From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 08:33:33 -0600Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
i gave a talk at european finance conference a couple yrs ago that SOX couldn't prevent/eliminate the ENRON type stuff ... since the criminal activity was already criminal ... that about the only part of SOX that was really new was the section at the end on informants.
past posts mentioning basel ii &/or sox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#xmlvch implementations of "XML Voucher: Generic Voucher Language" ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#50 glossary
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#29 CIOs Must Be Involved In Controlling Risk In Financial Services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#smallpay3 Small/Secure Payment Business Models
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#cfppki19 CFP: PKI research workshop
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#50 E-banking is board-level Issue, Says Basel Committee
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#52 Committee calls for better e-banking security management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm16.htm#7 The Digital Insider: Backdoor Trojans ... fyi
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm19.htm#10 Security as a "Consumer Choice" model or as a sales (SANS) model?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm21.htm#3 Is there any future for smartcards?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm22.htm#26 FraudWatch - Chip&Pin, a new tenner (USD10)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#10 PGP "master keys"
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
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#26 Fraudwatch - how much a Brit costs, how to be a 419-er, Sarbanes-Oxley rises as fraud rises, the real Piracy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#43 Audit Follies - Atlantic differences, branding UnTrust, thunbs on Sarbanes-Oxley, alternates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#2 Audit Follies - Atlantic differences, branding UnTrust, thunbs on Sarbanes-Oxley, alternates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#41 An Understanding Database Theory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#23 More on garbage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#26 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#33 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#58 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#1 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#28 Password Complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#22 AOS: The next big thing in data storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#63 Is Silicon Valley strangeled by SOX?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: 2741s, was Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 09:44:47 -0600johnl@iecc.com (John L) writes:
i had 2741s for personal use (one at office and one at home for several yrs w/o problems).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 10:10:10 -0600"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
in afc ng ... i've often mentioned that the number of vm/43xx customer
installs were larger than vax/vms installs ... in part because some
number of large customers would order then in blocks of 100s at a time
(i don't believer there were ever any single vax/vms orders for 1000
machines ... until possibly you got to microvax). misc. old email
discussing 43xx activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx
internally ... all the original relational/sql work was done on vm ...
lots of past system/r posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr
and the internal network was larger than the (whole) internet/arpanet
from just about the beginning until sometime mid-85 ... and was nearly
all vm machines. misc. past internal network postings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
one of my hobbies was building and supporting highly modified custom
operating system for internal distribution. i've periodically joked that
the number of customer batch systems were much larger than the number of
customer vm systems. the number of customer vm systems were much larger
than the total number of internal vm systems. the total number of
internal vm systems were much larger than the peak number of internal vm
systems that i provided distribution and support for. however, that peak
number (that i directly built, distributed, etc) was still as large as
the total number of multics systems that ever existed. this comparison
was somewhat because the vm stuff had started on the 4th flr of 545 tech
sq ... and the multics stuff was on the 5th flr ... misc. past posts
about science center and 545 tech sq
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
in the early 80s ... bitnet/earn for a time was comparable in size
to internet. bitnet/earn was based on similar vm technology used
in the internal network ... but totally different network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet
it wasn't that the IBM culture involved in interactive was smaller than other vendors interactive activity ... it was that the batch market acitivty was so much larger, that skewed perception.
for some topic drift ... post mentioning recent news article
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#68 A tribute to Jim Gray
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 11:12:48 -0600Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
the issue isn't so much that you divulge the account number ... it is that the account number (and other "static" information) is sufficient to authenticate and perform a transactions .... making the infrastructure vulnerable to replay attacks.
some recent posts about authentication independent of the transaction
and authentication tied to the transaction (i.e. when they are separate,
it is possible that the infrastructure becomes vulnerable to other
kinds of attacks ... like man-in-the-middle attacks):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#73 public key pas>sword authentication
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#74 public key password authentication
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#65 Public key encrypt-then-sign or sign-then-encrypt?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#66 More Tipping Point evidence -POS vendors sued
in the past, i've mentioned that one-time account numbers (good for one
use only) have been tried as countermeasure to replay attacks:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#36 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#43 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
this week ... there was announcement of a different kind of one-time value (as countermeasure to replay attacks):
VeriSign to use one-time passwords for bank cards
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/060607-vendors-seek-unity-on-identity.html
VeriSign looks to offer bank cards with one-time passwords
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9018518
VeriSign will ship two-factor authentication for debit cards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/verisign_twofactor_authentication/
VeriSign to offer passwords on bank card
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2007-05-01-verisign-passwords_N.htm?csp=34
note that just having unique per transaction information ... aka or
"dynamic data" ... while it may be countermeasure to replay attacks
... it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't vulnerable to things like
man-in-the-middle attacks ... it depends on details of the
implemenation. for example, in the posts about yes cards
... "dynamic data" is suggested as countermeasure to the yes
card replay attack vulnerability. However, the "dynamic
data" implementation may still be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle
attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard
in posts about the "naked transaction" metaphor ... the countermeasure
integrates the authentication and integrity operations with the actual
transaction ... in effect "armoring" the transaction ... as
countermeasure to wide range of attacks (including replay
attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments
and misc. posts mentioning man-in-the-middle attacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#mitm
now, there may some additional confusion about two-factor authentication ... referenced in one of the articles.
nominally, 3-factor authentication refers to
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#3factor
dynamic data built into the card ... isn't considered multi-factor authentication ... i.e. providing different countermeasures to a single threat ... like lost/stolen card. dynamic data built into the card is more secure form of a single mode of authentication ... providing countermeasure to replay attacks ... but can still vulnerable to single threat from a lost/stolen card.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 11:48:59 -0600timcaffrey@aol.com (Tim McCaffrey) writes:
however, the better FEC may reduce the overall number of record hard failures that a disk might have i.e. improves the overall reliability of a drive while increasing the probability of any specific record failure by something less than 8times. raid has become much more common place as countermeasure to both drive and record failures.
in the 80s ... when we were doing HSDT project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt
we were working with a company called cyclotomics that specialized in reed-solomon error correcting codes ... for some of our high-speed links. cyclotomics had also been active in FEC for cdrom standard (with 2k byte blocks) ... and were eventually bought by Kodak.
some of this was because some of the links where high-speed satellite links (i.e. on a link getting 10**-9 bit-error-rate, 15/16ths reed-solomon FEC could provide the effective equivalent of 10**-15 bit-error-rate ... i.e. about six orders of magnitude improvement). we also had somebody that was considered one of the five best satellite RF engineers in the world and who also happened to be a graduate student of reed's at caltech. but then ... he would also say that his favorite instructor at mit in his undergraduate days had been my wife's father.
in any case, i was trying to really push the envolope (at the time) ... trying to do an interface that would sustain up to 3mbytes/sec ... do reed-solomon FEC and do crypto (along with being able to handle changing crypto key on every packet ... i.e. stepup from raw link encryptor).
past posts mentioning reed-solomon and/or other FEC work:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#28 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#115 What is the use of OSI Reference Model?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#210 AES cyphers leak information like sieves
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#38 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#1 4M pages are a bad idea (was Re: AMD 64bit Hammer CPU and VM)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#80 Disks size growing while disk count shrinking = bad performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#71 Encryption + Error Correction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#53 Free Desktop Cyber emulation on PC before Christmas
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#27 shirts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#3 Calculations involing very large decimals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#73 1950s AT&T/IBM lack of collaboration?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#37 Why doesn't Infiniband supports RDMA multicast
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#11 Mainframes (etc.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#43 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#25 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#27 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#52 Go-Back-N protocol?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#44 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#45 waiting for acknowledgments
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#29 Just another example of mainframe costs
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 15:56:43 -0600"David Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
these days i believe all "DASD" is physically some form of fixed-block ... with controller providing the magic emulation of CKD.
x-over post with old formulas for calculating overhead number of records
per physical track ... for various tracks and tecnologies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#5 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#8 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#13 Track capacity?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion
... i.e. from q&d conversion of old gcard ios3270 to html
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html#26.3
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: MTS *FS tape format? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 16:08:59 -0600"David Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
above also mentions reference to 2703 terminal controller and designing
something better from pdp with pointer to here:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery7.html
when i was an undergraduate ... i was involved in doing something
similar ... but building a "better" terminal controller out of
interdata/3 (which evolved into combination of interdata/4 and
interdata/3s). there was some subsequent article about getting blameed
for contributing to the clone controller business .... lots of past
posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm
later interdata was bought and the boxes marketed under the perkin/elmer brand. within the past decade ... i even ran into installation with still operating perkin/elmer box handling a lot of traffic in a large transaction processing datacenter.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 17:58:42 -0600paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
4341 was around mip (early models slightly less, later ones more).
both vax/vms and 43xx machines appeared to drop below threshhold and started trend towards department machines. by the mid-80s and 4381 time-frame ... workstations and larger PCs were started to take over that market segment.
posting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers
with old email reference to a customer upgrading/changing order from 20
to a couple hundred over a period of approx. six months.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404b
internally the explosion in the machines as departmental machines had a large number of the conference rooms (like in STL and other locations) being taken over for 43xx departmental machines
major market segment that were early into ordering hundreds at a time was chip industry (for running chip design tools ... things that would eventually migrate to the emerging high-end workstations).
old post with a decade of vax/vms machines sliced & diced by model,
year, us/non-us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction
43xx ... aka 4331 (follow-on to 135/138) and 4341 (follow-on to 145/148) shipped more in that mid-range market than DEC. both 43xx follow-on and dec vax/vms show the effect of workstations and large PCs starting to take over that mid-range market in the mid-80s.
six 4341s would provide higher aggregate performance than 3033 at
lower cost ... and were easier to justify and easier to house. some
of the old 43xx email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx
includes discussions working with the disk division on moving various disk design and development tools to clusters of 43xx machines ... that resided in various locations outside the datacenter (and off of the large mainframes that required extensive faciilties, cooling, and space requirements in large datacenters). part of the discussion was that there was never going to be any way that they were going to be able to cost justify and/or provide physical facilities ... for the amount of processing that was going to be needed (assuming the high-end mainframes).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 18:10:41 -0600paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
old post with a decade of vax/vms machines sliced & diced by model,
year, us/non-us
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction
i.e. a decade of vax/vms machines "sales", sliced & diced by model, year, us/non-us
and 43xx shipped more to customers than vax/vms.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 20:14:20 -0600paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
x-over thread from mainframe newsgroup mentioning 2321:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#51 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#63 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#64 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#0 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#3 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#5 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#12 FBA rant
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Disc Drives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 06:39:07 -0600isw <isw@witzend.com> writes:
with a few references to report published by google on detailed statistics on disk drive failures
and a couple other references ...
Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131168-c,harddrives/article.html
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 06:57:10 -0600"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
no, the comment was the "customer" market size for interactive computing was comparable to other vendor's interactive computing market size.
that is separate from the comment that the internal interactive use was extensive.
however, the observation was that the batch market size was so much larger (than either) ... that it skewed a lot of perception.
there were several internal battles over feature/function of 3270 terminals ... with product managers frequently claiming the 3270 major market was for "data entry" (related to batch environments) as opposed to interactive computing (in part ... again ... because the "data entry" market size was so much larger than the interactive computing market size).
for some topic drift ... part of it was resolved with the introduction
of ibm/pc. i've frequently commented that a big part of the uptake for
ibm/pc was that there was large business volume in 3270 desktop
terminals. ibm/pc cost about the same as 3270 terminal ... and it
could emulate a 3270 terminal with some local application software
capability ... in a single desktop footprint. it would be an easy
business justification no-brainer to switch the 3270 terminal
allocated budget from real 3270s to ibm/pc. lots of past posts related
to terminal emulation and market uptake for ibm/pc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
the ("original") virtual machine system was cp40 developed at the
science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
on a specially modified 360/40 with virtual memory hardware ... and "CMS" (cambridge monitor system) for interactive computing. When standard 360/67 with virtual memory became available, cp40 was ported and renamed cp67. later with the introduction of virtual memory standard on all 370s, cp67 morphed into vm370 (and cms was renamed to the conversational monitor system).
the really big volumes in vm370 started to appear with 4341s ... with the explosion in the mid-range market segment (also seen by DEC with vax/vms). subsequently in the mid-80s, this market segment started moving to workstations and large PCs.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 07:16:04 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
for other topic drift ... the original relational/sql implementation was
done at SJR on vm370 (in the late 70s, backus office was about six doors
down from mine, and codd's office was upstairs from mine). lots
of past references to system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr
then there was system/r technology transfer from SJR to Endicott for SQL/DS (i.e. vm370, vs/e, 4341s, etc).
for some other drift ... one of the people in the meeting mentioned
here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15
claimed to have handled majority of the technology transfer from Endicott back to STL for DB2 (even tho SJR and STL were only about 10 miles apart). This was all "mainframe" and mostly implemented in PLS. (DB2 on the corporation's mainframe "batch" platform, MVS)
Later there was "SHELBY" project done in Toronto to do a relational
DBMS implementation for OS2 implemented in C. This became available on
a number of (non-mainframe) platforms and is also marketed as DB2. a
few past posts mentioning shelby:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#1 Foreign key in Oracle Sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#41 Mainframe Applications and Records Keeping?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#13 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Interrupts Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 09:24:17 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
one of the things i've mentioned before is when bldg. 15 (disk product
test lab) got 3033 ... we were able to move air bearing simulation
application (part of designing floating thin-film heads) move the 195
across the street to the 3033 ... getting significantly better
turn-around ... a couple recent posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#46 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#83 Disc Drives
the 3033 had about half the thruput of the peak 195 thruput ... however a 3033 with effectively zero percent utilized would have much better turn-around than waiting weeks for 195 turn around.
palo alto science center also was getting lengthy turn-arounds on some of their numerical intensive workload being run by sjr's 370/195. they had a 370/145 running vm (they had done both the morph from cms\apl to apl\cms as well as the apl microcode assist on the machine) ... which had about 1/30th the thruput of 195. The 370/195 batch workload ran 24hrs/day 7day/week. Palo Alto's vm interactive service was primarily first shift and the machine was mostly unloaded 2nd, 3rd and weekends. Palo Alto did some checkpoint support and started the application on their 145 in the background ... so it got whatever spare cycles were available 1st shift and much of the off-shift processing cycles. While it might take the application several weeks to complete on the 145 ... that was better turn-around than they were getting from the sjr 195.
misc. past posts mentioning palo alto moving numerical intensive
application from sjr 195 to their own 145 (that only had about
1/30 the processing rate)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#22 Golden Era of Compilers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was: Movies with source code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#63 Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#27 Beyond 8+3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#77 COMTEN- IBM networking boxes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#54 Filesystems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#69 Multics Concepts For the Contemporary Computing World
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#21 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on 7 Apr 2004
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#34 August 23, 1957
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#4 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#44 Intel engineer discusses their dual-core design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#34 Power5 and Cell, new issue of IBM Journal of R&D
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#8 Free to good home: IBM RT UNIX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#0 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#4 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#16 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#27 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 09:59:58 -0600"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
for other topic drift ... mention that system/r, sql/ds and (mainframe)
DB2 was primarily PLS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design
slight drift with some past comments about PLS in relationship to
System/R implementation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing
however, i've mentioned also working on a "relational" DBMS implementation for the Los Gatos VLSI tool group (that had some participation from some people in STL). This was relational in the sense that all the relations were directly instantiated ... rather than a data dictionary that applied to a uniform table structure. It shared characteristics with System/R that the "relations" were abstracted with indexes under the covers (and not exposed as part of the data).
