On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 09:55 -0400, Ed Finnell wrote:
> The story I heard was they liked ASP, but it was too piggy so a
> furious rewrite was undertaken and it became Half ASP. Most of the
> design objectives were met. When they went to present, it was deemed
> unsophisticated and changed to Houston ASP.
>From session O441 at SHARE 79: "The History of HASP and JES2"...
A long, long time ago, IBM was deep in development of the S/360 (known
at the time as "NPL", or "New Product Line"). This was a particularly
long and uncomfortable pregnancy for IBM, and as they wrestled with NPL
they began to lose sales in their 70x0 mainframe product line.
A garage project ("Project Moonlight") was started to try to extend the
life of the 7090/94 mainframe. The engineers lashed a 7040/44 to the
7090 and used it as a peripheral processor -- basically a separate
computer to do spooling. The little experiment was wildly successful,
and where you used to get 150 jobs per day through the 7090, now you
could get 400 jobs per day.
Later when the S/360 was out, the former Project Moonlight team from
Houston went to Los Angeles to build the "Attached Support Processor"
for S/360. They took ASP back with them to Houston, but NASA - then the
big account in Houston - didn't want to double the number of processors
on the floor to get spooling. The Project Moonlight team wrote a program
called "SPOOL" in January 1967. But since "SPOOL" was a common acronym,
and there were lots of programs around the industry called "SPOOL", a
contest was held within the Houston branch office to name the program.
The winner was... HASP!
--
David Andrews
A. Duda and Sons, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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