private network for the WAN. No 'Weendows'
100 MBps TCNS for the LAN. No 'Weendows'
Hercules monochrome graphics and DRDOS, else ATI SVGA and OS/2 2.11. No
'Weendows'
Did I forget anything? Oh ..
** NO effing 'Weendows' ** No way. No how. No where.
so even 3 years after the release of microchannel, we would never
have considered pcs as 3270 replacements. i don't remember any
machines that could have even run 3270 emulators, if they existed.
A year-one IBM 'PC-1' 8-bit ISA could run 3270 emu just fine - part of what it
needed was in the BIOS, and the onboard 64K RAM was enough for block-mode
buffers. Just needed a NIC appropriate to the local concentrator, optionally a
keyboard swap. Ditto OS/2.
3270 emulation only got 'difficult' if you wanted to run it on *Windows*.
perhaps we were the wiredest ibm site ever, but i think not. and
judging from what i saw, the mca guys would have wasted time
thinking about 3270 emulators.
They didn't have to.
MCA-bus machines could emulate the central 370 itself - and anything earlier -
that those terminals once connected to. 308X and newer mainframes were another
matter.
ah, the summer of broken arrows. good times.
- erik
Yah - well... I can't edit plaintext files remotely any faster today (Joe, Pico,
Nano, Mined) over cable modem ssh internet than I could (BRIEF) over dedicated
56 Kbps fifteen years ago, so 'progress' has been eaten by TCP/IP overhead,
Ethernet overhead (world's second worst protocol), congestion, throttling,
packet-loss ..and .... GUI's.
Died in the wool Plan 9 guys are no doubt ROFL by now at that last part...
;-)
Bill
[1] In order of first use, IBM 701, WECO M33, Burroughs AN/GSA-51, IBM/MIT
Whirlwind II, (AKA MITRE AN/FSQ-7) ....
