2006 Newsgroup postings (07/27 - 08/23) Lynn Wheeler

2006 Newsgroup Postings (07/27 - 08/23)

System/360 Prototype
harris
the more things change, the more things stay the same
MTS, Emacs, and... WYLBUR?
How Many 360/195s and 370/195s were shipped?
Gould, not Harris
Article on Painted Post, NY
Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Article on Painted Post, NY
Article on Painted Post, NY
Article on Painted Post, NY
The SEL 840 computer
SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Google Architecture
Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
RAMAC 305(?)
Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Cache-Size vs Performance
Strobe equivalents
computational model of transactions
CPU usage for paging
Cache-Size vs Performance
oops
Google Architecture
oops, cics
The Question of Braces in APL-ASCII
Metroliner telephone article
When Does Folklore Begin???
When Does Folklore Begin???
Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
the personal data theft pandemic continues
Metroliner telephone article
the personal data theft pandemic continues
hardware virtualization slower than software?
sorting
the personal data theft pandemic continues
When Does Folklore Begin???
Metroliner telephone article
"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
When Does Folklore Begin???
"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
the personal data theft pandemic continues
sorting
The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
When Does Folklore Begin???
The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
When Does Folklore Begin???
When Does Folklore Begin???
Greatest Software Ever Written?
Greatest Software Ever Written?
Greatest Software Ever Written?
Why no double wide compare and swap on Sparc?
Greatest Software?
Health Care
Greatest Software, System R
Greatest Software, System R
The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
How the Pentium Fell Short of a 360/195
DASD Response Time (on antique 3390?)

System/360 Prototype

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: System/360 Prototype
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:21:26 -0600

hancock4 writes:
While in a sense the above is correct, I think it'd be more accurate to say Watsons' (both) compensation was based on total sales of the company. If the company did well, he did well and vice versa.

the person was very explicit about the wording of the executive compensation plan ... as saying that watson got a specific straight sales commission on everything ibm sold (he said that he found it a little odd since the straight sales commission percent (of everything sold) was specified to four decimal places ... i.e. x.yyyy percent).

a lot of executive compensation plans have been based on profit (as a measure of how well the company does) as opposed to gross sales (which may or may indicate how well a company is doing). for instance, in 1992, ibm reported a couple billion dollar loss on several tens of billions in sales.

ibm, in the time-frame mentioned as obtaining ibm's 10k
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#59 System/360 Prototype

had moved salesmen to quota system ... not straight sales commission ... i.e. salesmen were given sales target and base (maybe 20-40percent) of target compensation. If they sold one hundred percent of their quota ... they got reminder of their pay. if they were on 20percent base, and made twice their quota ... then they got .2 + 2*.8 = 1.8 times their target compensation. Note it also wasn't unusual if somebody were to make 100percent of their annual quota by mid-year ... to have they quota retro-actively adjusted for the year.

this prevented salesman, that might sell a couple hundred million dollars of computer equipment, from getting several million dollar commission (which could happen if there was a straight sales commission plan; which apparently what Watson was getting; but the salesmen were on this quota plan).

As to general corporate activity in the last 50 years ... some number of companies modeled their sales operations after ibm, quotas, sales promotions, annual award meetings, etc. IBM had an annual event called the 100percent club ... for salesmen that made at least one hundred percent of their quota. I know of one company in the early 80s with 200 hundred salesmen that didn't have a single sales and lost a billion dollars. that year they sent all the salesmen and their SOs on one week trip to Hawaii ... and had to come up with alternative name for the event (as opposed to the "zero percent club" award meeting).

harris

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: harris
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:32:13 -0600

"Tim Shoppa" writes:
IIRC it was a (or multiple) RISC-like CPU, not too different than the MIPS stuff coming out of everywhere in the early 90's, except that the Harris brand made it a lot more expensive! None of those IMHO falls into minisuper (which for me means things like bolt-on array processors, Convex, FPS, etc.)

old mini-super posting giving number of machines
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#56 Why SMP at all anymore?

the above reposts a '88 supercomputing report that lists 850 minisupercomputers having been installed since 1981 (it also mentions that there were rumors about a Harris minisuper). It also lists installs for Alliant, Convex, ELXSI, FPS, Gould, Multiflow, and Scientific Computer (and that Celerity was just shipping and Supertek hadn't shipped yet).

posting repeating above numbers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#32 Imitation..

the more things change, the more things stay the same

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the more things change, the more things stay the same
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:32:06 -0600

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#52 the more things change, the more things stay the same
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#53 the more things change, the more things stay the same

the following article:

How Secure Is That Device? As device software joins the larger world, security becomes ever more vital
http://dso.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191501076

Has statements that are almost exact quotes of some statements about virtualization made in the late 60s, nearly 40 years ago.

the article is also related to the thread raised in this crypto topic drift
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#57 The very first text editor

started with this article
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190900759

the most recent in that thread
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#52 Crypt to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

and even more thread drift related to the subject
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#53

MTS, Emacs, and... WYLBUR?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: MTS, Emacs, and... WYLBUR?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:46:46 -0600

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
We used to call it, TSO and Burroughs CANDE "Batch with a Patch".

Wylbur was useful, as compared with punching cards and waiting a day or two for your output.

i had done tty support in cp67 ... slightly related about doing our own clone telecommunication controller
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

and played with the cms editor to get it to do "full-screen" displays on 2250m1 ....

but I also supported the university os360 mft/hasp (and transition to os360 mvt/hasp) system. hasp managed "job" submission and files ... for cards and printed out.

i hacked hasp on mvt release18 .... putting in 2741 and tty terminal support along with writing an "editor" from scratch that supported cms editor command syntax .... for a "CRJE" system (i.e. conversational remote job entry).

How Many 360/195s and 370/195s were shipped?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: How Many 360/195s and 370/195s were shipped?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:08:23 -0600

eugene@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) writes:
Nope. LLL didn't buy one, they had a stable of CDC machines. I suspect LASL didn't either. I know there was 1978ish paper on their stable but my MSS is offline for work. I think the 7094 was the last IBM until the SP clusters excepting the administrative mainframe. They had a custom IBM storage system. I doubt weather, word size was small. The Fort, probably. Maybe a bank like BofA or 2. Not many.

eastern's system one airline res system (one of the precursors to amadeus) ran 370/195. past reference mentioning eastern's system, amadeus, future system, etc:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#8 EBCDIC to 6-bit and back

url talking about history of airline online systems, including eastern's system one, amadeus, etc:
http://www.atwonline.com/channels/informationTechnology/article.html?articleID=1163

amadeus url
http://www.amadeus.net/home/index_toplevel.htm
https://www.us.amadeus.com/

note that amadeus was both system design started 1987 (somewhat drew on eartern system one, my wife served a brief stint as amadeus chief architect) and a business. this states amadeus (business) absorbed system one on 1995:
http://airinfo.aero/services.html

Gould, not Harris

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gould, not Harris
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:39:17 -0600

"Al Kossow" writes:
Re. Harris thread

http://www.ccur.com/corp_companyhistory.asp

Datacraft -> Harris -> Concurrent

from above:


1988    Concurrent Computer Corporation merged with MASSCOMP.
1985    Concurrent Computer Corporation spun off from the Perkin-Elmer Corporation.
1974    Datacraft acquired by Harris Corporation.
1973    Interdata acquired by the Perkin-Elmer Corporation.
1967    Harris Computer Systems founded as Datacraft.
1966    Concurrent founded as Interdata, Inc.

as undergraduate (late 60s) ... we reversed engineered ibm channel i/o interface and built a channel interface board (originally) for interdata/3 ... which was programmed to emulate a ibm telecommunication controller. lots of past posts mentioning the project https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

later the project upgraded to a interdata/4 (w/channel interface board and programmed to emulate the ibm telecommunication controller) and several embedded interdata/3 processors dedicated to line-scanner function.

in the late 90s i ran into somebody that said they made an extremely good living in the early 80s selling the (by then perkin-elmer) boxes to nasa. the ibm mainframe channel board was still wire-wrap and he conjectured that it could have still been our original design and implementation done at the univ. nasa was apparently using the line-scanner for serial interfaces other than just terminals ... various kinds of data collection and other devices where the data was passed on to ibm mainframe.

Article on Painted Post, NY

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article on Painted Post, NY
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:40:46 -0600

Al Balmer writes:
And overseas. There were stories about a confrontation between Watson and the French operation about serving wine in the company cafeteria.

in the early 70s, i did a number trips to europe for installs or helping with various and sundry things. one my first trips started out in germany (put up in small hotel where nobody spoke english). at the plant site somebody pointed out one of the unions(?) had gotten beer in the vending machines (i have some vague recollection that there may be been some recommended guidelines about the max number of beers per day per person).

then on to paris for a "HONE" install as part of emea hdqtrs moving from westchester county to brand new complex in la defense.

lots of past posts mentioning HONE (and/or apl)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

some specific posts mentioning the move of emea hdqtrs to la defense
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#30 OS Workloads : Interactive etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#67 history of CMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#58 Oldest running code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#7 IBM operating systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#34 Not enough parallelism in programming

... i.e. WTC was divided into EMEA (europe, middle east, and africa) and AFE (americas and far east; americas was everyplace except usa). afe hdqtrs remained in terrytown (for all i know afe hdqtrs is still in terrytown).

Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Newsgroups: misc.transport.road,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:53:52 -0600

John Varela writes:
It's all guesswork and black magic. The same goes for military systems. How many more enemy tanks will a new rocket kill, and what's the value of a dead enemy tank?

for a little topic drift, old boyd tale about evaluation of air-to-air missile
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#120 atomic History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#13 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#67 Dealing with complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#22 Seven of Nine
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#10 Dangerous Hardware

collected boyd postings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd

and various boyd related urls from around the web
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2

Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Newsgroups: misc.transport.road,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:12:01 -0600

John Varela writes:
If this is an administrative system, I agree. However, having spent many years working on embedded systems for air traffic control, I must add that there are systems for which cost benefit is absurd but you have to go through the motions anyway to keep GAO happy.

any of the people from this activity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#15 IBM 9020 FAA/ATC Systems from 1960's

some number of them turned up in a new company (including former fsd president). about ten years ago we did a joint project with them totally unrelated to atc. however, they had (also) developed a new atc system that was being sold into other countries.

Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Pa Tpk spends $30 million for "Duet" system; but benefits are unknown
Newsgroups: misc.transport.road,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 11:45:38 -0600

hancock4 writes:
Considering how expensive new ATC systems are to design, build, and implement, it does make sense to do a cost/benefit analysis. Certainly there is guesswork in the value of human life and in risk analysis (as well as the overall social costs to society of losing people and lost revenue from people afraid to fly). However, the cost of a mid-air collision is terribly high.

system test & certification can dominate ... especially systems that can involve human life.

old y2k posting that mentioned certification costs with respect to human life related system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#24 BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#94 Those who do not learn from history...

we got called into review on one of the ATC modernization projects when we were doing ha/cmp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

turned out that there had been a high-level strategic design decision that all faults could be masked/recovered by low-level system facilities and as a result the domain specific application code didn't have to worry about any kind of fault and/or associated retries, recoveries, etc.

turns out there are numerous domain specific possible "faults" ... totally unrelated to hardware or software glitches. one example that I remember is traffic hand-off between regional control centers. the controller receiving the hand-off can fail to notice the hand-off and the controller doing the hand-off needs to retry the hand-off (however the base design had assumed that application level software required no retry provisions ... since all faults were either low-level hardware or software glitches and could be addressed by hardware dedundancy and operating system recovery/retry).

all of this in ada.

Article on Painted Post, NY

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article on Painted Post, NY
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:43:29 -0600

eugene@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) writes:
I think IBM had bigger cultural problems than wine with the French when attempting to impose a hierarchical SNA network and did not want to be below the USA.

still in the early 70s, there could be significant issues trying to coordinate english, french, and germans all in the same emea business operation. it was actually easier to get any of them to defer to americans than it was for any of them to defer to each other.

