My turn. :-) Tony, one correction to your comments. The H70 was the two-way machine. The H50 was the full speed uni, and the H30 was a knee-capped uni. At a prior job, we ran an H50 for several years, ESCON attached to an RVA (anybody remember them? :-) ) and parallel attached to tape and printer. We didn't use the emulated I/O for anything. Had a pair of Bus-Tech boxes that handled our TCP/IP traffic across ESCON I believe to the H50.
Funny side story was that we got a know-it-all CxO came in and decided the mainframe was too expensive/large/outdated/whatever other negative thing he could come up with against it. He decided we were going to get modern so he spent mega-bucks on an HP superdome with all the peripherals. Physically a huge machine. Well, he showed up one day to show off the new machine to the big-wigs and after bragging the HP up to them, he looked around for the mainframe he was replacing and literally couldn't find it even though it was right in front of him. He didn't know we were running the mainframe on a box the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet. A couple years later, he was gone, and a couple years after that the superdome was gone too. Rex -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Tony Harminc Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 10:50 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: LzLabs in ComputerWorld On 13 December 2016 at 10:34, R.S. <r.skoru...@bremultibank.com.pl> wrote: > I dare to disagree. My turn... > Although MP3000 was better than MP2000, it was still nothing good. It was *much* better than the MP2000. Very much faster. It was a 390 G5 CPU. Even 2 x G5 on the top model (H50). A note on the "development only" idea about this machine. There *were* development (PWD) models. We had one, at a much reduced price, and we also had a free "Linux option" that kept the model number unchanged (P30), but doubled the CPU speed and doubled the memory. IIRC the non-PWD models were H30 and H50. > As a demonstration/learning/portable machine it was much to big. Sure. The old P390s were about the best for that. But you could always connect remotely. > As a production or development machine the I/O was really poor. Well... Don't mix the two kinds of I/O. There was the P390/Integrated Server style of I/O, all done by OS/2 through the (16-bit!) drivers taken unchanged from the P390. This was used for OS/2's own purposes (C drive, etc.) and it was possible to map emulated 390 DASD to OS/2 files on this space, exactly as on P390. But the "real" DASD I/O was via an STI cable from the G5 CPU to a PCI card on the passive backplane. The array of SSA drives connected to the same PCI bus, and that I/O was done with no involvement of OS/2 or even the Intel CPU. > No real channels except ESCON. There was a parallel channel, but IIRC not supported for DASD. Tape and UR only. But did you really have old DASD that you wanted to connect via Bus & Tag? Maybe a 3380... > No sysplex capability. A lot of SPOFs. Yes - SPOF were a problem for a production shop. Though OS/2 could crash and be rebooted without crashing the G5. But who wants Sysplex on a machine that size, except a development shop (ISV)? > z800 and followers were not much more expensive, but it's functionality was > significantly better. z800 + DASD + network interface + TN3270/console support of some kind came out to a lot more money. But of course speed of a 64-bit program on the MP3000 = 0 MIPS... Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN The information contained in this message is confidential, protected from disclosure and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, distribution, copying, or any action taken or action omitted in reliance on it, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and destroy the material in its entirety, whether in electronic or hard copy format. Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