The tools group had been doing extensive work on various kinds of
languages using Metaware's TWS ... misc. past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#0 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
and developed a Pascal implementation that was used extensively for
numerous tools ... including the (tools group) DBMS implementation
... recent reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#61 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
it was also eventually released as vs/pascal language product.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 10:28:08 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
slightly related article:
The T.J. Maxx Hack Illuminates Reality Credit Card Companies Want to
Hide from Online Merchants, Says Payment Service Provider
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/5/prweb522888.htm
and old post on security proportional to risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61
and reference to attackers frequently are easily able to
outspend defenders:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#26 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#20 T.J. Maxx data theft worse than first reported
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#56 T.J. Maxx data theft worse than first reported
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#64 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
lots of general posts mentioning fraud, risks, threats, vulnerabilities,
and/or exploits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 12:13:01 -0600paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
with respect to pascal comments in previous post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design.
this post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
mentions much later when the corporation had decided to transition to some number of COTS VLSI tools ... as part of that transition they were providing some of the VLSI tool vendors copies of some of the internal applications.
by that time, vs/pascal was supported for both mainframe operation and rs/6000 (aix) operation. however, as part of the COTS tools transition, various of internal tools had to also run on other vendor workstations. I had opportunity to port one 60,000 line pascal application to other platforms ... however, it seemed like these other implementations had never gotten much past the student programming application stage (and never dealt with a 60,000 line application).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 12:49:39 -0600"David Cressey" <cressey73@verizon.net> writes:
one of the things you started to see with cp/cms in the 60s was the appearance of a number of personal computing applications (similar to various of the things that you would later see on PCs. in the 80s).
in the 60s, there were two operations that sort of spun off of the
science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
to offer commercial time-sharing services. they transitioned to 370
machines when virtual memory became readily available on all 370
machines. they were also joined by tymshare offering commercial
vm370-based time-sharing services. lots of post posts mentioning
cp/cms and vm/cms based time-sharing services
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare
for a little dbms tie-in .... in addition to original relational/sql
system/r being done on vm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr
there was also the ramis, nomad, focus genre that were done on vm/cms
... misc past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#15 CA-RAMIS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#17 CA-RAMIS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#12 Dreaming About Redesigning SQL
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#15 Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#44 Shipwrecks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#35 PDP-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#37 PDP-1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#37 Quote from comp.object
and a couple wiki refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCUS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramis_software
one of the things that started to show up with interactive computing was
games. in the 70s, tymshare had ported the adventure dec fortran source
to vm/cms and i obtained a copy for internal corporate distribution. at
one point, the executives in STL complained that they thot nearly
everybody was spending their days playing adventure on vm/cms (instead
of doing dbms development). recent post mentioning adventure:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#0 10 worst PCs
in addition to the local internal corporate datacenters providing
local vm/cms users interactive computing ... there was also the
world-wide HONE system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
providing online, interactive services for sales, marketing and field
people world-wide ... recent reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU
starting out with most of the application written in cms\apl on cp67 and then transitioning to vm370 and apl\cms. Sometime in the early to mid 70s, sales couldn't even submit a 370 order w/o it having first being processed by a HONE "configurator".
To continue the theme that there were a lot of cms personal computing applications ... the type of things you started seeing moving to PCs in the 80s ... there were a lot of APL-based applications doing "what-if" type things ... that you later see implemented with PC-based spreadsheets.
An early one was when the cambridge science center first ported apl\360
to cms for cms\apl. The apl\360 service offerings typically limited
workspace sizes to 16kbytes (or in some cases 32k). With cms\apl, the
size of the APL workspace could be nearly as large as the virtual
address space. This opened up a lot of "what-if" applications using
real-world data. Early on, we found corporate business planners shipping
tapes to Cambridge with the most sensitive customer and corporate
business data ... and using the science center cms\apl facilities to run
"what-if" business planning scenarios. a couple recent references
mentioning business planners in corporate hdqtrs using the cambridge
cms\apl facilities:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 13:16:20 -0600Greg Menke <gdmnews@toadmail.com> writes:
the 370 SMPs ... would slow down the processor machine cycle by ten percent ... to allow for cross-cache chatter ... and any actual cross-cache chatter (needing handling) would slow the processors down even further. basically, anytime that cache-line was obtained for alternation (whether store-thru cache implementation or a store-into cache implementation) ... there would have to be cross-cache invalidates to clear cache-line from any other processor.
the cross-cache overhead tripled going from two-processor smp configuration (one other cache to listen for) to four-processor smp (three other caches to listen for). in the 3084 time-frame, major operating systems had some amount of kernel storage re-organization to force kernel storage to be aligned on cache-line boundaries and allocated in multiples of cache-line units. this change supposedly improved overall avg. system thruput by 5-6percent (just eliminating possible kernel storage cache-line trashing, aka two different kernel storage areas overlapping in the same cache-line).
there have been some number of optimizations to eliminate cross-cache chatter overhead and allow better processor scaling. an early one was snoopy caches ... where all caches would watch all memory bus operations ... whenever one cache saw a memory bus operation from some other cache ... that involved a cache-line that it had loaded, it would invalidate it (aka sort of an implicit cross-cache signal).
note this is a cache function ... involving copies of the same data in different physical caches ... not a processor function. when you have multiple processors sharing the same physical cache ... the issue doesn't come up.
lots of past posts mentioning SMP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp
a couple recent posts mentioning cross-cache chatter/overhead:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#63 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#16 What's a CPU second?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:19:06 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
This was shortly after BCS had been formed ... it was sort of to move all dataprocessing into a separate business unit and change it from expense category and give it profit/loss responsibility (even if it was mostly internal corporate fund transfers ... however, it was also allowed to perform dataprocessing and consulting outside the company).
I ran into a similar situation when I suggested that I was going to install a pencil sharpner on the wall near my desk (this involved driving screws into the wall).