Article on Painted Post, NY

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article on Painted Post, NY
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:15:04 -0600

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:
especially in the early 70s, there could be significant issues trying to coordinate english, french, and germans all in the same emea business operation. it was actually easier to get any of them to defer to americans than it was for any of them to defer to each other.

i met to type "still" ... not "especially".

friction didn't even require national boundaries ... i was at one all day meeting in paris at "ibm france" (as opposed to emea hdqtrs over in la defense). it was conducted in french and there was a long presentation by a frenchman from la guade (southern france ... maybe 20km? from nice). i was surprised that a parisian interrupted the speaker a couple dozen times to correct pronunciation.

i think this was possibly after the grenoble science center had been relocated to paris.

Article on Painted Post, NY

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Article on Painted Post, NY
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:12:17 -0600

eugene@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) writes:
I think you mean defer twice here.

also in the followup ... brain check ... busy thinking about something else ... however, had corrected it in the archive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#11

The SEL 840 computer

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The SEL 840 computer
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 21:36:34 -0600

jsavard writes:
In addition to thanking you for *them*, as it happens, I see that among the new items you've recently added is something else both I, and someone else rather more significant, had recently expressed interest in in another newsgroup, comp.lang.apl.

Yes... the reference card for APL/700, the historic Burroughs dialect with extra file handling overstrikes.

one apl/700 ref:
http://www.hbingham.com/technical/apl/arm.htm

in the very early 70s, the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

had taken apl\360 (from phili science center, iverson, falkoff, etc) and ported to cp67/cms virtual memory environment (apl\360 had its own multitasking monitor that could be thrown away for cms and operated typically with 16kbyte to 32kbyte real memory work spaces). the storage allocation and garbage collection had to be redone for (large) virtual memory work spaces. this was cms\apl for cp67/cms

the other thing done was adding support for cms system APIs (filesystem calls, network transfers, etc). this caused some amount of conflict with phili and the apl people because cambridge had violated the purity of apl with the way it implemented system api support.

palo alto science center then upgraded cms\apl to apl\cms for vm370/cms as well as doing the 370/145 apl microcode assist. here is acm paper from '75 on the apl microcode assist for cms\apl.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=803802&coll=portal&dl=ACM

in the mean time the apl "purists" came up with shared variable paradigm (apl/sv) for accessing generalized system functions.

eventually everything merged with vs/apl (virtual storage, apl)

the following has some apl references ... (8) was at the (cambridge) science center during the days of cms\apl (and worked on various apl applications) ... later left IBM and went to BCS (guess who his father was)
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/apl_archives/apl/translit.schemes

SEQUENCE NUMBERS

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:14:20 -0600

R.S. wrote:
Even some mainframe programs interpret it as data, with funny effects somtimes. For example SYSIN DD * for FTP program cannot contain the numbers. AFAIK some TCPIP config files as well.

AFAIK the sequence numbers are completely useless nowadays. It was used for punched card sorter. Is there any other application ?

they were also used for a long time as part of the cp67/cms multilevel source update infrastructure (later vm370/cms). since it was the pervasive internal platform for a long time ... even some number of mvs components would start life with cms multilevel source update and then have to morph to smp for external release (there were some folktales of mvs components having periodic difficulty converting their cms source development and maintained environment to smp as part of customer ship).

in vm/cms ... before the oco-wars, not only did source ship as standard, but maint. was done by shipping the source changes.

recent thread that started out discussing card sorting but drifted into description of cms multi-level source update:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#45 sorting

Google Architecture

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Google Architecture
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2006 08:39:26 -0600

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
Google runs on hundreds of thousands of servers-by one estimate, in excess of 450,000-racked up in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centers around the world.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#12 Google Architecture

... in somewhat similar vein

Grid Is 'It' at eBay
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1995124,00.asp

The dramatic growth and high exposure of eBay's Web presence make it a rare example of a grid computing platform and application portfolio that are well past the pilot-project stage.

... snip ...

and for a little drift
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
Newsgroups: alt.technology.smartcards
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2006 08:55:46 -0600

Bruce Barnett <spamhater113+U060729232659@grymoire.com> writes:
Friends tell me that some contactless cards in Asia sign a challenge with a private key in 300 ms. I haven't personally verified this, but that sounds like the right start.

in 1999 time-frame we were looking at proximity card doing a signing in approx. 100ms (at the time, requirements for transit gates)

separately, there can be an issue with MITM-attack ... if you do something like authenticate a card (with signature on a challenge) separate from performing a transaction ... as opposed to having the card directly sign a transaction (and contactless/proximity may exaserbate the situation).

in the mid-90s, the financial standard x9a10 working group was given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all financial transactions ... this met ALL and in credit, debit, stored-value, internet, non-internet, point-of-sale, contact, contactless, etc.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

one of the considerations was various MITM-attacks in various different circumstances
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm

somewhat related was the work on the aads chip strawman in the late 90s that included being able to do fast signature signing within power-profile of contactless and timing requirements for transit gates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

another issue looked at for aads chip strawman in the late 90s has shown up recelntly in this press release

Crypto model plugs leaky fabs
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190900759

and more in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#49 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#51 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#52 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#0 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#1 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#2 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#3 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#4 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#5 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#6 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
Newsgroups: alt.technology.smartcards
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2006 10:26:27 -0600

Bruce Barnett <spamhater113+U060729232659@grymoire.com> writes:
Friends tell me that some contactless cards in Asia sign a challenge with a private key in 300 ms. I haven't personally verified this, but that sounds like the right start.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#16 Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C

some old email from the fall of 99
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#7 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

the 20,000 circuit custom design was not only extremely low power draw (making it easy fit for contactless ... even starting to move down into even lower power rfid range) ... but there was some work with the custom circuit design being able to do a signing with a private key in 10ms (putting it easily into the transit gate range).

RAMAC 305(?)

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: RAMAC 305(?)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:00:13 -0600

hancock4 writes:
The disk drive that came with it went on to big things and before S/360. The biggest well known application was SABRE which used pre-360 machines and disk drives to store airline reservations. Soon other companies did likewise with both IBM and Univac machines.

past post in another thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#4 How Many 360/195s and 370/195s were shipped?

has this history of airline online res system
http://www.atwonline.com/channels/informationTechnology/article.html?articleID=1163

from above:
As ATW's first issue was being prepared for its debut in 1964, another baby was born to the commercial aviation industry: The Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment went live on March 4, 1964. It was an unwieldy name, inevitably shortened to Sabre, and it indeed would prove to be a sharp-edged weapon. It also would revolutionize the travel industry.

... snip ...

tail end of the above history talks about current status of various of the res. systems .. recent news on that front:
http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/article/20060724103803551

...

I used to have several DASD "historical" URLs that were at the san jose plant webserver ... but they went 404 when the business was sold off.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/04/22/story6.html

and more current status:
http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/sanjosesite/menuitem.0aa94b6327c5360dacd3d307aac4f0a0/

...

for a little different drift:

in the mid-90s we were asked to look at some of the applications in one of the large res. system. started with routes ... which accounted for something like a quarter of the processing load. they had list of ten impossible things that they weren't able to do. we came back two months later and demonstrated a new implementation, including doing all ten impossible things. this became an unresovable problem for them ... part of the reason for the ten impossible things was that there were certain manual infrastructure operations that involved several hundred people. in part, the new implementation was able to address all ten impossible things by automating all the manual operations (actually deploying the new implemetation would have resulted in a major organizational impact).

we then wanted to move on to fares ... which accounted for something like 40percent of the system load. however, after appearing to have botched routes (at least from an organizational perspective), there was no interest in letting us have a try at fares.

Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:40:44 -0600

cfmpublic@ibm-main.lst (Clark Morris) writes:
How do the various source maintenance packages for other platforms such as Unix handle the problem. I'm thinking of CVS and the various Itegrated Development Environments. There are differential upgrades and other techniques. I am not familiar with them but realize that I am not familiar with most of the tools in the non-MVS environment.

rcs, cvs, etc ... tend to be "down-dates" ... you have the complete source for the current version ... with control information how to regress to earlier versions.

cms had "update" command from mid-60s ... which applied an update control file to source, resulting in "temporary" file to be updated recent refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#14 SEQUENCE NUMBERS

this provides a short description of the evoluation of the CMS update command into multi-level source maintenance updates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#45 sorting

one of the things that fell by the wayside was an application that attempting to merge potentially parallel update activity.

during the early days at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

evolving the cms multi-level source maintenance process ... there was an application written that attempted to merge and resolve parallel update/maint. operations.

the infrastructure evolved out of a joint project between cambridge and endicott to add 370 virtual machine support to cp67. cp67 provide virtual 360 and virtual 360/67 (i.e. virtual memory) virtual machines ... but 370 was going to announce virtual memory (it was something like two years away). 370 virtual memory definition had various differences from 360/67. the idea was quickly implement 370 virtual machines (with 370 defined virtual memory hardware tables) under cp67 (running on 360/67).

the multi-level initially consisted of

1) normal set of updates and enhancements built on base cp67 source, ("cp67l" system)

2) set of updates applied to normal cp67 that added support for 370 virtual machine option ("cp67h" system)

3) set of updates that modified cp67 kernel to run on 370 hardware (rather than 360/67 hardware; "cp67i" system)

part of the issue was that the cambridge cp67 system hosted some number of students (mit, bu, harvard, etc) and other non-employees in the boston area. since 370 virtual memory hadn't been announced yet, it was being treated as super sensitive corporate information and there was no desire for it to leak to non-employees.

as a result only #1 kernel typically ran on the real hardware. #2 kernel would run in a 360/67 virtual machine, isolated from prying eyes of the students and other non-employees. for testing of #2, #3 would then run in a 370 virtual machine (under #2 kernel, running in 360/67 virtual machine under #1 kernel, which ran on real machine).

so potential problem was that there might be new updates introduced at the "#1 level" (earlier in the update sequence) which might impact the updates applied later in the update sequence (i.e. updates to the base system that was going on independently supporting changes for 370 virtual machines).

as an aside, "cp67i" was up and running as normal operation a year before the first engineering 370 machine with virtual memory support was operational. then as 370 real machines with virtual memory support became available internally (still well before customer first customer ship), the "cp67i" was standard operating system running on those (real) machines ... at least until the vm370 morph became available (and some of the other operating system development got far enuf along to move from testing in virtual machine to real machine operation).

Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
Newsgroups: alt.technology.smartcards
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:06:51 -0600

"Ali" writes:
New gadgets are VLSI design so signaling protocol is quite robust like 4-millionths of a second wide. And though still there is no concept of public/private key infrastructure but RN16 (A unique Identifier in single tag and reader at any given time) is almost the same thing if not exactly which ensures quite secure communication path.

Folks, I do agree that there is still way to go to secure wireless communication but as Bruce pointed in his post that it depends on solution to solution. Com'on, you are not gonna put all your assets on a contact-card (not contact-less) or on a single chip will you? Its something related to human psychology. We believe what we see.

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#16 Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#17 Gen 2 EPC Protocol Approved as ISO 18000-6C

as mentioned in the ref,
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#7 Crypto to defined chip IP; snake oil or good idea?

the work in 1999 (20k circuits for private key digital signature in possible 10ms) was during the period that there was transition from .6micron to .2micron (i was co-chair of some sessions at recent ieee chip conference where there was discussion of issues moving from .06micron to .045micron).

the issue of person-centric vis-a-vis institutional-centric ... is that institutions are claiming they have to issue the hardware token because they can't otherwise be assured of the devices integrity (i.e. if hardware tokens became more than a fad, then people might wind up with scores of unique hardware tokens from multitude of different institutions ... starting to verge on the current password management nightmare).

the referenced 1999 email mentions processes that would allow institutions to validate integrity level of a person presented token ... enabling the change-over to a person-centric paradigm (from an institutional centric paradigm). in a person-centric paradigm ... the person could then have the choice of how many tokens they needed to manage ... modulo institutional requirements that they meet specified integrity criteria. specific integrity critieria then starts to move off into the area of parameterised risk management and security proportional to risk.

a recent (long) post discussing person-centric paradigm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#52 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

a recent (long) post discussing parameterised risk management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#1 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

the issue of contactless ... vis-a-vis contact ... is in some ways similar to the issue of internet vis-a-vis contact. there is sometimes assumptions that direct contact may have less vulnerabilities ... and that contactless, wireless, and the internet may open the way for additional vulnerabilities (possibility various kinds of evesdropping, skimming, etc, that may be much less difficult than with straight direct contact).

this is somewhat what we had to look at in the mid-90s for x9.59 financial standard protocol. the x9a10 financial standard working group had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments ... regardless of the type of payment or the infrastructure/environment that the payment might occur in. that met that x9.59 had to work equally well in possibly less vulnerable physical point-of-sale with contact card ... or in possible more vulnerable internet and/or wireless environment.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:48:38 -0600

Shmuel Metz , Seymour J. wrote:
I'm not sure when it came along, but by VM/SE there was a somewhat more sophisticated UPDATE facility[1] with aux files, control files and update files. I'd love to see a similar facility integrated with ISPF.

