john.archie.mck...@gmail.com (John McKown) writes: > I remember from my first jobs, about 1979, DP (the name back then) was > looking at some mini-computer for the police department (City of > Ft. Worth, TX). The sales person showed us the equipment. And said > that all software maintenance was done by the hardware C.E. type > person. He would put a tape in the integrated drive and "press a > button". That was it. Everything else was just application level > programming. The closest that I know of today is the IBMi (nee AS/400) > which supposedly only needs a "administrator" who supposedly doesn't > need to know much more than how to read a manual. Of course, the OS > being more or less "hard wired" into the hardware means that there are > basically NO internals documented.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017g.html#23 Eliminating the systems programmer was Re: IBM cuts contractor billing by 15 percent (our else) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017g.html#28 Eliminating the systems programmer was Re: IBM cuts contractor bil ling by 15 percent (our else) "no internals documented" ... including hardware operation & instructions AS/400 was targeted at being migration path for s/36 and s/38 ... and lower-level "FS" features (from s/38) were eliminated ... but because of the very high-level ease of operation ... it was relatively straight-forward to migrate both s/36 and s/38 to as/400. starting late 70s, the was IBM program to migrate the multitude of internal microprocessors to RISC (801 iliad chips) .... low & mid range 370s, controllers, as/400, etc. For various reasons these programs aborted (with risc engineers leaving for risc programs at other vendors) ... and things reverted to doing traditional CISC chips ... including crash CISC chip design program for as/400. However, the as/400 interface is so high .... that decade later, as/400 finally did migrate to 801 risc (power/pc). past posts mentioning 801, risc, iliad, romp, rios, power, power/pc http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 note about the same time apple macs went from motorola 68k to power/pc .... and since has moved to intel (latest change is claimed because IBM wasn't doing power efficient power/pc chips for laptop market). other triva: my brother was regional apple market rep (largest physical region conus). I would get invited to business dinners and sometimes got to argue mac design with the mac developers (before mac was announced). He worked out how to get on online access to the hdqtrs system to track manufacturing and delivery schedules ... which was an IBM S/38. -- 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
