poodles...@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 on 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 him in business through the end of the century. misc. past posts mentioning future system http://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, 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 http://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 scaleup (and 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
