re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013i.html#71 Future of COBOL based on RDz policies was Re: RDz or RDzEnterprise developers
2nd hand about testimony in the gov. legal action ... claim that top executive from one of the seven dwarfs testified that by the late 50s every computer company realized that the single most important market criteria had become a compatible product line ... however, in the 60s, only ibm management was able to force the lab managers responsible for different products to toe the compatibility product requirement. the implication was that since IBM was the only company that provided the single most important market requirement (compatibility) ... they might even be able to get every other detail wrong and still dominate the market. ibm and the 7 dwarfs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUNCH old post about end of 360 advance computing system http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html mentions that ibm executives shut the project down because they were afraid that it would advance computer technology too fast and they would loose control of the market ... shortly after amdahl leaves and starts his clone 360 company. end of the page has features from ACS-360 showing up in es/9000 more than 25yrs later. note that this was in the time that clone controllers were starting to appear. IBM responded with the Future System effort ... which was to make the controller interface so tightly integrated and complex that it would significantly raise the bar for clone controller businesses. lots of past posts (and various web references) to future system http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys Future System was completely different and incompatible with 360/370 ... and internal politics were shutting down 370 projects ... the resulting lack of 370 products during the period is credited with giving the clone processors a market foothold the subsequent failure of future system effort is claimed to cast dark shadow over the company for decades (as well as significant change in corporate culture to "sycophancy" and "make no waves" under Opel and Akers) ... contributing to the big downturn and going into the red in the early 90s ... although another major contributing factor was the strangle-hold that the communication group had on datacenters ... trying to fight off client/server and distributed computing and preserve its (emulated) dumb terminal install base. some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal also it wasn't until 3090 that you see new computer ... both 303x & 3081 are q&d efforts using left-over technology ... some reference here: http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm trivia ... as an undergraduate in the 60s i did lots of changes to both os/360 and cp/67. when cp/67 was first delivered to univ. it had terminal support for 1052 & 2741 terminals (and did automatic terminal identification ... any terminal could be connected to any controller port and cp/67 would figure out type of terminal). The univ had lots of tty/ascii terminals ... and I added tty support to cp67 ... doing it so that it was also dynamically recognized (any terminal type on any port). I wanted to have a single dial-up number for all terminals ("hunt group) ... finding the available line to the controller ... however it didn't quite work. While the ibm 360 terminal controller allowed type of line-scanner to be dynamically associated with any port ... they had done a short-cut and hard-wired line-speed oscillator to each port. this was major motivation for univ. to start clone controller project ... started with interdata/3 minicomputer (instruction set very similar to 360), reverse engineer the channel interface and built channel interface board for interdata/3, the interdata/3 was programmed to emulate ibm controller ... but in addition to dynamically associate line-scanner type with each port ... it could also dynamically determine terminal baud rate. later four of us are written up as being responsible for (some part of) clone controller business. some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm it was then enhanced with an interdata/4 to handle the channel interface and cluster of interdata/3s handling the port interfaces. later perkin-elmer buys interdata and the product continues to be sold under the perkin-elmer logo. A decade ago, visiting a large east coast financial transaction datacenter ... there is one such perkin-elmer box handling significant percentage of point-of-sale dial-up terminals in the eastern part of the country. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