[1] Not only could the XEDIT editor process them, but it could generate update files to reproduce the effects of an edit session. That's one of the CMS facilities I miss the most.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#19 Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS

the aux files, control files, update files scheme was what was created for the effort for building 370 virtual machine support into a cp67 kernel (running on 360/67). however, it was implemented all in EXEC with EXEC processing figuring out the control & aux files and making interative calls to UPDATE command.

this was picked up as part of the original vm370 release and update command was enhanced to directly process control, aux, and update files (in one pass) and spitting out the (temporary, working) source file for compile/assemble.

a little later, editors were enhanced to directly support the control, aux, and update files as part of loading a source file for editing ... with option that all changes made in the edit session resulted in an "update" file (as opposed to a new complete source).

this recent posting, in a different thread, has more detailed description of some of the operations ... as well as URLs to current CMS documentation (including an example "update" from an internal editor that predated xedit).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#45 sorting

a few other recent postings that happen to also mention xedit:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#34 Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#43 MTS, Emacs, and... WYLBUR?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#55 The very first text editor

Cache-Size vs Performance

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache-Size vs Performance
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:54:22 -0600

MitchAlsup writes:
So for normal PC/workstatioin like applications you will see a logarithmic decrese in the miss rate as the cache size grows logarithmecally. I leave it as an excercise to figur out what rate this curve moves at.

For normal big data base applications the mis rate decreases similarly but at a much lower rate (typically 1/4 to 1/5 as fast as the PC/workstation rate) and starts to decrease at a different place.

in big database applications ... there is the processor cache (used to compensate for memory access latency) and there is database cache ... where the database uses real storage to compensate for disk record access latency.

the major database vendors tend to have very detailed models of their internal operation and processing ... and tend to work with server vendors to make sure that processor cache sizes are sufficient for efficient dbms execution.

dbms may have a little more variety with different databases requiring adequate real storage to be used for caching (disk) records in transactions.

for a little drift ... i've posted before about the evolution in system real storage sizes and that effect on the uptake with the (emerging?) RDBMS technology.

in the 70s there was some discord between some of the "60s" physical database people in stl/bldg90 and the relational/sql system/r people in sjr/bldg28 ... misc. past posts mentioning system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

the physical databases tended to have record pointers as part of data and exposed as part of the normal programming paradigm ... i.e. application fetched some record, operated on that record and then had direct pointer to one or more other records.

the stl people somewhat argued that the relational/sql paradigm abstracted away the direct record pointer paradigm by the relational schema and using large indexes inside the dbms implementation. for many databases, the indexes doubled the physical disk requirements (compared to the 60s physical database implementation) and significantly increased the number of disk access to retrieve a record (physically processing the index before getting to the pointers to the desired records).

on the other hand, with physical pointers no longer exposed in the standard database paradigm, relational significantly reduced the administrative and human overhead compared to the 60s paradigm.

one of the things that started to tip the balance in the 80s was that 1) disk space became significantly cheaper, the disk space for the index was reduced as a cost issue and 2) the amount of real memory increased significantly ... which allowed "caching" of much of the relational index (eliminating the significant disk i/o penalty processing the index to find a specific record or records). And then with further increases in real storage sizes, not only could relational indexes be cached ... and frequently much of the actual database records.

however, some of these databases may have cache operations that have a wide variation. bank accounts might see very little database cache benefit ... i.e. if you make an ATM withdrawal ... the probability may be very low that there will be another hit on the same bank account while the record is still in the database cache (over a broad range of database cache sizes). significant changes in real storage for database cache hit rate may see little benefit until it is nearly as large as the whole database.

Strobe equivalents

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Strobe equivalents
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:28:36 -0600

Gilbert Saint-Flour wrote:
I keep a list here:

http://gsf-soft.com/Documents/MVS-APPL-DEBUGGING.shtml

for some drift ... in the early 70s, the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

had done a lot of work on performance monitoring and measurement technologies ... some of it later evolved into capacity planning.

there were sort of three kinds of technology
• monitoring & sampling • simulation & modeling • multiple regression analysis

all had their strengths and weaknesses and there were various situations were one of the technologies could identify an issue when the other two couldn't.

there were both software and hardware monitors. when work was being done for selecting what should go into the ecps microcode assist, the kernel was instrumented with a software monitor and then the person at the palo alto science center responsible for the apl microcode assist did a microcode based PSW sampler. old standby posting describing ecps microcode assist analysis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21

for other drift ... recent post mentioning the apl microcode assist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#13

there were two or three different simulation and modeling projects at the science center. there was an event driven system model written in PLI ... used among other things for modeling paging behavior ... and an analytical system model written in apl.

we used a variation on the apl system model in the automated benchmarking for validating the resource manager before release.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

basically in excess of two thousand benchmarks were run taking three months elapsed time. initially there were something like 1000 different benchmarks defined that had wide range of configuration, workload, and system parameters. the modified apl system model was feed all results and allowed to select the set of conditions for the next benchmark. these results were fed back into the apl system model and it repeated the condition selection settings for the next set of benchmarks. this was repeated for another 1000 or so benchmarks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bench

the apl system model was also adapted to the HONE system (world wide vm-based system that supported all field, sales, and marketing, by the mid-70s, salesmen couldn't even place a mainframe order w/o having first run it thru one of the HONE configurators)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

where it was called the performance predictor and allowed marketing people to input customer configuration and workload information and ask "what-if" questions (what happens if amount of memory is doubled or the workload changes, etc).

another instruction analysis tool was "REDCAP" which had been developed in POK for doing workload instruction traces ... for studying detailed workload instruction execution characteristics as aid in processor design. the science center adapted REDCAP for analyzing application execution in virtual memory environments. this was used to analyze the port of apl\360 to cms\apl (and execution characteristics of the memory allocation and garbage collection change from small 16k-32k byte real memory workspaces to very large virtual memory workspaces). It was also used by a number of application development groups to study their application in the transition from real storage to virtual memory operation (applications like IMS). It was also released as a product called Vs/Repack. Vs/Repack would also perform cluster analysis of program operation and attempt semi-automated program reorganization for improved execution in virtual memory environment.

some recent references to old vs/repack
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#37 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#18 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#22 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#24 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#11 virtual memory

A few years ago, I ran into a consultant (european) that was doing work using a descendant of the performance predictor (with nearly 20 years of enhancements). During the corporate troubles in 1992, the vendor had acquired the rights to the software and had run it through an APL-to-C language converter ... and then subsequently made additional enhancements.

He was doing some consulting at a large datacenter that had an enormous application that ran across a large number of mainframes ($$ value in the 8-9 digit range). Even a few percentage performance improvements in the application translated into large number of hardware dollars. The application had been studied extensively using standard mainframe monitoring tools and heavily optimized. The consultant, using his enhanced performance modeling tool had identified additional areas that resulted in another ten percent optimization savings.

Remembering the science center experience from the early 70s (nearly 35 years earlier), i wondered if multiple regression analysis could identify opportunities; in fact it turned up something accounting for over 20% of total usage. The issue has been that things like instruction sampling and event modeling tend to turn up things at the micro level ... while multiple regression analysis frequently can highlight more macro level issues. The identified feature was a complex, spaghetti combination of low-level stuff ... which turned out could be optimized (at the macro level) and resulted in 14% total system savings.

computational model of transactions

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: computational model of transactions
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:50:58 -0600

paul c writes:
Also, in the interest of preserving Marshall's sanity, I must mention that somewhere I think Gray mentioned that lock managers can be a bottomless pit. I once hired an assistant professor to implement more thorough predicate locks. Before he finished he had a nervous breakdown. The last time I saw him the secret police were tailing him. Then I got ordered to hire a professor. The walk-throughs were okay but he prompted only code that wouldn't compile. I thought it best to get out with my own sanity. After that the whole thing was handed over to a system programmer who knew nothing about db. He ignored predicates but being an expert in system resource monitoring for accounting purposes and having heard that lock managers could be performance hotspots, he added system calls to record things like cpu utilization which I thought was a self-fulfilling prophecy and proved Gray's point.

i had worked with jim in system/r days
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and then when my wife and i were doing ha/cmp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

i designed and did ha/cmp's initial dlm implementation; minor reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

i actually had difference of opinion with jim during '91 sigops conference in asilomor about whether (ha/cmp) commodity clusters could be used in business critical settings.

for a little drift ... recent post about performance management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#23 Strobe equivalents

CPU usage for paging

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: CPU usage for paging
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2006 11:20:33 -0600

Craig Dudley wrote:
I am looking for the RMF report(s) where I can find out how much CPU time my system (2066-0A2 w/8 GB) to perform paging. I am trying to determine how much CPU I will "get back" if we buy more memory. WAS on z is involved ;>)

that was the type of "what if" questions that the performance predictor on the HONE system was used to answer ... i.e. how much paging would be reduced by adding amounts of real storage based on current configuration and workload profiles ... previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#23 Strobe equivalents

as mention before, HONE was the world-wide online (vm-based) internal system supporting marketing, sales, and field people:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

Cache-Size vs Performance

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cache-Size vs Performance
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2006 11:36:31 -0600

me writes:
Not necessarily true. Let's say you have a terabyte sized table that's randomly looked up. If it is on a CPU with more cache, it would be because cache lines from the first few levels of the indexing tree would be less frequently evicted from cache, not because there is very little data.

note that the first order stuff for processor cache design with respect to large database was the execution/instruction working set ... and then you moved into the index tree items (and other data structures ... like data structure dealing with what is currently in the database memory cache) ... which is the corresponding thing that happened with real-memory/disk caching in the early 80s ... i.e. a lot of the real memory sizes from the early 80s were on the order of current processor cache sizes (and were becoming large enuf to contain the rdbms indexes to offset having to do disk reads to walk the indexes).

... previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#22 Cache-Size vs Performance

for some drift collected past posts mentioning original relational/sql work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and other collected past posts mentioning lru replacement algorithms and working set type stuff ... dating back to 60s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

recent post on some performance management tools
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#23 Strobe equivalents

including some discussion of vs/repack technology ... which was used internally in the early 70s to do detailed studies of applicationoperation in virtual memory environments (and replacement strategies). In the mid-70s, it was released as a product. part of the vs/repack technology did detailed studies of application instruction and storage references and attempted semi-automated program re-organization for improved operation in environments involving lru-type replacement strategies. Some of the large dbms products made extensive use of vs/repack as part of transition from real-storage environments to virtual memory plactforms.

oops

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: oops
Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 05:49:16 -0600
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l

Phil Smith III wrote:
Gabe reminds me that the 360 didn't run VM; I did use it, but it was the 370/158 with 2MB that I used to use VM on.

360/67 was the only (standard) 360 with virtual memory support. it had both 24-bit and 32-bit virtual addressing options (you didn't see more than 24-bit again until 370-xa with 3081). 360/67 multiprocessor also had channel director ... which supported all processors accessing all channels (standard 360 & 370 multiprocessors only provided for common memory addressing ... the rest of the infrastructure, including channels, were partitioned, specific to processors).

cp67 was developed by the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

... supporting virtual machines and virtual memory. cp67 was released to customers. there had been an earlier cp40 developed on a custom modified 360/40 with virtual memory ... pending availability of a 360/67.

there was joint project between cambridge and endicott to add a lot of 370 stuff to cp67 kernel ... this was discussed recently in the series of posts on "sequence numbers" and cms multi-level source maintenance ... which mostly evolved out of the cp67 cambridge/endicott 370 effort (CMS originally stood for the cambridge monitor system, but morphed to conversational monitor system for vm370)

modified version of cp67 ran internally extensively on 370s ... pending availability of vm370. also CP67's CCWTRANS (supporting virtual memory ccws translated to shadow real CCWs) was used in initial prototype of os/vs2 (i.e. mvt hacked to directly support 370 virtual memory).

Google Architecture

From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: Re: Google Architecture
Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 11:13:12 -0700
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers

somewhat keeping this thread going ...

Another Operating System Expert Goes to Google
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1999763,00.asp?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535

The State of the Mainframe Today
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15398

oops, cics

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: oops, cics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:28:29 -0600

bob shair wrote:
That 360/40, serial number 2040-x0002, made two outstanding contributions to IBM. After serving as the first 360 testbed for CP (CP/40), it went on to be the primary development machine for CICS!

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#27 oops

the university i was at had a 360/67 (originally installed for tss/360) ... and with all the tss/360 problems started looking for other uses (besides running it in 360/65 mode with os/360). they stumbled across the cp/67 sometime in 1967 and had three people from the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

come out the last week in jan68 to install cp67. i got to play with cp67 (as an undergraduate) in addition to supporting os/360.

part of that also led to us doing our own clone controller ... recent topic drift on cloning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#10 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

above mentions the university cloning project ... and cloned controllers also motivating FS project.

however, the university library also had an ONR grant and was selected to be a CICS beta test site ... and i got roped into shooting some number of early CICS bugs. misc. past post mentioning early CICS (and/or BDAM)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bdam

The Question of Braces in APL-ASCII

From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: Re: The Question of Braces in APL-ASCII
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:01:23 -0700
Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl,alt.folklore.computers

Kenneth Brody wrote:
I believe the APL terminal I used was a Selectric model. It had one of those metal (or, sometimes, plastic) balls for printing. Watching the head spin could make your head spin.

there is a 2741/selectric APL typeball sitting on my desk ... something of reminder.

misc past posts mentioning apl and/or hone .... hone was the internal world-wide online service supporting field, marketing, & sales .... majority of applications written in apl (originally cp67 with cms\apl ... and then migrated to vm370, first with apl\cms and then vs\apl).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

Metroliner telephone article

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Metroliner telephone article
Newsgroups: misc.transport.rail.americas,nyc.transit,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 10:35:09 -0600

"Sancho Panza" writes:
What difference does that make? The point is balance sheets are fictions drawn up to placate stockholders and the SEC, among others and certified by compliant yes-men and yes-women at accounting firms. The real value of a company is assessed in the free and open market.

related recent thread on sox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#12 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#13 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#14 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#15 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC

slightly earlier thread on the same subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#35 Interesting bit of a quote
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#36 Interesting bit of a quote
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#39 Interesting bit of a quote
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#40 Interesting bit of a quote

When Does Folklore Begin???

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:25:17 -0600

sidd@situ.com () writes:
i am reminded, for some reason, of an incident a long time ago, when a VAX (that was being retired) woke up after a power outage and rejoined a cluster. since the quorum rules had not been designed with this in mind, much tumult ensued.

early in ha/cmp effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

we had a number of meetings with some of the major dbms vendors that had cluster implementations that ran on vax/cluster. we got a list of the 8-10 things that they felt could be improved about vax/cluster ... as well as the vax/cluster distributed lock manager. one of the things was the long time that it took vax/cluster to recover to a stable state after change in cluster membership.

so one of the things that i did in the original design and implementation of the ha/cmp dlm was significantly shorten the time it took to recover to stable state.

random ha/cmp posting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

misc past postings mentioning ha/cmp dlm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm16.htm#22 Ousourced Trust (was Re: Difference between TCPA-Hardware and a smart card and something else before
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm21.htm#29 X.509 / PKI, PGP, and IBE Secure Email Technologies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#66 KI-10 vs. IBM at Rutgers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#2 Block oriented I/O over IP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#47 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#5 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#67 Blade architectures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#8 Avoiding JCL Space Abends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004i.html#1 Hard disk architecture: are outer cylinders still faster than inner cylinders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004i.html#2 New Method for Authenticated Public Key Exchange without Digital Certificates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004i.html#8 Hard disk architecture: are outer cylinders still faster than inner cylinders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#0 Specifying all biz rules in relational data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#5 Tera
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#10 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#70 CAS and LL/SC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#40 clusters vs shared-memory (was: Re: CAS and LL/SC (was Re: High Level Assembler for MVS & VM & VSE))
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#1 Foreign key in Oracle Sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#18 Is Supercomputing Possible?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#26 Crash detection by OS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005i.html#42 Development as Configuration
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#8 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#41 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#20 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#24 computational model of transactions

When Does Folklore Begin???

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:15:13 -0600

sidd@situ.com () writes:
would you care to expand on the differences between the VMS DLM and the ha/cmp DLM ? and on their similarities...?

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#32 When Does Folklore Begin???

it had support for the same api/semantics as offered by vms dlm ... but internally it kept/piggybacked state in more places so that it shorten recovery time (slightly more upfront work but shortened any fault/recovery time).

some of the dbms vendors had fast commit or something similar in non-cluster environment ... but was disabled for any cluster operation. as part of the dlm work, i had also worked out the conventions for doing fast commit type operations across a cluster operation. however, originally it was considered somewhat too advanced ... although I've had follow-up in the past couple years about implementations for doing fast commit type operation in cluster environment.

misc. past posts mentioning fast commit stuff:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#40 Disk drive behavior
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#8 Avoiding JCL Space Abends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#70 A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#7 A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#70 CAS and LL/SC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#32 the relational model of data objects *and* program objects
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#8 IBM 610 workstation computer

other ha/cmp posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

and other posts on continuous availability, disaster survivability, and geographic survivability
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

and other drift misc. past posts mentioning original relational/sql implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

note, some amount of the work also drew on my wife's experience doing a stint (long ago and far away) in POK responsible for mainframe loosely-coupled architecture (i.e. loosely-coupled is mainframe speak for cluster, dates back to at least 360 cluster operation in the 60s). while there, she developed Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

which didn't see much uptake at the time ... but eventually used by IMS hot-standby ... and since has evolved into (mainframe) parallel sysplex.

a parallel sysplex URL:
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/pso/

Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:37:05 -0600

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#14 SEQUENCE NUMBERS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#19 Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#21 Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS

for some additional drift, old history about requiring source for application distribution on the internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

***** Extract from VM Newsletter 5 *****

V M Newsletter Issue 5 ... May 1977 Welcome to the fifth issue of the newsletter. E D I T O R I A L I recently received a contribution for the newsletter which, in addition to the usual description, mentioned that no source code for the item described would be made available. I have withheld its publication for the time being. I feel that, in the absence of a very good reason to the contrary, contributors should always make the source for their programs available to the requesters. Aside from the fact that in many cases it may be essential for the proper installation of a program to have the source, it seems to me a matter of courtesy that it should be provided. I would like to establish a policy for the newsletter regarding this question, but I solicit your opinion to help me do so. ***** Extract from VM Newsletter 6 *****

V M Newsletter Issue 6 ... June 1977 Welcome to the sixth issue of the newsletter.

The response to the first editorial in the last issue is quite satisfying. Most of you feel that source should, in general, be made available. But a number of readers pointed out some other considerations, most of which seem to me to be valid. Among them:

* Sometimes the source is really not available; it seems unreasonable to lose what might be an otherwise valuable contribution and of use to someone in spite of the lack of source.

* Sometimes the source is really part of, or related to, some product being developed and the source can't be made available until the corresponding product is announced or shipped. This was the situation with the contribution which prompted the editorial.

• When the program is under continuing development, it is a considerable burden to the developer to provide a complete set of source. In this situation, some people felt, at least idle requests for the source code should be discouraged. Furthermore, there appears to be a conflict between letting many early versions of the program propagate widely, and getting a number of early "guinea-pig" users.

* When the contribution is the installation of some OS-based processor on CMS, it is inappropriate to distribute the source of the entire processor. In these cases, however, the source for any interface and installation programs should be provided.

• There are a few unusual cases in which the integrity of a lot of data depends on the integrity of programs which access or maintain it. A specific example of this is a file system which was developed at Yorktown. In such cases, a small bug could be introduced by someone casually changing the program, and not have its effects realized until long afterwards. In cases like this, perhaps the burden is on the requester to demonstrate that providing the source will not lead to a bad situation.

The policy I have decided to implement for the newsletter is to publish any contribution, but to require that the contributor state explicitly that the source is not available, and that he explain why this is the case.

the personal data theft pandemic continues

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the personal data theft pandemic continues
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 11:50:04 -0600

Efinnell15@ibm-main.lst wrote:
Maybe they'll add it to SOX.%-)

recent sox thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#12 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you
get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#13 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you
get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#14 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you
get when you don't do FC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#15 Sarbanes-Oxley is what you get when you don't do FC

and mention of another sox thread here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#31

there is the generic category of Identity Theft ... which FTC and some other organizations have been trying to differentiate into identity theft and account theft/fraud.

the account theft/fraud is obtaining sufficient information to perform fraudulent transactions against existing accounts. the other is obtaining sufficient information to create fraudulent new accounts or records in the name of the victim.

part of the issue discussed here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#13

is security breaches and/or data breaches involving account related information ... where just knowing the account number is sufficient to perform fraudulent transaction. the problem in such situations is that the account number needs to be readily available for correct operation of scores of business processes. however, at the same time, because of the fraudulent transaction vulnerability, the account number needs to be kept strictly confidential and never divulged or made available. the diametrically opposing requirements in the treatment of account numbers creates quite a bit of conflict.

in the mid-90s, the x9a10 financial standards working group was given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments. one of the items in the resulting x9.59 financial standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

was to remove knowledge of account number as a fraudulent transaction vulnerability (i.e. account numbers used in x9.59 financial standards couldn't be used in other kinds of transactions w/o the required authentication).

this is somewhat related to my old post on security proportional to risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61

also in the 90s, we had been called in to help word smith the cal. (and later the federal) electronic signature legislation. one of the industry groups involved was also looking at privacy issues and had done a survey about factors motivating privacy legislation ... they found the two major driving factors behind privacy legislation were

1) Identity Theft (including account fraud/theft) 2) "denial of service" (against individuals by institutions and organizations)

at the time, cal. was also working on a data breach notification law, in part because any subsequent fraud (including fraudulent account transactions) was frequently against individuals, as opposed to the institution that had the security/data breach.

misc. past posts mentioning electronic signature related stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#signature

Metroliner telephone article

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Metroliner telephone article
Newsgroups: misc.transport.rail.americas,nyc.transit,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:33:18 -0600

floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L. Davidson) writes:
Eventually yes. After divestiture AT&T had MCI and SPRINT to compete with.

from archive long ago and far away:

Date: 01/11/82 13:46:04
To: wheeler
Subject: Techno-trivia

Note that AT&T has started divesting itself of the 22 wholly owned local phone companies (over half of "Ma Bell") in order to compete freely in any market it wishes. Two predictions:

a) The use of integrated MODEMs in PCs to obviate the need for bigger DASD is doomed to failure. The local rates are going to take a big jump now that long lines no longer subsidize them. Because of the unwillingness of cable television companies to share standards much less technology, cable TV is not likely to offer much of a solution.
b) Bell Labs brought us UNIX. What can they do now that they are allowed to make money? Is this likely to make them a super-competitor or are their accountants going to completely stifle anything which might affect us?

... snip ... top of post, old email index

Date: 02/10/82 00:51:10
To: wheeler
Subject: rumors

Latest rumor from AT&T... they're going to buy DEC. (xxxxx's version of that says buy Amdahl. Both seem possible.)

... snip ... top of post, old email index

and:
SEMINAR

Monday, June 11, 1984
10:00 a.m. - 2C-012
Dan Dvorak
AT&T Bell Laboratories
ABSTRACT

The Bell Laboratories Network (BLN) provides a host-to-host networking service that has been specifically designed for the heterogeneous computer environment at AT&T Bell Laboratories. BLN incorporates two important concepts: a 7-layer architecture similar to the one proposed by ISO and CCITT, and implementation techniques that allow most of the networking software to reside in totally portable modules. BLN has been operational since March 1979, and currently runs on over 25 nodes throughout AT&T. This talk presents an overview of the network service requirements and the architecture and implementation that was developed to provide those services.

