Ray Mullins wrote:
I remember earlier 3090 models did have 3370's for the service processor;
this was 1987-1988 or thereabouts.
Our IBM FE said that the designers used it because someone said to use up
all the 3370s that weren't selling. Not that I believed that 100%...
by 1988, 3370 were coming up on ten year old technology ... having been announced in
1979; they would have been at least 2-3 generation old technology ... and so would have
relatively out-of-date price/bit (so in that sense, 3370s probably weren't still
"selling")
1979 3370 announcement reference for 4331, 4341 and system/38
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3370.html
in the 3090, 3370s would have been used by the pair 4361s running highly
modified version of vm370 release 6 ... that were being used as service
processors.
FBA was significantly simpler device to deal with than all the vagaries of CKD ... so in
that sense it would be an ideal availability/reliability device for use by service
processor ... first 3310 FBA used by the 3081 service processor ... and then 3370 FBA
used by the 3090 service processor. One of the FBA characteristics is that the whole
fixed-block architecture genre could obtain profile characteristics from the device ...
and use common support regardless of how device characteristics changed over time ...
very similar to "SCSI" or many of the other fixed block architectures.
this chronology "50 years of hard drives"
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127105/article.html
lists 3370 as first drive to use thin-film heads.
I've posted before about some of the thin-film head work. Part of it was simulating
"air-bearing" floating head characteristics ... originally by disk division
people running simulation on the SJR 370/195 in bldg. 28. One of the problems with that
was there was significant backlog workload for the 195 ... measured in multiple weeks for
turn-around.
One of the benefits of getting operating systems onto the "stand alone" machines in the disk
engineering and product test labs (bldg 14 & 15) ... was the engineers saw a significant increase
in productivity since multiple concurrent testing could be done "on-demand" anytime the
engineer needed to ... instead of having to wait for dedicated, stand-alone, scheduled test time. Lots
of past posts mentioning doing operating system work in disk engineering and product test labs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk
The other benefit was that even the most heaviest device testing tended to
place only a couple percent cpu load on the machines. As a result, we had at
our disposal significant amounts of processor time ... somewhat to use as we
saw fit. The engineering and product test labs also tended to get the latest
processors ... so saw some of the earliest 4341s and 3033s. So while 3033 was
only about half the peak thruput of the 195 ... we could move the air-bearing
simulation work over to the 3033 in bldg. 15 and give it almost unlimited
amount of processing.
for a little drift ... using search engine looking for other thin-film head references
... I tripped over this (again, copies appear at a number of places on the web)
http://febcm.club.fr/english/information_technology/information_technology_4.htm
which includes the note about 8Feb83: "IBM announces the Object Code Only policy on all its
products, including VM" ... i.e. where it was standard not only for vm370 to ship all source
... but maintenance was also shipped as source updates. there is recent reference here to
waterloo/share tape having large body of source level changes for vm370 ... even at the time of the
"OCO" announcement
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
other posts in this and related threads:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#48 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#51 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#52 CMS (PC Operating Systems)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#65 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#69 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#72 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#27 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#32 I/O in Emulated Mainframes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#33 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#35 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#39 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#40 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems
history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#42 FBA rant
misc. past posts about the air-bearing simulation for thin-file (floating) heads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was:
Movies with source code
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#30 Weird
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#63 Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#74 They Got Mail: Not-So-Fond Farewells
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#51 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re:
Yamhill
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#52 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re:
Yamhill
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#69 Multics Concepts For the Contemporary
Computing World
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#20 360 Microde Floating Point Fix
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring,
wandering story
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#21 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on
7 Apr 2004
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#15 harddisk in space
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to
hardware?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#25 CKD Disks?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#8 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#4 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#5 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#44 Intel engineer discusses their
dual-core design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#29 IBM microwave application--early data
communications
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#0 IBM 610 workstation computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#13 IBM 610 workstation computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#14 IBM 610 workstation computer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#6 Google Architecture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#18 virtual memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#42 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#41 The Future of CPUs: What's After
Multi-Core?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#18 Why so little parallelism?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#27 The Future of CPUs: What's After
Multi-Core?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#31 The Future of CPUs: What's After
Multi-Core?
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