On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 7:42 PM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > I find it interesting that the field of comms interoperability with IBM > mainframes was huge up until TCP/IP > took over, and all traces of the software implementations have disappeared or > were consolidated into a couple > like Micro Focus.
The golden years of Software Results and COMBOARDs were 1982-1986, perhaps a little later, but not much. By early 1989, we really didn't have many board sales, just maintenance contracts for the existing customer base and an occasional upgrade sale (Unibus->VAXBI or Unibus-Qbus). By 1994, there weren't that many customers left on maintenance. The last contract expired around February 1995. We did have a last breath of demand in the early 90s that garnered a tiny handful of sales - when EDI began to take hold, one of the standard transport models was 3780 to an IBM service that essentially took care of delivery in the fashion of an ISP. If you wanted to use that network, you needed _a_ product that would move files using sync modems and the 3780 protocol. There were a couple of PC products that could do it, and we were one of the last companies still in the Bisync space for minicomputers. After EDI moved to TCP/IP, that was all over. But in the early 80s, we made a few million dollars getting PDP-11s and VAXen to interoperate with IBM mainframes. At that time, lots of large companies needed it, then fairly quickly nobody needed it. -ethan