BIOGRAPHY

Dan Dvorak joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1972 and was named "Distinguished MTS" in 1984. His current work focuses on the DATAKIT* Virtual Circuit Switch where he is coordinating the development of a DATAKIT central network management system and also engineering the large internal DATAKIT VCS network for local-area and wide-area data communications within Bell Labs. Earlier he worked on a layered network architecture and implementation for host-to-host networking, and later surveyed existing LAN products. Dan holds a MSEE in Computer Engineering from Stanford University (1974).

... snip ...

misc. past postings mentioning osi, 7-layer architecture, and/or other stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

the personal data theft pandemic continues

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the personal data theft pandemic continues
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 06:22:50 -0600

Ed Finnell wrote:
It's sort of like the Immigration Laws. No matter what policies and procedures are in place, if they aren't enforced or even acknowledged by the parties of the first part same thing happens over and over. We've still got systems that are in violation of 1974 privacy act that are de facto 'industry standards'.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues

1974 privacy act overview (for federal executive branch agencies)
http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/04_7_1.html
intro/overview
http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/1974intro.htm

the popular press somewhat treats the (account fraud) situation like a bucket that periodically springs links. the issue in the "naked transaction" paradigm is that it is possible for information to leak at the millions of business processes that use and process transactions.

the analogy is then much more like a giant sieve than a giant bucket (that periodically springs leaks). in the "naked transaction" scenario ... it isn't so much that the information can be leaking from millions of business processes ... but the vulnerability that it is possible to turn around and use the leaked information for fraudulent transactions. this is my scenario that even if the planet was buried under miles of (information hiding) crypto ... that the (account) business process information would continue to leak ... since it is required and used in millions of different places.

the x9.59 financial standard scenario
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

... rather than trying to continue the impossible task of plugging all the potential leakage points ... was eliminate the leaks as fraudulent transaction vulnerability (i..e the information could continue to leak but couldn't be turned around and used for fraudulent transactions)

for a little more drift, i was co-author of the financial industry PIA x9.99 standard ... and had to spend an unexpected amount of time not only looking at glba but also hipaa and eu-dpd. I also did a privacy merged taxonomy and glossary as part of the effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote

some of the fed. gov privacy officers attended some of the financial standard privacy working group meetings. one of them commented that the original hipaa "security" language had hardly changed since it was originally drafted in the 70s.

Also, the OECD privacy guidelines have been around since 1980
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/basic/oecdguidelines.html

lots of past posts related to fraud, vulnerabilities, threats, and exploits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud

hardware virtualization slower than software?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: hardware virtualization slower than software?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 06:54:24 -0600

Hardware virtualization slower than software?
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/08/12/2028223.shtml

... from above:
One example given is compilation of a Linux kernel under a virtualized Linux OS. Native wall-clock time: 265 seconds. Software-assisted virtualization: 393 seconds. Hardware-assisted virtualization: 484 seconds. Ouch. It sounds to me like a hybrid approach may be the best answer to the virtualization problem.

... snip ...

similar, but different posting made here not too long ago
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#27 virtual memory

the above has a discussion about hardware/software virtualization trade-off in 3081 vis-a-vis 3090. note that this was pre-"PR/SM" (which has since evolved into LPARS) ... where the microcode support can create virtual machines ... w/o requiring separate hypervisor monitor running (i.e. "dropping" everything into hardware was no longer a performance trade-off issue).

for other drift, the performance characterization in the article is reminisent of presentation i made at Atlantic City share meeting in fall68. three people had came out from the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

the last week in jan68 to install cp67 at the university. during the spring and summer of 68, i rewrote significant poritions of the kernel, some cases descreasing pathlengths by factor of 10 to 100 times. past posting of parts of that presentation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 and OS MFT14

which has a bare-machine (native wall clock) time of 322 sec. original virtualization elapsed time 856 sec. virtualization elapsed time (after rewrites of the spring and summer) 435 secs (virtualization processing was reduced from 534 cpu secs. to 113 cpu secs.).

misc. other posts repeating the same information:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#22 Pre S/360 IBM Operating Systems?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#28 IA64 Self Virtualizable?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#21 Reviving the OS/360 thread (Questions about OS/360)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#93 MVS vs HASP vs JES (was 2821)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#12 checking some myths.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#16 CPU time and system load

sorting

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: sorting
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 09:37:31 -0600

krw writes:
Yes, it was on VM. I don't believe it's been updated for a long time.

I'd misread your article such that you were maintaining internal dictionaries. Sorry.

If I'd had that, I wouldn't have had to maintain my own SCRIPT defs!

Dunno why they didn't make such things available. TLA and ETLA dictionaries might have been a good business. ;-)

Jim Gray and i was sitting around one friday night ... slightly related ... misc. past posts mentioning original relational/sql implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

and came up with this idea that online phone directories would go a long way to getting a lot of the internal non-computer users ... to start using online computer facilities. as a result, we started project to do internal online phone directories. recent post (in this thread) discussing some of that
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#22 sorting was: The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That

for some drift ... i maintain a few merged taxonomies and glossaries on a number of subjects
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote

which also includes some number of acronyms.

the personal data theft pandemic continues

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the personal data theft pandemic continues
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 10:23:19 -0600

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#37 the personal data theft pandemic continues

for some additional drift related to being able to harvest personal information and whether or not it represents a vulnerability, risk, threat, and/or fraud potential.

here is a lot of past postings on account number harvesting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#harvest

and even more posts on general fraud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud

... basically being able to harvest (static) information and perform fraudulent activities ... frequently as some form of replay-attack.

x9.59 included countermeasure to skimming and replay-attacks (i.e. simple skimming/harvesting of readily available information and using it for fraudulent transactions)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

another example is the recent news articles about cloning e-passport chips
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#9 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#11 And another cloning tale

where there have been subsequent comments that e-passport cloning doesn't represent a vulnerability (i.e. personal information may be captured, but it supposedly isn't subject to exploits).

this is somewhat in light of recent items about similar cloning of financial payment chip cards ... and yes card vulnerability

first a quicky comment about 3-factor authentication model
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor
• something you have • something you know • something you are

in the yes card vulnerability, the chip card represented something you have authentication. it contained static information that is very similar to what is found on a magstripe ... and the chip is vulnerable to some of the same techniques used to harvest magstripe information. then a counterfeit yes card chip card is built in manner similar to creating a counterfeit magstripe card. presenting a supposedly valid card is then a form of something you have authentication.

supposedly the e-passport can be considered a form of electronic surrogate passport. there can be a digital image, a name and a passport number ... supposedly all protected from modification by some form of cryptographic technique or secure hash.

if the threat model is the stealing and use of electronic passport then the e-passport is a failure ... since it is easier to copy/steal the e-passport information (compared to physical passport). furthermore, the theft of a physical passport is frequently noticed and reported ... while the "theft" of e-passport may not even be noticed.

however, the e-passport does provide a countermeasure to modification threat model (i.e. altering information/picture on valid passport and/or creating purely counterfeit passport with false information).

the lack of vulnerability, somewhat supposes that there is a (trusted) human in the loop that reads the electronic information, looks at the digital picture and compares it against the person standing in front of them (basically a form of something you are or biometric authentication).

the issue with the yes card, was that the card represented purely something you have authentication (whoever possesses the object is authenticated). it does require a PIN (something you know authentication) for supposedly multi-factor authentication and as a countermeasure to lost/stolen cards.

however, a fault in the yes card scenario was that the terminal would authenticate the (potentially counterfeit) card (with static data vulnerable to replay attacks) and then asked the card if the correct PIN was entered. the counterfeit yes cards were programmed to always respond YES (that the correct pin was entered).

Slight additional digression on yes card and multi-factor authentication; supposedly multi-factor authentication is considered more secure based on the different authentication factors having independent threats and vulnerabilities (which is NOT a valid assumption, if they have common threat/attack). A copy of the (static/SDA) authentication information can copied into a yes card and then it is no longer necessary for the attacker to know the correct PIN.

supposedly the countermeasure to the yes card replay attack exploit (using static data authentication) is to convert to dynamic data authentication (DDA; i.e. changes on every use). However, there may still be a man-in-the-middle vulnerability (MITM-attack)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm

where a counterfeit yes card is paired with some valid (DDA) card, the counterfeit yes card transparently passes the (DDA) authentication operation to a valid card ... but then takes control of the remaining interactions. as an aside, this is somewhat similar to the "naked transaction" thread mentioned earlier, i.e. straight forward something you have card authentication (with or w/o PIN, something you know entry as countermeasure to lost/stolen card) separate from the actual transactions and business processes; opening gaps for MITM-attacks.

a few recent posts discussing yes card vulnerability, chip cloning, etc:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm22.htm#34 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm22.htm#39 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm22.htm#40 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#20 Petrol firm suspends chip-and-pin
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#25 Petrol firm suspends chip-and-pin
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#27 Chip-and-Pin terminals were replaced by "repairworkers"?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#30 Petrol firm suspends chip-and-pin
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#55 UK Detects Chip-And-PIN Security Flaw
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#0 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#1 UK Detects Chip-And-PIN Security Flaw
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#2 UK Banks Expected To Move To DDA EMV Cards
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#27 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#29 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#30 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#31 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#32 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#43 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#4 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#9 DDA cards may address the UK Chip&Pin woes

posts referencing naked transactions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#7
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#9
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#12
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#14
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#26
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#41
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#42

When Does Folklore Begin???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:38:11 -0600

Charles Richmond writes:
At a PPoE, the powers that be modified the company procedures so that they could do it. Then they *required* that all employees come in at 7 am and leave at 6 pm everyday. It was very, very unpopular. People goofed off a lot and I think *less* got done. I called this attitude the "Spirit of 7 to 6". ;-)

long ago and far away (some 35years ago) in the days of timesharing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

and accounting for resources used ... i was once approached about using more computing resources than the whole rest of the organization ... and asked for ideas about reducing it ... I made an offhand suggestion about possibly doing less work.

Metroliner telephone article

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Metroliner telephone article
Newsgroups: misc.transport.rail.americas,nyc.transit,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:24:02 -0600

sidd@situ.com () writes:
o, be nice

i used isdn for several years in the middle and late 90s and it just worked. 2B+1D channels from three client locations to a datacenter. call setup times were impressive and i liked the little ascend isdn to ethernet boxen and the many attractive blinking lites on the max4000 ascend box at the datacenter. we had unlimited service between these locations thru dubious centrex extend arguments, that i always felt were flawed. we discontinued the service sometime in the late nineties, but not for technical reasons...infact i do not recall a single outage in perhaps 5 yrs...

I had isdn in the fall of 94, the time-charges were running $400/month for connection to local ISP. then switched to 56kbit dial-up modem which gave me nearly identical thruput and eliminated all the time-charges.

"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 18:25:16 -0600

Roland Hutchinson writes:
The first "personal computer" identified as such that I remember hearing about was the MIT Lisp Machine.

my first personal computer was a 64kbyte 360/30 ... 60s, i would get it on the weekends from 8am saturday until 8am monday ... it would make it a little hard to get to monday classes after having been up for 48hrs straight.

When Does Folklore Begin???

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:08:11 -0600

jmfbahciv writes:
<GRIN> Some days I often wondered why monkeys weren't ruling the world. Another idiocy is a product manager insisting that a customer have the first gear off the manufacturing floor instead of TW (or JMF as in the case of the Alpha). It happened to TW all the time after we'ld moved to Marlboro and idi^Winexperienced people started doing the product manager job.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#41 When Does Folklore Begin??

then there is the story about getting operating system deployed in the disk engineering lab (bldg. 14) and disk product test lab (bldg. 15). their attempts at it before hadn't been very successful (they tried it with mvs and found it to have something like 15min mtbf). i had to nearly completely rewrite the i/o supervisor to handle the significant error conditions generated by hardware in development and test.

the side-effect was they got engineering own time-sharing service ... the down-side was i got the trouble calls when anything went wrong, even when it was their own hardware.

one such was some monday mid-morning (from bldg. 15) when they called to complain that the performance had gone all to pieces and what had I done over the weekend (and they had done nothing). turns out that they had string of 16 drives that they had put together for their own use ... and had actually exchanged an existing 3830 disk controller with a 3880 disk controller (still in test) over the weekend. after some amount of diagnostic, it was shown that there had been no software changes over the weekend, and the (performance) problems were isolated to the newly installed 3880 disk controller. after some more diagnostic the nature of the problem was characterized ... and they went off to try and figure out how to redo the hardware to fix the problem. fortunately, first customer ship was still six months off and there was some time to fix things up.

lots of past telling of various activities in bldgs 14&15
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:26:45 -0600

Roland Hutchinson writes:
Fun! -- but of course the salient difference is that the Lisp Machine was designed to be used that way (and only that way) from the get-go.

