Munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (01/02/85)
David Green and Andrew Klossner have set most of the facts straight,
but there is still some history missing or wrong:
VM/370 originated as CP/40, a small internal project at the IBM
Cambridge Scientific Center, 540 Tech Square, Cambridge, MA in about
1964. In that same building, MIT people were constructing MULTICS, of
which UNIX is an inferior descendent; hence this use of UNIX-WIZARDS.
CP/40 was intended to provide resources for the research in operating
systems being done at the Scientific Center. It used a /360 mod 40
with a patched-on hardware relocation box to provide virtual bare
/360s to each user. (The idea was an outgrowth of earlier work done
by R.W O'Neill on the 70XX machine at Watson Research Center in the
late 50s.) To aid programming, a simple interactive executive was
built supporting little more than an assembler, linker, editor, and
file system: CMS. That first system was pretty feeble; I can remember
groans sounding up and down the corridor whenever anyone did an
assembly.
When the /360 mod 67 came out with hardware relocation (virtual
memory) standard, the Cambridge people immediately moved to the more
powerful machine, creating CP-67/CMS. IBM's flagship OS for that
machine, TSS, was late and buggy, causing a number of installations to
acquire CP for their 67. (The Univ. of Michigan built their own very
nice system, MTS.) We started running CP at Brown Univ. in 1969 after
a great debate over whether interactive computing was a fad.
About this same time, some of the original developers of CP (Dick
Bayless, Mike Field, others) left IBM to start their own company, CSS
(later National CSS, later NCSS, finally bought out by Dun and
Bradstreet). It was one of the leaders in the heyday of phone-in
interactive mainframe computing. At Brown, we taught hands-on
operating system design and graphics on CP to several generations of
students who have gone on to prominence in the field. (U. of Mich.
produced a similar vintage group.)
By the time the /370 line was announced, there were about 50 CP-67
installations, mostly universities. (Less than 100 67s were built.) We
were amused by IBM's "invention" of virtual memory on the /370, as
were Burroughs and GE. CP/CMS made the jump to the /370 line easily,
becoming VM/370, and also began to rival IBM's "main" operating
system, OS/360-MVT -> MVS. I've heard rumors that pitched political
battles between the two factions at high levels in IBM continue to the
present day. Though I have no figures, I'd bet that there are more VM
users than UNIX users in the world today.
Finally, CP is now available on my desktop at a TOTAL price of $5500
(with MITRE's giant discount) in a PC/AT with the /370 board. I can't
wait to see if any of my code has survived the decades.
-- Bob Munckjans@mako.UUCP (Jan Steinman) (01/03/85)
In article <6912@brl-tgr.ARPA> Munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA writes: >...CP/CMS made the jump to the /370... becoming VM/370, and also began to >rival IBM's "main" operating system,... MVS. I've heard rumors that pitched >political battles between the two factions at high levels in IBM continue to >the present day. If you're a customer, IBM really pushes you toward MVS (stressing things like RACF, TSO, etc.). But guess what they use internally? Of the five machines in use at FSD (Manassas, VA) at the time I was there, only \one/ ran MVS, and that was (curiously enough, when related to this discussion) for outside contractors, because MVS/TSO was considered more \secure/! -- :::::: Jan Steinman Box 1000, MS 61-161 (w)503/685-2843 :::::: :::::: tektronix!tekecs!jans Wilsonville, OR 97070 (h)503/657-7703 ::::::
geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) (01/04/85)
One last point that nobody else seems to have mentioned: IBM used VM on the 360 internally for OS/360 development for several years. I interviewed with them in 1974, and they were very proud to show me their fancy virtual machine. (DEC, by contrast, was running a godawful PDP-11 emulator on PDP-10's. It even kept track of rotational positions for the emulated disks.) -- Geoff Kuenning ...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff