Few realise the PCM mainframe industry was not only controlled from Japan, but that they also had a strategy and defined routes to market.
NEC was told to enter joint ventures. Fujitsu to take a large equity share in the companies it dealt with (not just Amdahl - 419 companies in total) and Hitachi was told to stay in Japan and use dealerships abroad. This explains a lot of the major design differences. Alone among the three Hitachi had no control over site preparation, etc., so right from the S6 (AS/6 from Itel, AS/7000 from NAS) every machine was powered via motor-generators. The S6 would survive a complete 0.6 second brownout, the S8 (AS/9000) 0.8 seconds. Amdahl used similar technology, but bought them mostly from Pillar. I had a customer in Aßlar, near Wetzlar - RZ Schulte. They were plagued by CPU outages caused by lightning strikes to the transmission lines in the hills. I recommended an S6 because of its built-in motor generators. About six months after installation, I sa a massive thundrestorm pass over his area - our Frankfurt office was on the ninth floor. The phone rang. 'Payne' 'HERR PAYNE - HIER IST SCHULTE!' 'Ja, Herr Schulte. How are you?' 'HERR PAYNE, WHEN I BOUGHT THIS MACHINE YOU PROMISED ME IT WOULD NOT FAIL BECAUSE OF LIGHTNING STRIKES!' 'True, Herr Schulte.' 'WELL, IT HASN'T! BUT EVERYTHING ELSE HAS!' I heard later he made the call from a darkened data centre, with every single piece of equipment silent except the quietly humming CPU asking where its disks had gone. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
