0000014ab5cdfb21-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu (Mike Wawiorko) writes: > Remember back in 1980 there was no sysplex. Each machine was a > stand-alone system with a single operating system - if we ignore VM > guests. > > There was a proliferation of 4341s, 4361s(?), 4381s and even a bit > later 9370s running MVS. OS/VS1, OS/VS2, VM, DOS (the mainframe one > not the PC one), TPF and possibly others. > > Also remember non-IBM mainframes. Boroughs comes to mind but there were > others.
Early 1979 (before first customer ship), I was con'ed into doing 4341 benchmark for national lab that was looking at getting 70 for compute farm ... sort of leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami. cluster of five 4341s had more compute and I/O power than 3033, less expensive, less floor space, less power & environmentals. At some point POK felt so threatened that they got corporate to cut in half critical 4341 manufacturing component. Also large corporations were ordering (VM/370) 4341+3370 FBAs, hundreds at a time for placing out in departmental areas (inside IBM, departmental conference rooms became scarce commodity since so many were being used for vm4341s), sort of the leading edge of the coming distributed computing tsunami. One of the issues for MVS was that 3380s (even 3380 had already moved to small fixed sized blocks, can see in size roundup calculations for records/track) were high-end datacenter disks ... FBA were the only mid-range that could be used out in non-datacenter environment. Eventually 3375 CKD was produced, 3370 FBA simulating CKD for MVS ... however, it didn't do MVS a whole lot of good. Large customers with hundreds of distributed VM/4300s were looking at large number of (distributed and/or clustered) systems per support/operational staff ... while MVS was still number of staff per system (today's large cloud megadatacenters have several hundred thousand systems with 80-120 staff). Old post with decade of DEC VAX sales, sliced&diced by year, model, US/non-US (discount microvax, half the total). VM/4300s sales in single or small unit number orders were similar (as VAX numbers), a big difference were large corporations ordering hundreds of vm/4341s at a time for departmental, distributed operation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 The internal network (non-SNA) was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime mid-80s. The big difference for arpanet/internet was the change-over from IMPs/host protocol to internetworking protocol on 1Jan1983. At that time, it had approx. 100 IMP network nodes and 250 mainframe hosts ... while the IBM internal network was rapidly approaching 1000 nodes (which it passes a few months later), a huge influx were the distributed vm/4300s all over the world. Old post with list of world-wide corporate locations that added one or more network nodes during 1983. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#8 Some of the MIT CTSS/7094 people had gone to the 5th floor to do MULTICS while others went to the IBM science center on the 4th floor and did virtual machines, internal network, bunch of online and performance technology (GML was invented at the science center in 1969, GML tag processing was then added to CMS SCRIPT ... which was a reimplementation of CTSS RUNOFF). There was some amount of (friendly) rivalry between 5th and 4th flrs. One of MULTICS premier installations was USAF data services ... old email about they wanted to come out to talk to me about 20 vm/4341s http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404b when they finally got around to coming out six months later (fall 1979), it had grown to 210 vm/4341s. Other old reference to virtual machines at some government agencies starting in the 60s ... gone 404, but lives on at the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml trivia: my wife was in the Gburg JES group and one of he catchers for ASP to turn in JES3 ... also co-author of JESUS (JES Unified System), all the features of the two systems that the respective JES2 & JES3 customers couldn't live w/o (for various reasons, it never came to fruition). She was then con'ed into going to POK to be responsible for loosely-coupled architecture where she did peer-to-peer, shared data architecture. She didn't remain long in part because of 1) little uptake (except for IMS hot standby), until SYSPLEX and Parallel SYSPLEX much later and 2) constant battles with communication group trying to force her into using SNA/VTAM for loosely-coupled operation. -- 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