I have located the very place where I first encountered the term "personal computer" applied to the Lisp Machine (which may also be where I first encountered the term "personal computer" in any context): MIT AI Memo 444, August 1977, "LISP Machine Progress Report by the Lisp Machine Group" (http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5751), page 3:

"The Lisp Machine is a personal computer. Personal computing means that the processor and main memory are not time-division multiplexed, instead each person gets his own. The personal computation system consists of a pool of processors, each with its own main memory, and its own disk for snapping. When a user logs in, he is assigned a processor, and he has exclusive use of it for the duration of the session. When he logs out, the processor is returned to the pool for the next person to use. This way, there is no competition from other users for memory; the pages the user is frequently referring to remain in core, and so swapping overhead is considerably reduced. Thus the Lisp machine solves a basic problem of time sharing Lisp systems."

You betcha! 24 bits of address space ought to be enough for anyone...

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#43 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

and old 801 reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#65 801 (was Re: Reviving Multics

including the following tidbit (I had already left cambridge and transferred to sjr):

Date: 79/07/11 11:00:03
To: wheeler

i heard a funny story: seems the MIT LISP machine people proposed that IBM furnish them with an 801 to be the engine for their prototype. B.O. Evans considered their request, and turned them down.. offered them an 8100 instead! (I hope they told him properly what they thought of that)

... snip ... top of post, old email index

see the referenced 801 url for some comments about the difference between 801 and 8100.

at the time, the 801 group had pl.8 and cp.r monitor; and of course, 801 has since evolved into power and power/pc.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

and other posts in the thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#54 Reviving Multics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#55 Reviving Multics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#56 Reviving Multics
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#60 Reviving Multics -- Computer Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#62 Reviving Multics -- Computer Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#63 Reviving Multics -- Computer Museum
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#64 Reviving Multics -- Computer Museum

and some old posts mentioning various acorn related activities:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#31 difference between itanium and alpha
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#9 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#19 PC history, was PDP10 and RISC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#16 unix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#24 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#27 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#8 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#48 Hey! Keep Your Hands Out Of My Abstraction Layer!

"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:51:24 -0600

Roland Hutchinson writes:
"Future programs are likely to be quite a bit bigger; intelligent systems with natural language front ends may well be five or ten times the size of a PDP-10 address space."

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#43 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#45 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

so they are somewhat getting around to natural language front ends ... however, old reference to somewhat larger 801 configuration; which have since grown significantly larger than the ones mentioned here:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

on the other hand ... 801 cores have also morphed into the "game" personal computers.

the personal data theft pandemic continues

Refed: **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the personal data theft pandemic continues
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:34:19 -0600

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#37 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#40 the personal data theft pandemic continues

various recent news articles involving security/data breaches and authentication technology.

part of the breach issue involves whether or not the leaked information can result in fraud ... i.e. like authentication replay-attacks (in the case of cloned magstripe or cloned yes cards) ... or possibly other infrastructure flaws that can result in things like mitm-attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm

Data breaches And Congress
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3624536
Clock is ticking on data security bills
http://www.greensheet.com/PriorIssues-/060702-/5.htm
Consumer groups, banks battle over ID theft legislation
http://www.oxfordpress.com/business/content/shared/news/stories/IDENTITY_THEFT16_COX_W1718.html
Congress must pass strongest protection of consumer data
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/15134762.htm
Federal bill may trump ID theft law; Lynch asks Congress to reject the measure
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060727/REPOSITORY/607270344/1043/NEWS01
Recent Wave of Data Thefts Breeds Changes in IT Security Policy and Legislation
http://www.techweb.com/showPressRelease.jhtml?articleID=X512630
FISMA Could Solve Data Security Issues
http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/3625756
Data Security | Deadline For Agencies To Secure Remote Data Comes--And Goes
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202804307
Keep from being the 'Breach of the Week'
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6105339.html
Security breaches steadily increasing
http://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=20957
UK's Biometric Passport OK, Dutch Passports Cracked in 2 Hours
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=600
S'pore: Biometric passports are secure
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,39390380,00.htm
Beijing ATMs to recognize your face
http://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=20962
Are we ready for biometric passports and ID cards?
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060815.E03&irec=2
Industry group defends e-passports
http://www.theregister.com/2006/08/11/e-passports_defended/
High-tech passports fail to pass hacker's security test
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/hightech-passports-fail-to-pass-hackers-security-test/2006/08/07/1154802823195.html

sorting

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: sorting
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:56:03 -0600

jmfbahciv writes:
Demanded by people who believe that it is possible to force everybody to be 100% safe from everything, especially their own stupidity.

baby proofing the environment for everybody.

old story about VP testing phone circuit with his tongue ... and then mandating that phone jacks on all modems had to be recessed so that executives wouldn't get shocked when they went around sticking their tongue in phone jacks:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#11 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#68 The Pentium 4 - RIP?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#26 Losing colonies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#57 high speed network, cross-over from sci.crypt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#12 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design

The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:31:35 -0600

Mickey wrote:
My opinion of VM has been essentially the same as yours. For lack of a better term, I have always thought of both VM and Rexx as being elegant.

part of the issue was that CMS (under cp67 and then vm370) was mainstay personal computing offering of the late 60s and through-out the 70s. lots of stuff we see today was originally developed in that environment ... including Rexx. GML (precursor to sgml, html, xml, etc)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml
was also invented at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

it was major time-sharing, "personal computing", online interactive offering platform ... both by commercial companies like idc, ncss, tymshare, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

as well as the internal HONE system which provided interactive, personal computing support for all field, sales, and marketing world wide.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

that role was taken over in the 80s with the appearance of individual computers for personal computing.

When Does Folklore Begin???

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:53:35 -0600

Charles Richmond writes:
One weekend a system needed to be installed and there was *no* system ready to send. So the install guy took our *test* system and used it for the install. It was a week before we got another test system...*not* to mention the difficulty of rebuilding the software on the new hard disk.

you are starting to stray into the "mip envy" theme ... which also raised the issue of shipping to customers before internal ships ... and along the line of the old tale about cobbler's children going barefoot.

The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:41:32 -0600

Tom Marchant wrote:
> Is IBM really giving up on VM? They tryed that once before...

Once? I think the first time was about 1970.

pretty much all during cp67 ... at least tss/360 group was trying to cancel it ... since the 360/67 (w/virtual memory was supposed to be a "tss/360" machine). i was undergrad that got to attend the Spring '68 houston share meeting (when cp67 was officially announced) and almost got into a brawl at scids with one of the tss/360 developers (both of us were pretty well plastered)

then all during early vm370 .... developers were constantly being told that if they wanted a career, promotion, and/or raise ... they needed to move to hudson valley (pok or kingston) and work on a "real" system ... since the next release of vm370 was always going to be the last.

then in '76 they killed the vm development group in burlington (the development group had split off from the science center, absorbed the boston programming center, and when they outgrew space in 545 tech sq. ... moved out to the old service bureau corp. building in burlington mall) and told everybody that they needed to move to pok ... vm370 was being killed ... because mvs/xa wasn't going to meet its schedule and mvs/xa needed all the vm developers working on mvs/xa ... in order to try and meet schedule.

there was an episode where the shutdown was leaked to the people in burlington ... well before it was officially announced ... which resulted in a couple month witch hunt for who leaked the information (as well as lots of people looking for how they could stay in the area and not have to move). the guilty party was never identified.

endicott was eventually able to salvage part of the vm370 product development mission ... of course you saw some number of the burlington people staying in the area and going to work for dec (vax/vms) or to places like prime computer.

in the late 70s and early 80s ... there was a huge explosion in the number of vm machines in the mid-range market place ... 4341s competing against vax machines (which also saw a huge market explosion). this was before the mid-80s when the workstations and large PCs started taking over that market segment. the 4381 was being ramped up to continue the huge 4341 market explosion ... but by that time the workstations and PCs was starting to take over that market segment (other vendors in that market segment saw similar effects).

The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:54:47 -0600

Mickey wrote:
HONE? Ewwwwwwwww.... I remember I took the Skills Tracking System off of home and converted it to run on VM at the Atlanta ED cenrter way in 1990. What a monumental task that was, but the resultant system was 2/3 the size of the original and had about 20% more functionality. Now THAT was some Hands On work indeed :)

Mickey

P.S. Funny thing about the Skills Tracking System.... if you were definded to it as a manager, you could not enter skills for yourself. I will leave it to your imaginations to work out just how many jokes about IBM managers not having technical skills THAT lead to :)

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#49 The Fate of VM - was: re: Baby MVS???

in the late 70s and early 80s ... there was joke about pulling 4shift ... working in sjr/28 1st shift ... there was the original relational/sql implementation system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

working across street in the disk engineering and product test labs 2nd shift (bldg. 14 & 15),
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

working down in stl (bldg. 90) 3rd shift
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

and then working up at hone on the weekend.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

i had helped build and support hone systems from the time it was on cp67 and then thru much of its life on vm370. much of hone services and applications had been built in apl ... starting originally with cms\apl. the cambridge science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

had ported apl\360 to cms (under cp67). apl\360 had its own multitasking monitor and terminal support ... which could be discarded under cms. apl\360 also supported its own swapping of 16kbyte (sometimes 32kbyte) real memory workspaces. This had to be completely reworked for the large virtual memory environment provided with cms. cms\apl also introduced mechanism for accessing operating system APIs (filesystem operations, etc ... which offended the apl purists). in aggregate, this allowed some major applications to be developed in cms\apl (which wasn't possible in the purely self-contained 16kbyte workspaces provided by apl\360).

HONE evolved a major APL-based delivery vehicle called SEQUOIA (itself a very large APL application) which attempted to isolate majority of (cms) computing infrastructure characteristics from the end-user. All HONE APL applications then had major requirements to implement SEQUOIA consistent characteristics and interfaces.

in the mid-70s, US HONE operations consolidated all their datacenters in northern california ... the new datacenter was across the back parking lot from the palo alto science center. palo alto science center had done the work for apl\cms (as opposed to the earlier work cambridge had done for cms\apl) and also the apl microcode assist for the 370/145.

HONE had its own equivalent of constant attempts to kill vm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#51 The Fate of VM - was: re: Baby MVS???

Especially during the late 70s and the 80s ... HONE would get a new executive every couple years. HONE was part of the marketing division and so the new executive typically came up through the marketing and sales ranks.

The corporation constantly had a sales/marketing theme that MVS was the solution to all computing requirements. That HONE was actually a vm370 based infrastructure was pretty well hidden from the world-wide field and marketing people. As a result, it frequently came as quite a shock to the new, incoming executive that HONE wasn't a mvs-based operation.

Then there ensued a period where the whole organization would be directed to drop nearly everything else and work on moving HONE operation to a mvs-based operation. Usually within 9-12 months, it would be thoroughly proven that it couldn't be done and things would sort of settle back to semi-normal ... at least until the next, new replacement executive came in (which happened about once every two years) and the process would be repeated. As a result, something like 1/3rd to 1/2 of HONE resources went into repeatedly proving to newly appointed executives that you couldn't use MVS for the HONE platform.

The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:03:17 -0600

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#49 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#51 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#52 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

email from long ago and far away

Date: 11/04/82 22:45:27
To: wheeler
From: xxxxx
Subject: GENDMOD module

Could I ask you to get an assembly listing of the GENMOD module so I can study it to determine what changes I have to make to VS APL. If we make this change, it could have a tremendous impact on the HONE system, above what their SEQUOIA system is giving them. There are several very large APL applications on there .... particularly the configurators. If users are sharing that code as well, we could get some big savings ... not to mention the time savings in just loading the workspaces.