For other topic drift ... later at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
there was the son of one of the DNA guys on assignment ... who was heavy
into APL programming at the science center ... after the port of apl\360
to cms\apl had been done ... some recent posts mentioning cms\apl:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#32 IBMLink 2000 Finding ESO levels
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#64 Is computer history taugh now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#31 Wylbur and Paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#62 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#77 Sizing CPU
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#17 Newbie question on table design
he left and joined BCS consulting. I dropped by later and he was explaining how they had a contract with USPS to do the financial modeling justifying postal stamp increase (from 8 to 10?) ... as I've often repeated before ... back then, APL was commoningly used for a lot of things that are currently done with spreadsheets.
for other drift ... a couple recent URLs:
IBM to Layoff Half of Global Services Division
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/04/1826221.shtml
Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_002027.html
IBM will erase 100,000 workers - man with one name
http://www.theregister.com/2007/05/05/ibm_cringely_100k/
Slightly drifting back to the topic ... business trips to various
european plant sites in the early 70s ... recent posts with some mention
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#47 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#62 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
when I noticed beer in the plant site vending machines ... it was explained that it was in the union contract (also wine/beer in various company cafeterias)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:41:47 -0600krw <krw@att.bizzzz> writes:
the problem seems to drift into the theme of the comptroller general claiming that nobody is able anymore of doing simple middle school arithmetic ... i.e. the benefits were not fully funded ... but were being paid out of the current operating revenue. The problem extended to executives, unions, gov. officials, and employees. Everybody was taking all the money they could at the moment ... and tomorrow was somebody else's problem.
Supposedly when the company went into the red in 1992 ... they also took a charge-off to move to fully funded retirement program (i.e. since they were already in the red, going further into the red didn't make that much difference). However, a lot of corporations never have bothered to do that ... assuming that it in the worst case, it can be left up to the taxpayers to cover the difference at some point in the future. An issue ... also raised by the comptroller general, is that it assumes the number of taxpayers continue to significantly outnumber the recipients ... there is also a matter of simple middle school arithmetic involved here too.
past posts mentioning comptroller general and his observation about the
lack of even middle school arithmetic skills:
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/2006o.html#61 Health Care
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:56:02 -0600somewhat tieing together these two posts
maybe there is requirement to return to using APL for doing financial modeling ... of course it still doesn't really make up for the lack of middle school arithmetic skills ... since it would take some understanding to even write the APL programs.
lots of past posts mentioning APL (and/or HONE):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 10:36:16 -0600re:
other folklore ... i've seen lots of references ... but haven't actually read the statutes ... claims that in the mid-90s congress passed some legislation that changed some accounting rules, allowing companies to claim funded retirement plans as assets. it doesn't make a whole lot of practical difference to the running of the company ... except for possibly the size of executive bonuses that are tied to such numbers. however, there is the claim that since it is claimed as an asset, if a company were to declare bankruptcy ... assets are available for paying off creditors (possibly even including funded retirement benefits).
for other drift ... in the mid-80s (20+ yrs ago), I spent a summer touring around europe doing market support, giving talks and teaching classes (I wasn't paying close attention to geography and one sequence went boeblingen, stockholm, zurich over 3week period when it would have been much easier to do boeblingen, zurich, stockholm). At one location where i was teaching a 40hr, one week class, i was in the habit of coming in an hr or two early and staying a couple hrs in the evening to login back to the states and do email and some number of other things.
i then asked if i could come in over the weekend to get some work done. i was told that i was creating a significant bureaucratic paper work problem for the local management. It seems that the company benefits had included vacation time that was one week more than the gov. mandated. As a result, the employees had come to think of themselves as priviledge compared to their fellow countrymen.
Recently, the gov. had just increased the mandated vaction time by one week and many employees believed that the company should then also increase its vacation time by a week (to preserve the one week more than gov. mandated for all other workers in the country). Since the company hadn't done that, the unions were taking various work actions. This included the guard union observing that I was spending more than 8hrs/day in the bldg ... and filing various forms with the gov. about work violations (which management had to respond to ... also in writing with the appropriate forms). If I were to (also) come in on the weekend, it would significantly increase the gov. paperwork forms that they would have to file (in response to the anticipated forms that would be filed by the guard union).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 12:42:16 -0600Greg Menke <gdmnews@toadmail.com> writes:
the mnemonic CAS comes from charlie's initials ... which then required coming up with the phrase compare and swap, to go with charlie's initials.
as previously mentioned when attempting to first get compare&swap into
370 architecture ... it was rejected based on various assertions that
test&set instruction was sufficient for handling multiprocessor
synchronizations. the challenge given was that in order to justify
compare&swap instruction inclusion in 370 architecture
... there had to be uses that weren't multiprocessor specific; thus
were born the descriptions of using compare&swap
instruction in multithreaded/multiprogramming applications ... whether
or not running in a multiprocessor environment. a few recent post
references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#49 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
above post in this thread also includes URL pointer to the description of compare&swap uses in the current principles of operation (some 35yrs later)
lots of past posts mentioning multiprocessor and/or compare&swap
instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 13:03:33 -0600paul c <toledobythesea@oohay.ac> writes:
note as somewhat implied in this previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design.
the development tools used by SJR for system/r and sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray is Missing
weren't nearly as sophisticated or powerful as the tools used by the tools group in the los gatos VLSI lab for their DBMS development. Somewhat as a result, the tools group also had somewhat more experience and sophistication in doing a DBMS language for their implementation.
for topic other drift ... a reference about early on, somebody doing some
cms application re-implementation for the TRS80
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"
for slightly other drift ... GML
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml
had been invented at the science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
in 1969 (aka G, M, and L, are the initials of the three people responsible ... they then had to come up with the phrase "generalized mark-up language" to correspond with their initials). It then took quite awhile for GML to evolve thru SGML, HTML, XML, etc.
