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] (Tom Schmidt) writes: > The mainframe community also supported city, area and regional user groups > for quite a few of its subcomponents for many, many years -- up until the > advent of the internet, which brought communication without travel > requirements. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#7 Xephon, are they still in business? 70s use of the internal network (mostly vm370) included rexx evolution REXX Symposium, May 1995 http://www.rexxla.org/Symposium/1995/report.html ... from above: Mike discussed his ideas for a new scripting language with colleagues at Hursley and with other IBMers over IBM's VNET network, which then had 300 nodes in Europe and North America. He sent out the first language specification and began incorporating the feedback. He typically wrote and circulated the documentation for each new feature to get feedback on the desirability of the new function before doing the implementation. He also typically first wrote a few programs to exercise the new feature and see whether it was right. The first implementation was distributed via VNET on May 21, 1979. "From then on, the good ideas came from the users." For example, David N. Smith, the father of VMSHARE, insisted upon being able to nest comments ... snip ... at the time of the arpanet/internet great switch-over to tcp/ip on 1jan83, depending on how counted, there were something between 100 and 250 nodes ... old post with reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#7 Was FORTRAN buggy? by comparison, in 1983, the internal network exceeded 1000 nodes (again mostly vm370 machines) ... prepping for the announcement http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#email830422 in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#43 Arpa address the actual announcement included in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
