The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rick Fochtman) writes: > If the business needs are being satisfied, with reasonable economy, > who cares whether the box is "the lastest and greatest"? Future > business needs may or may not dictate upgrades. YMMV a little search engine mainframe surfing for vm/4341 turned up this story about a vm/4341 keeping the nyse running will thru the 80s ... apparently with an old mvt system that had been moved from 360/50s http://www.raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html that i mentioned in this recent post: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#26 VM system kept NYSE running a quick check just this moment, turns up some problem with the URL ... but (as always) the wayback machine knows http://web.archive.org/web/20060220161415/http://raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html for other topic drift ... we spent some amount of time in the early 90s talking to SIAC about using ha/cmp for much of the work that the tandems were doing (see mainframe MDS-II being replaced with tandem MDS-IIIs in the above reference) ... lots of ha/cmp references: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp this was in the period that we were also working on ha/cmp and trying to cram as much computing into dense footprint, old email references: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa I had actually attempted to do something similar nearly a decade earlier with trying to cram as many 370 chipsets (had about 168-3 thruput) as possible into racks. the old 8-10 yr cycle for mainframe generations (and obsolescence) really showed up when the early 70s FS project was killed http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys since it was going to be something completely different, much of the work on 370 related stuff pretty much went away. after FS was killed, there was a scramble to get stuff back into the 370 product pipeline. 370-xa/3081 was going to take eight yrs (early 80s) ... so they had to find something else that could be done in possibly half that time. the resulting 303x was quite a bit of warmed over 370. they took the intergrated channel microcode from 158 and made it stand-alone box called channel director. Then 158 paired with a channel director became 3031 (with integrated channel microcode running on different processor). 168 became 3032 repackaged to work with channel director. 3033 started out as 168 wiring diagram implemented with faster chip technology. straight-forward mapping would have just been 20percent faster than 168 ... other tweaks done during development got 3033 up to 1.5times 168. part of the issue was that up to the 80s, lots of technology was on 7-10yr cycle ... where in the 80s, the rate of change started to accelerate, for a time, leaving some mainframe technology in the dust. note that it wasn't just mainframes. circa 1990, there US automobile (C4) task force looked at being able to accelerate (cut in half) us automobile product cycle from 7-8yrs (in attempt to get on level playing field with some of the imports). it was interesting to watch what the mainframe people were saying in the meetings (since they were effectively in the same boat). one of the things that the automobile industry had been doing would run parallel new product projects offset by four yrs (so it appeared that something new was coming out every four yrs). the analogy for mainframes ... was as soon as 3033 was out the door, they started on 3090 (8yr overlap with 3081 with 4yr offset). in fairly stable industry this worked since consumer tastes weren't signicantly changing. However the 8yr lag could become significant if there was any significant change in what the market place was looking for (giving vendors that had much shorter product cycle a competitive edge). some recent references to C4 effort circa 1990 ... attempting to improve competitive footing vis-a-vis several imports: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