GML language support had been added to the CMS document formating
application "SCRIPT". Archeological reference to HTML evolving from
the "waterloo" version of CMS script command in use at CERN:
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/
other historical trivia, the first webserver outside europe was on
vm/cms system at slac:
https://ahro.slac.stanford.edu/wwwslac-exhibit
for other trivia ... the current w3c offices are just around the corner from the old science center location at 545 tech. sq.
misc. past posts mentioning the "waterloo" version of the CMS script command:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#46 ... the need for a Museum of Computer Software
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#72 Specifying all biz rules in relational data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#74 Specifying all biz rules in relational data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#34 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#49 Moving assembler programs above the line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005l.html#10 who invented CONFIG/SYS?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#3 winscape?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#12 Flat Query
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#35 Fw: Tax chooses dead language - Austalia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#55 The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#16 Comic Sans was Re: An alternative history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#29 old tapes
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: a little dbms folklore Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 15:34:00 -0600from recent thread over in comp.databases.theory (with standard amount of topic drift):
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 16:40:19 -0600ArarghMail705NOSPAM writes:
objective was in 3mths elapsed time working half-time ... have something with ten times the function and ten times the performance of the existing tool (that had been implemented in assembler). it included some amount of code that searched the dump for specific kinds of failure signatures.
recent posts with references
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#30 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#43 Latest Principles of Operation
in cp67, "svc 0" instruction (supervisor call with function code zero)
was used to invoke the kernel failure & automatic dump process. they
were sprinkled around the kernel to invoked falure/dump when various
conditions were encountered. one of the enhancement for cp67 "release 3"
was to add automatic reboot/reipl after the dump had been taken. recent
posts mentioning cp67 automatic reboot
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#22 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#23 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#44 1960s: IBM mgmt mistrust of SLT for ICs?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#21 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
in the morph from cp67 to vm370, i suggested that each of the svc0 instructions be followed by unique identification codes to facilitate identifying the failure cause. The 1st response to the suggestion was that you can't embed data in an instruction stream ... since there would be an execution failure on return to the svc0 instrucation. Pause ... there was never going to be a return to the svc0 instruction ... since the kernel was going to dump and fail.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 17:29:28 -0600Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
it was somewhat a given that it might be possible to do ten times the function ... with appropriate higher-level language ... as compared to assembler code implementation ... the trick was also getting ten times the performance out of the interpreted REXX implementation compared to the assembler implementation ... part of the demonstration was to support a claim that freed from having to deal with low-level assembler gorp, it allowed a person to better concentrate on solving the problem ... which also included being able to recognize new ways of optimized implementation.
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx
early on in working on cp67 as undergraduate ... i had been known to achieve 100 times performance improvement for some kernel pathlengths. but over the yrs ... as more and more things were optimized ... it became harder and harder to find additional things where it was possible to obtain 100 times performance improvement.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Even worse than UNIX Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 17:42:51 -0600Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
for totally different subject ... about a decade ago, we had been asked to look at ROUTES ... one of the major applications in airline res system ... and given a list of ten things that were then currently impossible to do.
looking at it, completely changed the paradigm of how ROUTES went about being implemented ... and were also able to then implement all ten impossible things. As part of the complete paradigm change ... also speeded up things by a factor of 100 times.
However, also as part of the paradigm change ... three separate person/human transactions were collapsed into a single operation ... and that single operation did quite a bit additional work (compared to what had happened in all three of the previous separate operations) ... so it actually netted out to have only ten times the "transaction" rate as the prior implementation (although the definition of what was now a transaction had dramatically changed).
a couple recent posts mentioning having redone ROUTES:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#22 Bidirectional Binary Self-Joins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#41 US Airways badmouths legacy system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
note initially ... it was only about 20 times faster ... but careful study of the cache structure and re-arranging a lot of program data structures to better match the machine's cache operation ... got another five times improvement (5*20 ... netted 100 times).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 08:07:38 -0600Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btopenworld.com> writes:
however, in the early 70s, Boeblingen got into a little trouble (with corporate) doing something different for the 370/115 and 370/125. They created a 9-position shared memory bus (i.e. positions for up to nine processors). A 370/115 was an microengine running 370 microcode load able to execute 370 at about 80kips ... and 2-8 other (identical microengines) with various microcode loads to perform various kinds of i/o controller functions. A 370/125 was identical to a 370/115 ... except the microengine executing 370 microcode load was about 50% faster, able to execute 370 instructions at about 120kips.
