> No; the "upgrade" on the 370/145 was a new floppy disk. A story concerning the 370/145:
A certain financial institution of a specialised nature much in the news recently - as a major component of a larger group and then another larger group just before the crisis - got hold of an early 145 to run alongside and replace an older machine, probably a 360/50. Two things conspired together resulting in a catastrophe: 1. They fell out with the SE who used to hold their hand - as SEs did in the early '70s 2. They got exited about this new-fangled thing called "virtual storage" (VS) which looked like a "free lunch" The precise details are hazy but I believe they had the CE install the VS microcode, they installed a suitable version/release of the operating system and they transferred their business-critical online application to the new machine from the old machine. Unfortunately, the 370/145 did not have as much real storage as the older machine - but, hey, that's what VS is all about isn't it? Disaster! If anyone remembers a cartoon of a skeleton with its bony hand on a 3270, the equivalent here would be of a skeleton with a bony hand feeding a pass book into a financial terminal. Naturally, they wanted to know what had gone wrong. Since it all appeared to have happened because of the new operating system, they called in the regional "OS" specialist, a colleague of mine in the same centre. I might have been called in also as supposedly the regional "teleprocessing" specialist but I was in the US supporting a most unusual - "online" - benchmark in K Street, Washington DC, the only location where 2260s were available for such activity. Or I might at the time of the disaster have taken up the opportunity to take a holiday in Florida - Daytona Beach - driving on the sand - that sort of thing! When I returned, after work I went over to the pub with my thankfully highly technical boss and my "OS" colleague. There I heard about the disaster with the online application. Instantly the penny dropped: raw "VS" and raw online applications are incompatible. I say raw "VS" but I don't know what adjustments were ever made to make VS operating systems more friendly to online applications. I do know that the online application enabling systems such as CICS and IMS got themselves a "/VS" suffix implying that they were better prepared for a "VS" environment. Meantime, the recommendation was to limit severely the extent to which you were able to "over-commit" online applications, vastly less than was possible with batch applications. The customer probably reverted to running the application either on the old machine for a while and then in a probably very greedy - close to 100% - "working set" if under a "VS" operating system. Given the rather special enabling software and the rather special financial terminals they were using, they may well have had to wait until they had migrated to more mainstream products before finally realising the benefits of "VS" for their online application. - > No; the DAT boxes on the 370/155 and 370/165 were post-delivery field upgrades[1], not options that you could order. At $200K (155) and $400K (165), it wouldn't have made economic sense either to offer or to order a 370/155 II or 370/165 II once the 158 and 168 were announced. > [1] There was no field upgrade from a 165 to a 168, and we had one. At a recognition event in Madrid in 1971, a chief honcho from another financial institution - also in the news recently for the same reasons as above and also in a merged form - explained why it was good for IBM customers that they had made the 370/155 and 370/165 available with IBM knowing full well that the real excitement, namely "VS", was about to be available fairly shortly - can anyone fill that in? - afterwards. Bundles of "stick" had been thrown IBM's way over this and so the event organisers had pushed this eminent gentleman forward in order to provide the counterargument. I believe it really worked only if the customer had ordered and taken delivery of the said machine types at or shortly after announcement. Any who had ordered and taken delivery just before the 370/158 and 370/168 were announced was still entitled to be spitting blood. I actually missed that presentation since the Prado was so much more interesting. Chris Mason On Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:57:11 -0500, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) <[email protected]> wrote: >In <[email protected]>, on 12/17/2009 > at 02:10 PM, Rick Fochtman <[email protected]> said: > >>IIRC, the DAT box was optional on the 370/145 and became standard on the >>370/148. > >No; the "upgrade" on the 370/145 was a new floppy disk. > >>Ditto the 370/155 and 370/158 and 370/165 and 370/168. > >No; the DAT boxes on the 370/155 and 370/165 were post-delivery field >upgrades[1], not options that you could order. At $200K (155) and $400K >(165), it wouldn't have made economic sense either to offer or to order a >370/155 II or 370/165 II once the 158 and 168 were announced. > >>The 168 was unique in the 370 series because it used outboard >>channels; as I recall , it was the only 370 that did so. > >The 165, 165 II, 168 and 195 all had outboard channels; I don't know >whether you consider the 370/195 to be a true S/370. > >[1] There was no field upgrade from a 165 to a 168, and we had one. > >-- > Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT > ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html> >We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. >(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
