Re: The joy of RISC

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

That was certainly a much more fruitful effort. IBM’s attempt to turn ROMP
into an actual product may have been an embarrassment (the RT PC), but
they more than redeemed themselves with the later POWER line, which
remains a performance leader to this day.

ROMP was originally targeted to be DISPLAYWRITER follow-on, written in
PL.8 and running cp.r ... when that was canceled (market moving to
personal computing), they decided to pivot to the UNIX workstation
market and got the company that had done AT&T Unix port to IBM/PC for
PC/IX ... to do one for ROMP ... some claim they had 200 PL.8
programmers and decided to use them to implement a ROMP abstract virtual
machine and tell the company doing AIX that it would be much faster and
easier to do it to VM, than to the bare hardware.

However, there was the IBM Palo Alto group doing UCB BSD port to 370
that got redirected to do BSD port to the (bare hardware) ROMP instead
(in much less time and resources than either the abstract virtual
machine or the AIX effort) as "AOS".

Late 80s, my wife and I got the HA/6000 project, originally for the
NYTimes to move their newspaper system (ATEX) off VAXCluster to
RS/6000. I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing scientific/technical
cluster scale-up with national labs and commercial cluster scale-up with
RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres that had VAXCluster
support in same source base with UNIX). Then the executive we reported
to went over to head up Somerset (AIM; apple, ibm, motorola; single-chip
RISC)

Early Jan92 in meeting with Oracle CEO, AWD/Hester tells Ellison we
would have 16-system clusters by mid92 and 128-system clusters by ye92,
however by end jan92, cluster scale-up was transferred for announce as
IBM supercomputer (for technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we were told we
couldn't work on anything with more than four systems (we leave IBM a
few months later).

There had been complaints by commercial mainframe possibly contributing
to the decision:

1993: eight processor ES/9000-982 : 408MIPS, 51MIPS/processor
1993: RS6000/990 : 126MIPS; 16-system: 2BIPS/2016MIPs,
                   128-system: 16BIPS/16,128MIPS

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