Re: The joy of FORTH (not)

Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:

Then before I graduate, I'm hired fulltime into a small group in the
Boeing CFO office to help with the consolidation of all dataprocessing
into independent business unit. I though that Renton datacenter was
possibly largest in the world, a couple hundred million in IBM 360
stuff, 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be installed, boxes
constantly being staged in the hallways around the machine room. Also a
lot of politics betweeen Renton director and CFO who only had a 360/30
up at Boeing field for payroll (although they enlarge the room to
install a 360/67 for me to play with when I wasn't doing other stuff).

when I graduate, I join the science center (instead of staying with
Boeing CFO).

Later I transfer out to SJR, I get to wonder around silicon valley
datacenters, including disk bldgs 14 (engineering) and 15 (product test)
across the street. They were doing 7x24, prescheduled, stand-alone
testing and mention that they had recently tried MVS, but it had 15min
MTBF (in that environment). I offer to rewrite I/O supervisor so it is
bullet proof and never fails, so they can do any amount of on-demand,
concurrent testing, greatly improving productivity. Downside I had to
spend increasing amount of time playing disk engineer diagnosing
hardware development issues. Bldg15 gets early engineering systems for
disk I/O testing and got both 3033 and 4341. In jan1979 (well before
4341 customer ship), I get con'ed into doing benchmark on the 4341 for
national lab that was looking at getting 70 for a compute farm (sort of
the leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami).

I also get con'ed into working with Jim Gray and Vera Watson on original
SQL/relational, System/R. Official next DBMS "EAGLE" was to be follow-on
to IMS ... and was able to do technology transfer to Endicott for SQL/DS
("under the radar" while the company was preoccupied with "EAGLE"). When
Jim leaves for Tandem, he tries to palm off a bunch of stuff including
supporting BofA which was in System/R joint study and getting 60 4341s,
sort of the leading edge of the coming distributed computing tsunami
(large corporations start ordering hundreds at a time for placing out in
departmental areas, inside IBM, conference were becoming in short supply
being converted to VM/4341 rooms). Note after "EAGLE" finally implodes,
there is a request for how fast could System/R be ported to
MVS. Eventually port is released as "DB2", originally for "decision
support" only.

Late 80s (decade after 4341 benchmark), got HA/6000 project, originally
for NYTimes to convert their newspaper system (ATEX) from DEC VAXcluster
to RS/6000. I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific
cluster scale-up with national labs and commercial cluster scale-up with
RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Ingres that have VAXCluser
support in same source base with UNIX; I do distributed lock manager
supporting VAXCluster semantics to ease the port). Early Jan1992, have
meeting with Oracle CEO and AWD/Hester tells Ellison that we would have
16-system clusters by mid92 and 128-system clusters by ye92. Then by end
of Jan1992 we get corporate kneecapping with cluster scale-up being
transferred for announce as IBM supercomputer (for technical/scientific
*ONLY*) and we are told we can't do anything with more than four
processors (we leave IBM shortly later).

trivia: email sent out possibly just hrs before the kneecapping,
referencing that IBM FSD had agreed to strategic HA/CMP cluster scale-up
(code name: MEDUSA) for gov. customers ...
alt.folklore.computers(/comp.arch) two decade old archived posting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#3
with copy of the email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email920129

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