Re: Chipsandcheese article on the CDC6600

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

At the end, the influence of 6600 on computers we use today is close to
zero. On the other hand, influence of S/360 Model 85 is massive and
influence of S/360 Model 91 is significant, although far less than the
credit it is often given in popular articles.
Back at their time 6600 was huge success and both Model 85 and Model 91
were probably considered failures.

Amdahl wins battle to make ACS, 360 compatible, then shortly later ACS
was shutdown (folklore is executives felt it would advance
state-of-the-art too fast and IBM would loose control of the market),
Amdahl leaves IBM shortly later ... lots of history, including some of
the ACS features show up more than two decades later with ES/9000
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html
Of the 26,000 IBM computer systems in use, 16,000 were S/360 models
(that is, over 60%). [Fig. 1.311.2]

Of the general-purpose systems having the largest fraction of total
installed value, the IBM S/360 Model 30 was ranked first with 12%
(rising to 17% in 1969). The S/360 Model 40 was ranked second with 11%
(rising to almost 15% in 1970). [Figs. 2.10.4 and 2.10.5]

Of the number of operations per second in use, the IBM S/360 Model 65
ranked first with 23%. The Univac 1108 ranked second with slightly over
14%, and the CDC 6600 ranked third with 10%. [Figs. 2.10.6 and 2.10.7]

... snip ...

old email:

To: wheeler
Date: 04/23/81 09:57:42

your ramblings concerning the corp(se?) showed up in my reader
yesterday. like all good net people, i passed them along to 3 other
people. like rabbits interesting things seem to multiply on the
net. many of us here in pok experience the sort of feelings your mail
seems so burdened by: the company, from our point of view, is out of
control. i think the word will reach higher only when the almighty $$$
impact starts to hit. but maybe it never will. its hard to imagine one
stuffed company president saying to another (our) stuffed company
president i think i'll buy from those inovative freaks down the
street. '(i am not defending the mess that surrounds us, just trying to
understand why only some of us seem to see it).

bob tomasulo and dave anderson, the two poeple responsible for the model
91 and the (incredible but killed) hawk project, just left pok for the
new stc computer company. management reaction: when dave told them he
was thinking of leaving they said 'ok. 'one word. 'ok. ' they tried to
keep bob by telling him he shouldn't go (the reward system in pok could
be a subject of long correspondence). when he left, the management
position was 'he wasn't doing anything anyway. '

in some sense true. but we haven't built an interesting high-speed
machine in 10 years. look at the 85/165/168/3033/trout. all the same
machine with treaks here and there. and the hordes continue to sweep in
with faster and faster machines. true, endicott plans to bring the
low/middle into the current high-end arena, but then where is the
high-end product development?

... snip ...

first part of 70s, IBM had the Future System effort, completely
different from 370 and going to completely replace it (internal politics
during FS was killing off 370 products, the lack of new 370 during FS is
credited with giving clone 370 makers their market foothold, including
Amdahl) ... when FS implodes there was mad rush to get new stuff back
into the 370 product pipelines including kicking off quick&dirty
3033&3081 efforts in parallel.
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

370/xa was referred to "811" for the architecture/design documents'
Nov1978 publication date, nearly all of it was to address MVS short
comings (aka head of POK had shortly before managed to convince
corporate to kill the VM370 product, shutdown the development group and
have all the people transferred to POK for MVS/XA; Endicott did
eventually manage to save the VM370 product mission ... for the
"mid-range).

trivia: when I joined IBM, one of my hobbies was enhanced production
operating system for internal datacenters (including world-wide
sales&market support HONE). In the original morph of CP67->VM370, lots
of stuff was dropped and/or simplified (including multiprocessor
support). In 1974, I start moving a bunch of stuff to VM370R2, including
kernel reorg for multiprocessor support, but not actual multiprocessor
support itself. In 1975, I move my CSC/VM system to VM370R3 and add
multiprocessor support, originally for the US consolidated
sales&marketing support HONE datacenters up in Palo Alto (the
consolidated US systems had been consolidated into a single system
image, loosely-coupled, shared DASD operation with load-balancing and
fall-over (one of the largest such complexes in the world). The
multiprocessor support allowed them to add a 2nd processor to each
system (making it the largest in the world, airlines' TPF had similar
shared-dasd complexes, but TPF didn't get SMP support for another
decade). I had done some hacks in order to get two processor system
twice the throughput of single process (at the time MVS documentation
was two processor MVS had 1.2-1.5 times the thoughput of a single
processor).

With the implosion of FS (and the demise of the VM370 development group)
... I got roped into helping with a 16-processor 370 SMP and we con'ed
the 3033 processor engineers into working on it in their spare time (a
lot more interesting than remapping 168 logic to 20% faster chips).
Everybody thought it was great until somebody tells the had of POK, it
could be decades before the POK favorite son operating system (MVS)
would have (effective) 16-processor support (POK doesn't ship a
16-processor system until after the turn of the century) and the head of
POK invites some of us to never visit POK again (and tells the 3033
processor engineers, heads down on 3033 and no distractions). Some POK
executives were also out bullying internal datacenters (including HONE)
that they had to convert from VM370 to MVS. Once 3033 was out the door,
they start on trout/3090.

trivia: Jan1979, I was con'ed into doing a 6600 forttran benchmark on an
engineering IBM4341 (mid-range), for a national lab that was looking at
getting 70 for a compute farm (sort of the leading edge of the coming
cluster supercomputing tsunami) ... the engineering 4341 benchmark was
slightly slower than 6600 but production machines that shipped, were
slightly faster.

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