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] (Ted MacNEIL) writes: > Mainframers brag about how long a system stays up. PFCSK's brag about > how fast they can re-boot. a lot of work was done on cp67 and subsequent vm370 to stay up, reboot quickly, and require minimum hands-on for 7x24 operation for around-the-clock, online access. reboot quickly included backup and operation in lights-out, unattended operation. this helped allow cp67 to migrate into commercial time-sharing service. first shift was obviously, fairly heavily used ... but offshift and weekends use might be problematical ... making it difficult to justify offshift availability unless costs were reduced to a minimum (i.e. no operator). however, there were other characteristics that were needed. back then, there was high percentage of leased systems ... and the processor "meter" was used to establish monthly charges. in addition to work on unattended/automated operation for cp67 ... there was also work on how to get the meter to "stop" when the system was otherwise idle. the system meter would run when the processor was executing and/or when there was active i/o operations (and would coast for 400mills after things quiesced). it took a little slight of hand to leave active i/o on the (terminal) interface (able to responds to spontaneous terminal i/o) and not have the meter run. for other topic drift ... posts related to getting to play disk engineer in bldgs. 14 (disk engineering) and 15 (disk product test). at the time they had tried operating test machines (processors used for testing disks & controllers in development) under MVS ... but found it had a MTBF of 15 minutes (hang and/or crash ... both requiring reboot). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk sort of as a hobby, putting together bullet proof operations where they could not only operate a single "test cell" ... but operate several concurrently (eliminated scheduling bottleneck for dedicated stand-alone single test at a time). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