The microengines executed an avg. 10 native instructions for every 370 instruction ... so the native performance of the 115 engine was around 800kips and the native performance of the 125 engine was around 1.2mips.
since there was no processor caches (this were slower microprocessors that didn't have the performance mismatch between processor speed and memory speed) ... and the system didn't run similar microcode loads ... there was less problem with multiprocessor coordination ... although the processors executing i/o controller functions were responsible for "executing" channel programs ... which could also be operated on by the processor running 370 microcode.
recent posts mentioning Boeblingen lab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#14 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#47 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#48 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#62 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
recent posts mentioning executing (360/370) "channel programs"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#28 SVCs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#14 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#17 A way to speed up level 1 caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#19 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#27 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#46 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#0 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#4 ISAM and/or self-modifying channel programs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#6 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#20 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#33 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#34 Historical curiosity question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#3 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#7 The Mainframe in 10 Years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#9 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers?
recent posts mentioning 303x channel director
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#18 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#21 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#62 Cycles per ASM instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#32 I/O in Emulated Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#28 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#65 History - Early Green Card
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#17 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#57 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#1 21st Century ISA goals?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 08:33:35 -0600Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btopenworld.com> writes:
Intel pledges 80 cores in five years
http://news.com.com/Intel+pledges+80+cores+in+five+years/2100-1006_3-6119618.html
from above:
Intel's prototype uses 80 floating-point cores, each running at 3.16GHz,
Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, said in a speech
following Otellini's address. In order to move data in between
individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip
interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached
directly to the bottom of the chip, he said.
... snip ...
the prototype wasn't full x86 processors
The Era of Tera: Intel Reveals more about 80-core CPU
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2925
now Rapport has 256 core and moving to "kilocore" ... i.e. 1024 cores.
IBM, Rapport's Kilocore, and reconfigurable computing
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060407-6556.html
and with a little help from IBM becomes 1025 cores ... with the addition of a single powerpc core.
but as per this post ... there is significant barrier with regard to
existing programming paradigms and being able to effectively utilize the
cores:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
also had ref to last yrs hotchips ... which had a number of presentations by cellphone companies about high-performance, low-power multicore chips ... able to process highly compressed full-motion video.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 09:35:58 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
this gao report
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06285.pdf
has a lot of stuff sliced and diced in a number of different ways for salary/wages, benefits, fully loaded compensation for period 1991 to 2005. For instance, avg total (fully loaded) compensation in 2005 for all workers in companies with >500 workers was $33.48/hr.
so foreign automobile companies did a couple different things when import quotas were instituted. one was move from cars at the low-end to cars at the high-end (i.e. the import quotas were on the number of cars ... so change from selling cars less than domestic vehicles to selling same number of cars at the high-end).
the other tactic was start building cars in the US. one of the comments from the time was that they were use to being able to hire high-school graduates to perform the work. however, in the US they were finding they needed to require at least 2yrs college (junior college degree) in order to get people with at least high-school education.
other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
misc. past posts mentioning foreign automobiles ... and/or census
studies finding that at least half the high-school graduate age people
were functionally illiterate
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#43 Foreign Cars (was: Computers in Science Fiction)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#61 TGV in the USA?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#51 [OT] Lockheed puts F-16 manuals online
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#14 In Search of Stupidity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 10:33:35 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
some vendors would market SMPs (only) with redundant and/or partionable configurations. for instance, in the 60s, for the 360 two-processor SMPs, it was always possible to split them and run as two, independent single processor machines. this continued thru the 370s up until the 3081 ... where they attempted to introduce to the term "dyadic" to differentiate it from the earlier configurations that could be partitioned into independent operations.
whether or not a particular vendors SMP was error-tolerate or not was more by convention than part of the industry definition of SMP.
recent post mentioning DEC press release moving from asymmetrical
multiprocessing to symmetrical multiprocessing support (circa spring
'88) ... i.e. they may have been SMP in the "shared-memory processing"
sense ... but hadn't been SMP in the "symmetrical multiprocessing"
sense:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#46 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
lots of old posts mentioning smp and/or compare&swap instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp
not that this was also referred to as "tightly-coupled" in mainframe
circles ... to differentiate from "loosely-coupled" (i/o sharing but
not memory sharing). tighly-coupled tended to be less fault resistant
because common code (in common memory) could result in failures ...
recent post mentioning study that indicated starting at least in the
early 80s, hardware represented smaller and smaller portion of the
cause of failures:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#76 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
as previously mentioned ... at one point, my wife had been conned into
going to pok to be in charge of loosely-couple architecture ... where
she originated Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata
later we did the ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
and coined the terms disaster survivability and geographic
survivability (to differentiate from disaster recovery).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available
i.e. loosely-coupled and/or cluster implementations are somewhat easier to create geographically distributed failure recovery implementations. Also, as both hardware and software have gotten more reliable ... environmental problems/failures rise to the top of the list of common source of outages ... and as cost of hardware and transmission bandwidth have fallen, more and more services find that they can justify geographic distributed failure recovery (for continuous availability).
other topic drift ... old email referencing working on ha scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:21:40 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
oh ... and these posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
mentions an old article calling for 100percent tax on (massive) unearned profits in the automobile industry in the wake of the import quotas.
the article claimed that the purpose of the import quotas was to give the domestic automobile industry breathing room to remake themselves into a competitive body. the reduction in cheap imports would lesson the downward pressure on prices charged for domestic cars ... giving them increased profits which could be funneled into remaking their business. The article observed that instead, the (significant) increased profits went into increases in workers and executives salaries/bonuses and stock dividends.
There were also secondary effects ... with the foreign importers observing that they could sell as many high-end cars as low-end cars ... totally changed the type of car they sold. This almost totally eliminated the downward pressure on domestic car prices ... supposedly allowing domestic manufacturers to nearly double the price of the same automobile over a period of a few yrs.
