Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lynn Wheeler Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:48:55 -1000 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 63 Message-ID: <878qptjrh4.fsf@localhost> References: <1976765442.762208809.808387.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> <20250225130315.00004e34@gmail.com> <87y0xtjts3.fsf@localhost> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 04:49:12 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="f059cba56fe322e4ed3641c7b5cd40f8"; logging-data="2544410"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1886cHm3lCit15Sah4hzfuOZNV4KLa9eZw=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:MBNAmhMrm8P2ekvSTz3DlzcftFA= sha1:Qgtao8ebfoOZi+LKL8xDadQ6wfA= Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:230094 comp.os.linux.misc:65704 Lynn Wheeler writes: > All during FS, I continued to work on 370 and would periodically > ridicule FS, including analogy with long playing cult film down in > central sq (lots of blue sky stuff going on with little idea on how it > might be implemented). One of the last nails in the FS coffin was > analysis by the IBM Houston Scientific Center that if 370/195 > applications were redone for FS machine made out of the fastest > technology available, it would have throughput of 370/145 (about 30 > times slowdown). late 70s, there was a plan to replace the large myriod of different internal CISC microprocessors, architectures, programming (controllers, low & mid-range 370s, as400 followon to s/38, etc) with common RISC and common software programing. For various reasons all these floundered and things returned to doing custom CISC ... and saw some number of the engineers leave for other vendors. RISC ROMP was going to be for the DISPLAYWRITER follow-on running CP.r and PL.8 ... but it got canceled (lot of that market was moving to PCs). It was then decided to pivot to the unix workstation market and they got the company that had done AT&T UNIX port to the IBM/PC for PC/IX to do "AIX" for PC/RT (follow-on was mutli-chip RIOS for RS/6000). IBM 801 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 The First RISC: John Cocke and the IBM 801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33055361 Computer Chronicles Revisited 65 -- The IBM RT PC https://www.smoliva.blog/post/computer-chronicles-revisited-065-ibm-rt-pc/ ... note in above: Birnbaum had been head of (IBM Research) Yorktown Computer Science and some people that had been working late 70s on 801 left for HP Labs ... and I got email asking if I might be joining them. I was in San Jose Research, but also had offices&labs out in Los Gatos VLSI labs that were doing "Blue Iliad" (1st 32bit 801/risc chip ... large, hot chip, never came to fruition). Before announced/ship, IBM executive Nick Donofrio approved HA/6000 product, originally for NYTimes to move their newspaper system (ATEX) off VAXCluster to RS/6000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific cluster scale-up with national labs (LANL, NCAR, LLNL, etc) and commercial cluster scale-up with RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix) that had VAXCluster support in same source base with unix (I do a distributed lock manager that support VAXCluster API semantics to simplify port). Then IBM S/88 product administer starts taking us around to their customers and also gets me to write a section for the corporate continuouus available strategy document (it gets pulled when both Rochester/AS400 and POK/mainframe complain that they can't meet the requirements) Early Jan1992, have meeing with Oracle CEO, IBM/AWD executive Hester tells Ellison that we would have 16-system clusters mid92 and 128-system cluster ye92. Then late Jan1992, cluster scale-up is transferred for announce as IBM Supercomputer (technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we are told we can't work on anything with more than four processors (we leave IBM a few months later). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970