On 2016-11-22 3:31 PM, jim stephens wrote:
On 11/22/2016 10:09 AM, william degnan wrote:
On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 2:31 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr<g...@shiresoft.com>
>wrote:
> >The IBM Series/1 was introduced in 1976 and withdrawn in 1988.
There
>were
> >originally 2 models and another 2 models were added later...
Ultimate's Pick implementation for the IBM mainframe had a channel
attached Series One with serial channels available for communications
to IBM 3151 ASCII terminals. if you ran the usual pile that IBM had,
there was a program that ran in the Series one that put up a screen
similar to a 3270 on each 3151 terminal, and acted much like a 3270
terminal, but with Ascii terminals and using cursor control and the
like to do the screens.
A standalone controller, the 7171 also did that as well.
On the 9121 mainframes there was a 68000 equipped board and subsystem
called the Hyfas that did the same directly from boards in the 9121
chassis.
IBM disclosed Ultimate on a method to bypass the 3270 software and do
direct I/O for byte I/O to use the terminals on all three of these
subsystems like direct attached Ascii terminals.
Also there was a Pick Series one implementation by Pick Blue in Seattle.
I also know that some number of Sears Roebuck stores had Series One
systems for their POS control in each store up to the end of life of
pretty much a real Sears chain, and the product. There was a large
flood of systems at the time that the IBM POS systems were converted
to some other backend system (I didn't track what the replacement
configuration was).
I've not set foot in a Sears store in 30 years due to them screwing me
in 1976, so don't know much about any of their gear since, but I am
pretty sure on the Series One from some people who acquired systems at
that time, in the early 90s.
I understand that the Sears stores in the US replaced their Series/1
machines with a 9371, Sears Canada replaced theirs with a small AIX
system as did the late Eatons Dept store. State Farm Insurance agents
used to have Series/1 machines in their offices, they too replaced them
with 9271s. The machines in the Sears stores stores did not have the
operator panel, nor did they have a diskette drive so if you wanted to
run diagnostics on them you had to haul these items packaged as a CE
tool to the site with you. The biggest problem with servicing Series/1
was they where so reliable that unless you where maintaining a lot of
them you never got good at them.
The channel adapter on the Series/1 had a rather large flaw, if you did
not disable the interface before shutting down the Series/1 it would
upset the channel it was attached to causing a flurry of channel checks
that could bring the host system to its knees. When I worked in the IBM
Toronto Lab we had two channel attached Series/1 machines with 72MD
diskette units that we used to create diskettes from images sent to us
and also to send diskette images. These Series/1s pretended to be a
3270 control unit so that the MVS host system knew how to talk to them.
Paul.