... snip ... top of post, old email index, HONE email

shared variables was eventually created as an alternative paradigm (to that originally implemented in cms\apl) for accessing system api/functions.

apl\cms and apl\sv eventaully evolved into vs apl.

the (cms) apl interpreter had been structured into code that could be shared across all the virtual address spaces. however, HONE apl operations had another couple hundred kbytes of commonly used apl applications that appeared in nearly all workspaces
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

i had originally done paged mapped filesystem for cms in the early 70s along with a mechanism that allowed loading of objects from cms paged mapped filesystem as memory objects shared across multiple virtual address spaces.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

one of the internal datacenters this was installed on was at HONE. HONE used it to create a "shared" executable image of the APL interpretor (under cms). I had modified the standard CMS executable creation command (GENMOD) and executable load command (LOADMOD) to add support for the shared executable object option (common r/o image shared across different virtual address spaces)

A small subset of the cp & cms memory mapped feature/function was released in vm/370 release 3 called DCSS.

However, the full function was in use at a number of internal datacenters, like HONE.

The issue in this particular email ... was that there were several large APL applications (like the HONE mega-application mentioned in the previous post, SEQUOIA). These "programs" were mostly static data that was "interpreted" by the APL interpreter (not directly executable code in the 370 sense). The idea here was to modify the APL workspace loader to play some of the same games that I had done in CMS GENMOD/LOADMOD ... so that static APL workspace applications could be loaded as shared memory objects (allowing a single common image to be used across all virtual address spaces). This could significantly cut both the aggregate HONE application real-storage requirements ... as well as I/Os involved in retrieving unique copies off disk for every HONE user.

When Does Folklore Begin???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:55:05 -0600

jmfbahciv writes:
<GRIN> Some days I often wondered why monkeys weren't ruling the world. Another idiocy is a product manager insisting that a customer have the first gear off the manufacturing floor instead of TW (or JMF as in the case of the Alpha). It happened to TW all the time after we'ld moved to Marlboro and idi^Winexperienced people started doing the product manager job.

is there possibility of doing a parody with these two articles:

Fastest-evolving human gene linked to brain boost
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9767&feedId=online-news_rss20

Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/08/15/1845200.shtml

and the possibility of dealing with species that hasn't evolved.

When Does Folklore Begin???

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: When Does Folklore Begin???
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:16:55 -0600

"Charlie Gibbs" writes:
If you do write such a book, though, be sure to include a warning to not take it to work, lest the local PHBs see it and classify you as a troublemaker.

for one of Boyd's seminars, i tried doing it thru the employee education center. after i sent them a summary to the talk, i got back a response that they didn't think it was appropriate for the general employee, it would be better to just limit it to business planning and competitive analysis executives.

misc. past posts mentioning boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd

and various URLs from around the web mentioning boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2

Greatest Software Ever Written?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software Ever Written?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:24:33 -0600

"Robert" writes:
The current Information Week magazine lists the greatest software ever written. What do you think?

1. Unix BSD 4.3
2. IBM System R
3. Institute for Genomic Research gene-sequencing software
4. IBM 360 OS
5. Java
6. Mosaic
7. Sabre
8. Mac OS
9. Excel
10. Apollo guidance system
11. Google search rank
12. Morris worm

lots of past posts mentioning system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

Greatest Software Ever Written?

Refed: **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software Ever Written?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:58:12 -0600

Peter Flass writes:
Thank God, at least they didn't include any windoze cr@p. OS/360, when it was finally got right, was certainly an accomplishment, but "greatest"? How about the original FORTRAN compiler? It certainly started a trend.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#56 Greatest Software Ever Written

how 'bout cp67 ... the original virtual machine implementation ... it has taken a little while ... but it seems to be really catching on now.

and as an aside footnote ... cp67 on 360/67 morphed into vm370 for 370 virtual memory machines ... and system/r implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

was done on vm370 system.

recent vm thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#49 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#51 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#52 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#53 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

Greatest Software Ever Written?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software Ever Written?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:47:56 -0600

Roland Hutchinson writes:
Waddabout public-key cryptography -- another interesting disruptor. Perhaps not great _programming_ per se, but programming based on great thinking.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#56 Greatest Software Ever Written?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#57 Greatest Software Ever Written?

a lot of public-key cryptography got side-tracked into PKI software ... the widest deployed is a typically something of a subset called SSL or HTTPS ... for which we coined the term certificate manufacturing ... to help highlight the difference. this was back in the days when we were working with this small client/server startup in the valley that wanted to do payment transaction on their server ... a past discussion
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

and a more recent comment on its application to what became called e-commerce (and some of the current vulnerabilities in the way that it is being used now):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#17 Hamiltonian path as protection against DOS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#19 Hamiltonian path as protection against DOS

Why no double wide compare and swap on Sparc?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Why no double wide compare and swap on Sparc?
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:05:05 -0600

"Chris Thomasson" writes:
Good point. Do you happen to know if they implemented it so they could successfully pop from a lock-free stack? I wonder....

charlie had invented compare&swap as part of his work on fine-grain locking (also leading to some number of lock free operations) for cp67 (360/67) mutliprocessor support at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

the trick then was to come up with a mnemonic that matched Charlie' initials, CAS.

the attempt was then made to get the instruction into the up and coming 370 architecture. working with ron smith in the pok 370 architecture group (they owned the 370 architecture "red book"), the response was that 370 didn't need another multiprocessor specific instruction, that the test and set from 360 was sufficient.

to get compare and swap into the 370 architecture we had to come up with usage for compare&swap that wasn't multiprocessor specific. thus was born some number of examples that were applicable to multi-threaded applications that might be running enabled for interrupts ... independent of whether the machine was single processor or multiprocessor.

originally in the 370 principles of operation, the examples were part of the programming notes that were part of the compare&swap instruction. in subsequent version of the principles of operation the examples were moved to a section in the appendix.

also as part of this activity, compare&swap double instruction was added in addition to compar&swap. that resulted in two instructions for 370, compare&swap along with compare&swap double ... so the instruction mnemonics become CS and CDS (instead of CAS ... defeating the original objective of coming up with instruction name compare&swap).

total topic drift ... science center was like that ... GML
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml

precursor to SGML, HTML, XML, etc ... also invented at the science center, actually are the first initials of the last name of the three inventors (and you probably thot it stood for generalized markup language).

misc. past posts on multiprocessor support and/or compare&swap instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

esa/390 principles of operation appendix for multiprogramming (i.e. multithread) and multiprocessing
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822

cs & cds appendix:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6.2?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822

bypassing post and wait
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6.3?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822

lock/unlock:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6.4?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822

free pool manipulation
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.6.5?SHELF=EZ2HW125&DT=19970613131822

and more recent z/architecture (64-bit) principles of operation multiprogramming and multiprocessing examples appendix
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9ZR003/A.6?SHELF=DZ9ZBK03&DT=20040504121320

note that the above also includes discussion of the newer PLO ...perform lock operation instruction

Greatest Software?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:18:00 -0600

Timothy Sipples wrote:
I disagree with the Morris worm in a sense because it was an example of a great bug. Morris didn't intend for the worm to spread as quickly and as destructively as it did. Do note that it only affected Solaris systems, back then called SunOS, and DEC VAX systems running BSD. In other words, only UNIX. :-)

the topic has generated quite a bit of discussion in alt.folklore.computers n.g.

a couple of my comments from that thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#56 Greatest Software Ever Written?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#57 Greatest Software Ever Written?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#58 Greatest Software Ever Written?

as to "worms", in a.f.c. somebody suggested christmas exec on bitnet (lots of academic vm systems, with misc. other stuff) ... which preceeded morris worm by a year. misc. past bitnet and/or earn (european equivalent) posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

as i've commented before, the internal network ... vast majority vm systems for a variety of reasons
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until around the summer of 85. furthermore, while the internal network and bitnet/earn used similar technologies ... the calculated size of the two networks were totally separate (I believe that even bitnet/earn may have had more nodes than internet for some period).

almost total serendipity there is a similar current thread in comp.arch n.g. called "admired designs / designs to study" .... a little x-post from the original post in that thread (by Mark Smotherman):


#1 - admired designs

It's been five years since I asked a group of computer
architects about the designs that they admired:

https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html

The list of admired designs is:

   6502
CDC-6600 and 7600
Cray-1, -2, -4
Cray X-MP and Cray Y-MP
   GE-645 (Multics)
IAS
   IBM Stretch
IBM 1401
IBM 1570 (not marketed)
IBM 7040 and 7090
   IBM S/360 and S/370
IBM S/360 Model 91
   IBM ACS
IBM America (RS/6000)
Intel x86
LC-2
   MIPS
Multiflow
   PDP-11

and a list of some designs which might serve as a source
of counterexamples is:

CDC-8600
   IBM Stretch (on both lists)
NS-32016 (16032)
VAX-11

... snip ...

Health Care

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Health Care
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 13:30:41 -0600

John Ahlstrom writes:
So, I don't think it will take "relatively little" to extend medicare downward into universal care, but I don't see what alternatives we have.

some past posts mentioning transcript of speech by the federal comptroller general (appointed in the mid-90s for a 15 yr term)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#41 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#44 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#9 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#27 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#2 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#3 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#4 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#19 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#33 The Pankian Metaphor

I had watched the speech on cspan (8apr2006)
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/nat408/index.html America's Fiscal Future

comptroller general's url
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/

misc. pieces from the previous posts:
... the comptroller general talk had something about there being enormous increases in gov. spending as a percent of gnp over the past 50 years ... however the defense budget as percent of gnp is the same as it was 50 years ago

... snip ...
... where some numbers are provided. For one set of numbers he made some comment that some of the numbers (from congressional budget office) were extremely conservative based on four assumptions. He read off each assumption and asked people in the audience (meeting of state governors) to raise their hand if they believed the assumption was valid (nobody raised their hand for any one of the assumptions). The point was the probable financial impact would be significantly more severe (assuming any set of realistic assumptions).

He repeatedly made the point that he believed that nobody in congress has been capable of even simple school math for at least the past 50 years.

... snip ...
... the talk mentioned that there is a problem that most economic policies have poor metrics, instrumentation and audits to be able to check whether they have actually accomplished anything at all in addressing/meeting the stated objectives.

... snip ...
i caught bits & pieces of discussion last night about directed appropriations ... I think I heard that one transportation bill had something like 3000 amendments for directed appropriations and something like $26B was involved (I may have gotten it wrong ... the number of directed appropriation amendments may have been spread over a larger number of bills ... but mostly they supposedly had little or nothing to do with transportation).

... snip ...
One of the comments the comptroller general made during the talk was that there is a $160k/person (every man, woman, child, and baby) fed. program liability in the US for various obligations. The extract (in this earlier thread) explains how the bailout of the S&L industry is being carried off-books, since it represents a $100k/person liability. It wasn't clear in the comptroller general's speech whether his figure of $160k/person included the S&L $100k/person bailout obligation or was in addition to the S&L bailout obligation.

... snip ...

the following has reference to the S&L bailout
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security

and from (note that the numbers are in TRILLIONS):
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/nat408/408natlconfstatelegis.txt


Estimated Fiscal Exposures (in $ trillions):

Explicit liabilities (Publicly held debt, military & civilian pensions
& retiree health, other);
2000: $6.9;
2005: $9.9.

Commitments & Contingencies: e.g., PBGC, undelivered orders;
2000: $0.5;
2005: $0.9.

Implicit exposures;
2000: $13.0;
2005: $35.6.

Implicit exposures: Future Social Security benefits;
2000: $3.8;
2005: $5.7.

Implicit exposures: Future Medicare Part A benefits;
2000: $2.7;
2005: $8.8.

Implicit exposures: Medicare Part B benefits;
2000: $6.5;
2005: $12.4.

Implicit exposures: Medicare Part D benefits;
2005: $8.7.

Total;
2000: $20.4;
2005: $46.4.

How Big is Our Growing Fiscal Burden?

Total Fiscal Exposures;
2000: $20.4 trillion;
2005: $46.4 trillion;

Burden: Per Person;
2000: $72,000;
2005: $156,000.

Burden: Per Full-time Worker;
2000: $165,000;
2005: $375,000.

Burden: Per Household;
2000: $189,000;
2005: $411,000.

... snip ...

a little bit further down:


Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid Spending as a Percent of GDP:

....

2080: Total value: 25.23% of GDP.
Medicare value: 13.85% of GDP, which is 54.9% of 2080 spending.
Medicaid value: 4.75% of GDP, which is 18.8% of 2080 spending.
Social Security value: 6.63% of GDP, which is 26.3% of 2080 spending.

