john.archie.mck...@gmail.com (John McKown) writes: > Descended from ACP (Airline Control Program). > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Airline_Control_Program > > I worked at Braniff Airways before it went under. The reservation system > ran ACP on a 2 Meg 3033. The thing would IPL in about 5 seconds. The ACP > systems people were a bit strange. They had the source and modified it. I > remember the CE complaining that the ACP attached tapes (3420s) would just > die with "no warnings at all" whereas the MVT (yes MVT on a 3033) and, a > bit later MVS and VM would show temp errors. The ACP people then told the > CE that they had removed all logging of temporary errors to speed up > processing. Not just on the tapes, but on the 3344 disks as well. IIRC, the > 3344s on ACP actually used "software duplexing" for reliability.
there was big problem with 3081 ... which originally was going to be multiprocessor only ... and ACP/TPF didn't have multiprocessor support (they were afraid that the whole market would move to clone processors which were building newer single processor machines). An an interim they shipped some number of releases of VM370 with very unnatural things done to it specifically for running ACP/TPF on multiprocessors (but degraded performance for all other customers). Eventually they shipped 3083 ... which was a 3081 box with one of the processors removed (minor trivia, simplest would be to remove the 2nd processor which was in the middle of the box ... but that would have made the box dangerously top-heavy, they had to rewrire "processor 0" to processor in the middle and remove the processor at the top of the box). other issues with 308x ... highlighting that it was warmed over FS technology http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm later in the 80s, my wife did temporary stint as chief architect for Amedeus (euro res system based on old eastern "system one") ... the communication group got her replaced because she backed x.25 (instead of sna/vtam) ... it didn't do them much good because amedeus went with x.25 anyway. later in the mid-90s, we were asked to look at re-engineering some of the largest airline res system in the world ... starting with ROUTES (about 25% of total mainframe processing load) addressing the ten impossible things that they couldn't do. I went away and two months later came back with totally different ROUTES implementation that ran about hundred times faster and did all ten impossible things ... including ten RS/6000 990s being able to handle every ROUTES transaction for every airline in the world. The issue was much of ACP/TPF implementation was dictated by technology trade-offs made in the 60s ... it was possible to start from scratch 30yrs later and make totally different trade-offs (and a decade later, cellphone processors had processing capacity of those ten 990s). It was fun because they provided me with tape of the full OAG ... including record for every scheduled airline flt in the world. -- 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
