The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
scott.r...@joann.com (Scott Rowe) writes: > Many of us skipped the applications sidetrack and just went straight > from Ops to Sysprog. I took a intro to fortran class and sat in on 360 assembler class (class projects ran on simulator on 709). I was then hired for summer job to port 1401 MPIO to 360/30. As part of migrating the univ. 709/1401 lashup to 360/67 ... the univ. had replaced 1401 with 360/30. While the 360/30 had 1401 hardware emulation and run MPIO directly (did unitrecord<->tape front end for 709 that ran ibsys tape-to-tape) ... I guess I was hired as part of gaining experience in 360. I got to design my own monitor, storage management, dispatcher, device drivers, error recovery, interrupt handlers, console interface, etc. When 360/67 came in, tss/360 wasn't running all that well ... so the univ pretty much stuck to os/360 (going thru pcp, mft, mvt cycle). They pretty early made me responsible for os/360 ... and I got to do a lot of work redoing various parts of os/360. Univ. even sent me to SHARE meetings to make presentations on some of the work. in jan68, ibm brought in three people from the science center to install cp67 ... and I got to play with that also (mostly on weekends). part of presentation I made at aug68 share in boston, on both os/360 and cp67 rewrites http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 when rewritting part of cp67 terminal interface to support tty/ascii terminals ... I tried to make the 2702 controller do something it couldn't quite do. This was somewhat the motivation for univ. to have clone controller project built on interdata/3, reverse engineer 360 channel interface, build channel interface board for interdata/3, etc. Four of us got written up ... being blamed for clone controller business. some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm the clone controller business was then major motivation for the corporation starting Future System effort (failed w/o ever being announced) ... some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys old reference to fergus & morris book http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#33 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984?? that claims that the focus on FS & neglecting 370 allowd processor clones to gain market foothold ... and "the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr of free and vigourous debate was replaced with sycophancy and 'make no waves' under Opel and Akers" I possibly did one of my non "career enhancing moves" ... by continuing to work on 370 all during the FS days ... and drawing comparisons between what was going on in FS and a cult film that was playing down in central sq. I was also making reference to having running 370 code that was better than what some of the FS specs was trying to do. People were being told that if they wanted promotions and raises ... they needed to take a transfer to FS. Another Boyd "To Be Or To Do" moment (I had sponsored Boyd's briefings at IBM): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#35 War, Chaos, & Business -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
