[email protected] (Mike Schwab) writes: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX > IBM wrote TSS/370 in 1980 then VM/IX then AIX/370 in 1988 then AIX/ESA > until 1999 when it merged into MVS/ESA Open Edition.
tss/360 was done in the 60s (official system for 360/67) ... was decommited and lived on as small special project. some of the single-level-store (paged-mapped filesystem) ideas were picked up for (failed) future system effort ... misc. past posts mentioning future system http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys folklore is that after demise of future system, some of the participants retreated to rochester and did s/38 ... which then morphs into as/400 in the 80s, tss/370 got something of a new life ... as base for special bid mainframe unix for AT&T ... stripped down tss/370 kernel (SSUP) with AT&T doing unix interfaces to the SSUP kernel interface (in some sense this is somewhat analogous to USS for MVS). this was competing with Amdahl's GOLD/UTS unix internally inside AT&T. AIX/370 (in conjunction with AIX/386) was done by palo alto group using the unix-like LOCUS done at UCLA. This was similar but different from the unix-like MACH done at CMU ... which was used by a number of vendors including NeXT and morphs into current Apple operating system after Jobs returns to Apple. AIX/370 morphs into AIX/ESA. The "argument" for (Amdahl) UTS under vm370, aix/370 under vm370, tss/370 ssup, and vm/ix (on vm370) was that the cost to add mainframe RAS&erep to unix was several times larger than the base, direct, straight-forward unix port (running under vm370 &/or tss/370 leveraged the already existing ras&erep support w/o having to re-implement directly in unix). This was aggrevated by field service stand that it wouldn't service/support machines that lacked mainframe RAS&erep. I ran internal advanced technology conference in '82 ... and some of the presentation were about VM/IX implementation ... old post reference: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a Palo Alto group had also been working with Berkeley to port their unix-like BSD to mainframe ... but they got redirected instead doing a PC/RT port ... released from ACIS as "AOS" ... as an alternative UNIX to the "official" AIXV2. The wiki page says much of the AIX v2 kernel was written in PL/I. The issue was that the original "displaywriter" was based on ROMP, cp.r, and PL.8 (sort of pli subset). Redirected to the unix workstation market required unix&C (all being done by the company that had done pc/ix and had been involved in vm/ix). For the internal people, a project called VRM was devised ... a sort of abstract virtual machine layer ... to be done by the internal employees trained in pl.8. The claim was that the combination VRM plus unix port to VRM ... could be done in shorter time and less resources than unix port directly to ROMP hardware. The exact opposite was shown when the palo alto group did the BSD port direct to ROMP hardware (for "AOS"). VRM+unix drastically increased original/total development costs, life-cycle support costs and complicated things like new device drivers (since both non-standard unix/c device driver to VRM interface as well as VRM/pl.8 device driver had to be developed & supported). misc. past posts mentioning 801, romp, rios, pc/rt, aixv2, aixv3, power, rs/6000, etc http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 misc. old email mentioning 801 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#801 Besides various other issues, the AIX wiki page skips over the whole generation of OSF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation and the "unix wars" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_wars Project Monterey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Monterey skips over the whole cluster scaleup after IBM bought Sequent and support for Sequent's 256-way SCI-based Numa-Q. Recent posts in (linkedin) "Greater IBM" (current & former IBMer) discussion http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#7 IBM Watson's Ancestors: A Look at Supercomputers of the Past the sequent wiki ... mentioned in the above post ... used to be somewhat more caustic about sequent being dropped shortly after the sponsoring executive retired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems as noted in the "Greater IBM" post ... at one time, IBM had been providing quite a bit of funding for Chen's Supercomputer ... Sequent later acquires Chen Supercomputer and Chen becomes CTO at Sequent ... we do some consulting for Chen (before Sequent purchase by IBM). Part of the speculation for IBM's purchase of Sequent was that Sequent was major platform for some of the IBM mainframe simulator products. much of the "posix" (aka unix) support in MVS during the first half of the 90s was sponsored by the head of the disk division software group. in the late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at the internal, annual, world-wide communication group conference ... and opened the talk with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division (because the strangle-hold that the communication group had on datacenters). Large amounts of data was fleeing datacenters to more distributed computing friendly platforms. The disk division had attempted to come out with traditional products to address the problem ... but they were constantly blocked by the communication group. As a result, there were doing all sorts of things "outside-the-box" to try and work around the communication group's roadblocks. the head of the disk division software group would periodically ask us to consult on some of the efforts. for other drift, recent thread in comp.arch about tss/360 supported "position independent code" (i.e. possible to directly map a disk image into virtual memory at any arbitrary virtual address w/o having to perform any link-edit modifications to the contents of that image) ... and the horrendous problems attempting to do anything similar using anything from the os/360 genre: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#76 PIC code, RISC versus CISC also referenced: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#79 DCSS ... when shared segments were implemented in VM misc. past posts mentioning (tss/370) ssup: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#37 A Glimpse into PC Development Philosophy http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#13 Relocating application architecture and compiler support http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.html#20 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#61 Virtual Machine Hardware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#34 Power5 and Cell, new issue of IBM Journal of R&D http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#26 Old PCs--environmental hazard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#2 The Pankian Metaphor http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#30 Old Hashing Routine http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#22 Admired designs / designs to study http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#17 old Gold/UTS reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#38 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#3 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#43 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#69 Operating systems are old and busted http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#1 Migration from Mainframe to othre platforms - the othe bell? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#49 Any benefit to programming a RISC processor by hand? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#82 Yet another squirrel question - Results (very very long post) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#21 What if the computers went back to the '70s too? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#43 PC history, was search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#17 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#72 Entry point for a Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#28 someone smarter than Dave Cutler http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#0 Hashing for DISTINCT or GROUP BY in SQL -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