Note: Social Security and Medicare projections based on the
intermediate assumptions of the 2005 Trustees' Reports. Medicaid
projections based on CBO's January 2006 short-term Medicaid estimates
and CBO's December 2005 long-term Medicaid projections under mid-range
assumptions.

Source: GAO analysis based on data from the Office of the Chief
Actuary, Social Security Administration, Office of the Actuary,
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Congressional
Budget Office.

... snip ...
Debt per Capita Could Exceed GDP per Capita by 2030 Assuming Discretionary Spending Grows with GDP after 2006 and All Expiring Tax Provisions are Extended

... snip ...

Greatest Software, System R

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software, System R
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 1:28 PM

Brian Inglis wrote:
I think he would disclaim much involvement with VS2 ff. and SNA products.

lots of system/r related posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

i had done a lot with os/360 as an undergraduate .... and then visited pok quite a bit during the days of building original prototype of vs2 ... i.e. adding virtual memory to a mvt platform.

I've noted in the past that a lot of SNA was continuation of major motivation behind FS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

some specific quotes with respect to FS (which also includes a stray system/r reference):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#16

i.e. countermeasure to clone control units. as undergraduate i was involved in building a telecommunication control unit ... which got written up as origins of clone control unit
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm

my wife did somewhat antagonize the SNA group when she co-authored AWP39 ... peer-to-peer networking ... as opposed to sna which primarily involved (centralized) controlling (large numbers of) terminals (or terminal emulation devices, settop boxes, atm cash machines, etc).

my wife also had her problems with the SNA group when she took the job in POK in charge of loosely-coupled architecture and developed Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

SNA group then was behind "SAA" which had a large component in trying to contain emerging client/server and maintain the PC terminal emulation paradigm.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

Unfortunately in the heyday of SAA we had come up with 3-tier architecture and out presenting it to customer executives (for which we took a bit of heat)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier

the foundation for 3-tier architecture and whole middleware architecture stuff, my wife had originally layed out when she co-authored a response to a large federal RFP for large, secure, reliable, enterprise networking and distributed infrastructure.

as an aside, was able to use some amount of the system/r experience later when doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

and the distributed lock manager for cluster scale-up operation ... including parallel database operation ... a few recent posts mentioning distributed lock manager work:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#8 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#41 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#20 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#24 computational model of transactions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#32 When Does Folklore Begin???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#33 When Does Folklore Begin???

old post mentioning some of the cluster scale-up stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

Greatest Software, System R

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Greatest Software, System R
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 6:13 pm

i've commented before that we when we were asked to work with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payments on their server
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

and ran into two of the people in charge of something the startup called the commerce server ... had been in the following meeting previously mentioned here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

... and that the results has since been come to be known as e-commerce.

i've also commented in the past that one of the other people in the same meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

had commented that he had been the primary catcher in STL for technology transfer of sql/ds from endicott to stl for (mainframe) DB2.

somewhat unrelated story is that one of the main people that had been in Endicott for the technology transfer of system/r from sjr to endicott for sql/ds ... had reached some corporate anniversity (35?) a few years ago ... and his management wanted some stuff from his career. for my contribution i dug up a dozen or so emails (from some archive) that were exchanged with him concerning the sjr to endicott system/r technology transfer activity (for sql/ds)

and as before ... misc. system/r related postings:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

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From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: Re: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:10:17 -0700
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#49 The Fate of VM - was Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#51 The Fate of VM - was Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#52 The Fate of VM - was Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#53 The Fate of VM - was Re: Baby MVS???

for even more drift related to page mapped filesystem related to doing zero copy i/o operations

one of the things i did for cms paged map filesystem (starting in the early 70s)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap

was putting a lot of effort into avoiding moving things around ... directly mapping pages. there were numerous challenges ... one was when i was did the internal backup/archive system ... i had to do some tricks so that backup of images on disk to tape and thre restore of blocks from tape to disk .... would be done with zero copies (i.e. the tape i/o operations directly specified the address of the page mapped images). this package went thru some amount of evoluation ... eventually being released as a product called workstation datasave ... which then morphed into adsm (adstar storage manager) and subsequently renamed tsm (tivoli backup system)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#backup

then when doing performance speedups for our high-speed backbone project in the early 80s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

i was faced with similar opportunity ... not only wanting to do zero copy network i/o ... but also when page mapped disk objects do it directly using the page mapped addresses. played some games with some of the page mapped optimization and the network i/o operations ... was to come as close as possible to streaming data from/to disk thru mainframe memory involving network i/o ... with the absolute minimum of intermediate processing (including any kind of data copy/movement).

for a whole lot of topic drift, a side reference is recent comment about also having to do rate-based pacing as part of hsdt ...
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#19

the above also mentions xtp which was also looking at pipelining and zero buffer copies (in addition to rate-based pacing)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#17

including pieces of the internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

as part of hsdt effort required modifying various components of its implementation. part of that implementation involved the vm370 spool file system as intermediate repository for store&forward. to fix some those problems required reimplementing the vm370 spool file systems with lots of enhancements and allowing pieces of infrastructure supporting page mapped filesystem .... allowing read-ahead, write-behind, contiguous block allocation, consistency checkpointing, multi-block operation, and page mapped/align data doing zero block/page copies between the spool file i/o operations and the network information i/o operation.

as an aside ... hsdt also involved doing things like rfc 1044 implementation in the mainframe tcp/ip product (the base product would burn a 3090 processor getting 44kbyte/sec sustained, after some tuning at cray research between a cray and 4341-clone, the 1044 support would sustain 1mbyte/sec using only a modest amount of the 4341 processor)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

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From: lynn@garlic.com
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:49:01 -0700
Subject: Re: "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

Brian Inglis wrote:
These were probably 68K or VAX systems in that time frame. Doubt any 16MB system could support 500 users doing anything useful. Had problems with a 32MB dual 370 getting 400 users logged on; admittedly that was the day the voluntary severance package details were to be announced online to about 1600 at our site people at 07:00! Never asked us in advance how many people the system could handle. What would have been the problem with having a couple of people in the lobby handing out a paper copy from 07:00 as people arrived at the office?

this was somewhat prompted my observation that disk relative system performance had declined by and order of magnitude over a period of 10-15 yrs .... i.e. if we went linear from cp67 on 360/67 (based on cpu and memory) to (two processor, 32meg) 3081 ... then the 3081 would have been supporting 2000-3000 users.

the issue was possibly starting sometime around the mid-70s ... it was becoming more and more critical to use the increasing available real storage resources to compensate for the inability of disk performance to track the rest of the system thruput

"25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

Refed: **

From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: Re: "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:03:35 -0700
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

misc. old rumors from the archives ...

Date: 12/10/80 22:29:47
From: wheeler

just heard that CMC has directed GSD to come out with home computer ASAP. They are managing a project that has all the pieces being subcontracted. Is suppose to have 8086 for chip, floppy disk, & 132 position printer for $4,000. Available (at least internally) in March. Employee price is 60% using similar program as typewriters (1-2 year interest free loan). Also offering to employees is in anticipation of being able to obtain set of programs that are written for box. GSD will buy best of such programs from employees for distribution/sale.

... snip ... top of post, old email index

Date: 80/12/11 01:38:02
To: wheeler

A few more details: I think its an 8088, not an 8086. The floppy disk is 100 millimeters in diameter (different from both 8 inch and 5-1/4 inch which are in wide use). Hadn't heard about the CMC decision, but the stuff about selling to employees seems to be fairly well known. Project is called CHESS. And the software is being done by some firm in the Northwest.

... snip ... top of post, old email index

Date: 81/04/09 14:21:51
To: wheeler

More rumors on Chess (but from a good source).

A 128K machine with 2 disks, running CP/M and Microsoft basic will be announced in June (or September) for a September delivery. Cost to IBMers is $800 purchace. Honest! Thats what he said! There will not be a communications facility in the initial version; one is planned for later. (I.E., one could not use one as a terminal.) The cpu is an Intel 8088.

There are plans for employees to be able to sell software they write at home and get a royalty but corporate is having problems understanding all the impacts of the policy.

... snip ... top of post, old email index

i paid significantly more than that for mine ... and employee orders took so long to fulfill ... that a couple days after mine arrived, they dropped the (list) price to a little less than what i was charged.

How the Pentium Fell Short of a 360/195

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: How the Pentium Fell Short of a 360/195
Date: Wed, Aug 23 2006 6:47 pm
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, comp.arch.arithmetic

Steve Richfie1d wrote:
The REALLY interesting comparison is between the Itanium and the early Project Stretch (7030) computers. These are SO nearly identical it is unbelievable - right down to each making the landmark use of a Floating Multiply Accumulate instruction with the same FMA mnemonic! Obviously, the folks at Intel didn't read any of the several accounts of the failed 7030 that detailed its architectural problems so that they could design an Itanium that avoided these problems. Those who don't learn from hisory are doomed to repeat it. There is more about this on
http://www.smart-life.net/ComputerArchitecture/

so a little about itanium architecture/architect history discussed in this comp.arch post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#1 About TLB in lower-level caches

and previous post in the thread
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#0 About TLB in lower-level caches

for part of the above reference ... i had to go to the wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20021226021851/www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/2worley.html

but one of the other references in the above (among other comments) is still the original:

Inventing Itanium: How HP Labs Helped Create the Next-Generation Chip Architecture
https://web.archive.org/web/20051031092309/http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/itanium.html

DASD Response Time (on antique 3390?)

From: lynn@garlic.com
Subject: Re: DASD Response Time (on antique 3390?)
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:55:37 -0700
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main, alt.folklore.computers

David Day wrote:
your absolutely right. I should have given my question more thought before asking. I've been out of touch with real world DP centers for a long time. Memory is so cheap and plentiful that it makes no sense to not use it to improve DASD times.

recent post regarding number of users supported by vm370 on old 32mbyte 3081 system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#65 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"

i had written an analysis that disk relative system thruput had declined by an order of magnitude over a 10-15 year period ... or otherwise the 3081 system could have supported on the order of 3000 users ... i.e. the number of users supported actually increased proportional to the increase in disk thruput ... not cpu or memory resources. initially the disk division performance group was assigned to refute my statements ... however, after several weeks, they came back and observed that i had slightly understated the problem. they eventually turned the analysis around into share presentation on how to configure disks and system to improve thruput (somewhat implicit implication that it was compensation for disk thruput bottleneck).

from long ago and far away:
SHARE 63 Presentation B874

Acknowledgments

This review makes liberal use of the computer science literature. As usual, the views expressed in this report are those of the author. Many contributed facts and ideas, but the selection and presentation are the author's responsibility, including any mistakes. I am especially indebted to Lynn Wheeler for pointing out how the relative speeds of things have changed over the years, to Brian J. Smith for helping me through many of the intricacies of attachment modeling, to Bill O'Brien for suggesting this review, and to my manager, Steve Goldstein, for his patient support throughout these activities.

... snip ...

somewhat related to that there was general trend thru-out the last half of the 70s with the increasing use of electronic storage to compensate for disk thruput bottleneck.

we had done some kernel hooks to capture record numbers from disk accesses for modeling things like file activity caching. this was installed in a variety of different systems in the san jose area ... some interactive online systems .... some much more commercial batch oriented. the traces were then run thru model of various kinds of caching configurations and strategies. one of the results was for a fixed amount of electronic storage ... and all other factors being equal .... a single global system file cache always provided better performance than subdividing the electronic storage into channel, controller, and/or drive caches.

you do find electronic storage in controllers and/or other places .... in addition to use of system memory for global system cache ... possibly because there are different kinds of memory technology being used in the different locations (invalidating the model assumption regarding all other things being equal, possibly things like controller memory being less expensive than global system memory). another scenario is that there have deficiencies shown up in some of the global system management strategies ... which can be compensated for by having (less efficient) partitioned management of the resources.

on of the other thing that the detailed i/o record traces started to show up was that some amount of activity had periodic clustering .... i.e. collections of files tended to be used together on periodic basis ... one any specific member of the collection was accessed, others in the collection tended to be used also.

somewhat related recent post regarding doing i/o with zero buffer copies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#64 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???

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