[email protected] (Mike Myers) writes:
> As Lynn Wheeler points out, TSS/360 was considered sound by many both
> in IBM and by at least a handful of IBM customers. I ran across many
> strong advocates during an assignment at IBM's Watson Research Center
> at Yorktown Heights, NY in the early '80s. These folks were serious
> enough to make it's control program design a basis for a competing
> version of VM/XA, known internally as VM/XB. This was my last project
> with IBM. I left the company before VM/XB was eventually shelved, and
> the issue of the competitive design may well have been settled by
> economic, rather than technical reasons.

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012o.html#30 Regarding Time Sharing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012o.html#31 Regarding Time Sharing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012o.html#34 Regarding Time Sharing

I had sponsored an internal advanced technology meeting spring
of 1982 ... discussed here:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a

As consequence of not being able to fix TSO &/or MVS, POK had a project
to port CMS to MVS ... as a way of providing interactive services, but
as mentioned previously MVS has some fundamental flaws for providing
interactive service ... and the implementation never really caught on.

There was also talks on a VM370 based Unix implementation ....  with
vm370 support for doing unix forks (user having lots of virtual address
spaces) as well as the TSS/370 implementation for AT&T Unix.

My theme for the conference was using new generation of software tools
and programming methodology to do a new highly efficient kernel ...
that could run on both the high-end ... aka SHARE LSRAD report ...  I
scanned my copy and got SHARE permission to put up on bitsaver here:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/share/
as well as the emerging microprocessors (aka the old cp67 microkernel
from the mid-60s had become enormously bloated and convoluted by this
time).

This eventually spawned a meeting in kingston cafeteria that was called
ZM (the lunchroom personal had gotten the meeting title wrong and put up
a sign "ZM" rather than "VM"). This then morphs into VM/XB. The
mainstream hudson valley jumped on it as a new microkernel for all
operating systems justified because of the high cost of duplicated
device support and associated error recovery for three different
operating systems (aka MVS, VS1, and VM370 would come to share the same
microkernel ... in part eliminated duplicate device support costs).  The
example being the AT&T effort to use a striped down TSS/370 for all its
hardware & device support ... as 370 unix platform.

You knew it was going to be another Future System failure ... when there
were 300-500 people writting VM/XB specifications ... when the original
objective was to have a small experienced group (no more than 20-30)
doing a lean implementation. misc. past posts mentioning FS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

for whatever reason, I still have a bunch of the old ZM stuff ... before
the morph into vm/xb.

note that as part of the POK effort to have corporate kill the vm370
product, shutdown the vm370 product group and move all the people to POK
to support mvs/xa (justification was not otherwise being able to meet
the mvs/xa ship schedule ... which was nearly 8yrs off at the time)
... the vmtool was developed ... an internal only 370/xa virtual machine
for supporting development and was never intended to be shipped as
product (as mentioned, endicott managed to save the vm370 product
mission, but had to reconsitute a development group from scratch).

With the introduction of mvs/xa & 3081 370/xa mode, company realizes
that lots of customers could use a migration tool ... being able to
concurrently run mvs and mvs/xa temporarily during transition period.

vmtool was packaged for various releases as vm/ma and/or vm/sf. a vm/xa
mafia faction grew in hudson valley for a few function product (i.e. the
vmtool had numerous performance and functional deficiencies compared to
vm/370 of the period).

outside of hudson valley, there was an internal datacenter that got a
full function vm/370 running with 370/xa support ... which was
enormously better than the vmtool variations of the period ... however
hudson valley had managed to justify significant development resources
to try and bring the vmtool platform up to vm/370 product level.  The
internal politics got fairly intense ... and eventually the vm/370 with
370/xa support disappears w/o a trace.

Old email reference 370/xa support in vm370
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email860121
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email860122
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#email860123
in this post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#87 A History of VM Performance

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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