john.archie.mck...@gmail.com (John McKown) writes: > TSO seems to be about as important to IBM as VSPC was. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Storage_Personal_Computing
VSPC was to be low-end non-vm370/cms online. They had a performance "model" which predicted benchmark performance ... and required VM370/CMS to run equivalent benchmarks taking major part of the VM370/CMS group resources (and the predicted VSPC performance was always significantly better then the equivalent VM370/CMS benchmarks). Finally when VSPC was actually operational, it turns out that VSPC actual performance was much worse than their model predictions (as well as actual VM370/CMS performance) afterwards, Endicott tried to get corporate approval to ship vm370/cms as part of every machine they made (sort of like LPARS today implementing a virtual machine subset). however, this was in the period after Future System imploding ... past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys and POK was convincing corporate to kill VM370/CMS product and move the group to POK for MVS/XA or otherwise MVS/XA wouldn't ship on time (some 7-8yrs later). Endicott eventually managed to acquire the VM370/CMS product mission, but they had to reconstitute a development group from scratch ... some customer comments about code quality during this period show up in the vmshare archives (TYMSHARE provided their CMS-based online computer conferencing free to share starting in August 1976). http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare Later still, endicott was selling so many vm/4300 machines that it got corporate to declare vm370/cms the corporate strategic online interactive platform (which really drove POK crazy, small payback for POK earlier getting vm370/cms product killed) ... even tho they still couldn't get corporate approval to ship vm370/cms as part of every machine sold. large customers were ordering hundreds of vm/4300s at a time for placing out in departmental areas, sort of precursor to the coming distributed computing tsunami. also, vm/4300 clusters were severely threatening high-end POK mainframes (better price/performance, smaller footprint, less environmentals) ... at one point POK managed to get allocation of critical 4300 manufacturing component cut it half. Before first 4341 shipped, I had got conned into doing benchmarks on engineering machines for LLNL (national lab) that was looking at getting 70 4341s for compute farm ... leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami (grid computing which has huge technology overlap with the cloud megadatacenters, running hundreds of thousand of systems). Part of the POK plan to kill vm370/cms was to not tell the group about their move to POK until the very last minute ... to minimize the number that could escape. However the news leaked early and lots managed to escape in local Boston/Cambridge area ... many to DEC (there is joke that head of POK was one of the largest contributors to the DEC VMS product). In the wake of the leak, there was witchhunt for the source ... fortuantely for me nobody gave up the source. -- 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
