-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Van Dalsen, Herbie Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 11:55 AM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: T3 Sues IBM To Break its Mainframe Monopoly
<SNIP> Well here is my $0.05 worth... How long did Amdahl last ? Os shall I say How far were they prepared to support the people that trusted them enough to buy a mainframe off them... I firmly believe in competition, but so many times I have seen someone coming into an area where someone else have been operating successfully for many years, undercutting the prices, not making if after the original guy went bust. I don't for one moment think IBM will end up like DEC that was bought by Olivetti?? Who was bought by Compaq who was bought by HP??? Yet, these new guys will come in, do the business for a few years, mainly because they want to make their investors money, but they will end up paying IBM so much in legitimate patent fees, that they will have to give it up. Unless it is someone big like Sun / HP, that actually have enough R&D resources available... They will just become another lot that will finally drive a few more mainframe users to HP / Dell. <SNIPAGE> Ever wonder how much money IBM is paying to Fujitsu for PR/SM!?! Remember Amdahl came out with MDF (Multiple Domain Support) before IBM even thought to come out with PR/SM. And who came up with XA I/O? Amdahl, in order to do MDF and share channels had to do floating I/O interrupts, and related control block structures in HSA (a la XA) to get this to work. And in another comment about 64 bit, in order for the machine to have more than 2GB to share between DOMAINS (LPARs for you PR/SM folk), the hardware registers had to support extended addressability. Similar to the 3033 26 bit addressing when the 3033MP came along (I was not at Amdahl when the 5995M machines were rolled out - and I didn't get to discuss much with that "future" machine's personnel, so I don't know its internals at all). Then there is ye good ole CF (Coupling Facility). At Amdahl I remember some discussions about an external storage system and how we would effect this so that the storage was shared between two or more CECs. It was said by someone at that point (1989) that we would have to wait for IBM to do it first or we would have to support our method AND their method (assuming they did it differently). So from this you can see that the company had a lot on the ball in the area of R&D up to 1989 when some of us macrocode developers were shown the door (interestingly enough, this was during ESA implementation). But the point is, Amdahl had quite a wealth of Patents it owned that were being cross licensed to IBM and other PCMs. And obviously IBM and Amdahl were reading each other's patent filings to try to figure out what the other was doing. And, the support question raised in another posting is very interesting to me. Amdahl had a group that wrote architectural testing programs (e.g., DIRT, 8E7, and Alpha just to name three) to verify that Amdahl's machines did EXACTLY what the PoO called for. And as a developer, we had to sometimes run a test of our own on an equivalent IBM machine to ensure that we gave the same results, OR, a letter was sent to IBM asking for clarification when the following program is run.... But like I said before, Amdahl died because upper management lost their understanding of the company and their customers -- in 1990 Amdahl's market share was 50% of all IBM Mainframe PCMs, which translated to approximately 7% of the IBM Mainframe market. And then they started losing market share because of their loss of vision. So some of the top execs were let go by Fujitsu after Fujitsu exercised its option to buy out the company. Then, as I understand it, the company was renamed and became a holding company for Fujitsu IP. Regards, Steve Thompson -- All opinions expressed by me are my own and may not necessarily reflect those of my employer. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