There were other secondary effects ... the motivation to the foreign importers to totally change the type of car they sold ... also contributed to changing how they did car development ... cutting the traditional 7-8yrs elapsed time to 2-3yrs. Some of the effects of this could be eventually seen in the early 90s behind the "C4" effort in the domestic car industry, which was targeted at leveraging (primarily) IT/dataprocessing technology to cut the traditional 7-8yrs lead time to come out with a new model (aka yr to yr changes tend to be mostly cosmetic) to 3yrs (in order to finally(?) compete with foreign operations).
one of the issues behind C4 ... is that as long as car buying habits remain relatively static ... there isn't much to differentiate 7-8yr development cycle and 2-3yr development cycle. However, when buying habits go into same amount of flux and change ... being able to respond to what the customers are buying in 2-3yrs (or less) gives a significant advantage over organizations that take 7-8yrs to respond.
past posts mentioning C4 effort:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#61 TGV in the USA?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#51 [OT] Lockheed puts F-16 manuals online
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#44 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#14 In Search of Stupidity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:30:57 -0600re:
oops, do i hear the name john boyd and OODA-loops being whispered?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 11:41:53 -0600John Ahlstrom <AhlstromJK@comcast.net> writes:
they weren't suppose to do multiple microprocessor common bus implementation. it is now long ago and far away (35yrs) ... but i have vague recollection that it may have involved some domestic plants complaining that Boeblingen had done a more advanced/competitive design
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Display Technologies Evolution Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 13:46:57 -0600Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes:
and
The History of Plasma Displays
https://www.plasmatvscience.org/plasmatv-history3.html
from above:
IBM took an early interest as well, and the lure of Big Blue's prestige
and deep pockets forced Merriam and Alpert into some ticklish
negotiations between the two corporate players, with the happy result
that U of I collected a million dollars from IBM in exchange for another
license. That license would lead in 1983 to the IBM 3290 Information
Panel, "the industry's first mass-produced, large-screen plasma display
terminal for commercial use," according to an IBM advertisement.
... snip ...
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: strange FTP problem--transatlantic asymmetry Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 14:42:31 -0600patrick.peters writes:
traceroute from both ends may give whether the hops are the same (symmetrical routing)
large packet traceroute (from both ends) may give whether the transmission latency over each individual hop is symmetrical.
Small packets may give similar latency for similar hop ... even if bandwidth/traffic of the links are significantly different (or different in different directions). traceroute with different port numbers might turn up port-number specific traffic shaping.
bandwidth/traffic shaping can occur at ip layer and may even be udp/tcp/port specific ... and can be asymmetrical. asymmetrical bandwidth can also occur at lower levels.
wiki page on traffic shaping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping
other traffic shaping reference from search engine
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios120/12cgcr/qos_c/qcpart4/qcfrts.htm
any of the possible characteristics might be asymmetrical for any specific hop.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Problem with TCP connection close Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 15:09:41 -0600David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> writes:
mid-90s HTTP webservers encountered significant TCP scale-up problem with common implementations that had linear scan of FINWAIT list. the problem was that some loaded webservers were cycling TCP sessions so fast (resulting in quite lengthy FINWAIT lists) that several of the major webservers were hitting 100% processor busy and spending nearly all of that scanning the FINWAIT list. Several vendors relatively quickly put together new releases that significantly reworked how FINWAIT list was handled.
there has also been work on reliable transactions protocols that had fewer minimum packet exchange ... i.e. like VMTP/RFC1045 with 5 minimum packet exchange.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Newbie question on table design. Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory,alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 15:59:14 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
STL (south san jose, dbms and language development, subseqently renamed
the silicon valley lab) and Hursley (UK, communication and cics
development) looked at off-shift dataprocessing offloading in 1980. The
dominant development platform at both locations was vm/cms interactive
computing. like in the reference to palo alto vm/cms this sort of
interactive workload tends to be running at full capacity during first
shift with much lower off-shift use.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts
the strategy was to get a "high-bandwidth" double-hop satellite link between STL and Hursley (i.e. from west coast up to the geo-sync satellite over the US, down to the east coast, up again to geo-sync satellite over the atlantic and down to Hursley). Since there was 8hr time-difference ... some of the 1st shift Hursley workload could be run on the STL machines (being 3rd shift in california) and some of the 1st shift STL workload could be run on Hursley machines (being 2nd shift in UK).
This was going to be showcase operation ... so some of the strategy people stepped in to "force" the link to operate with MVS JES2/SNA (even tho the dominate operation was vm/cms which didn't use SNA for network links).
They tried to bring up JES2/SNA on the link ... and nothing happened. Somebody then suggested to try it with VM link just to check things out ... and it came up with no errors. They immediately switched back to JES2/SNA on the link and nothing happened. The "official" conclusion was that there was significant transmission errors on the double-hop satellite link and VM link error handling was too primitive to recognize the problems. The actual situation was that the JES2/SNA had built in round-trip timeout ... which the round-trip double-hop satellite propagation delay was exceeding (and which they couldn't "fix") ... but the VM link support did adjust for the round-trip (double-hop satellite) propagation delay.
for other MVS JES2 topic drift between San Jose and Hursley ... old
post mentioning (unless converted) network traffic between different
versions of MVS JES2 (with incompatible network traffic headers) would
result in JES2 failure that would also bring down the MVS system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#8 vmshare
misc. other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#16 Newbie question on table design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#24 Newbie question on table design
past posts mentioning the attempt at San Jose/Hursley off-shift offloading:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#212 GEOPLEX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#35 HASP:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#19 tcp time out for idle sessions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#19 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#60 JES2 NJE setup
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#61 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#16 Why I use a Mac, anno 2006
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#17 bandwidth of a swallow (was: Real core)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Disc Drives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 16:18:02 -0600scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
doesn't mention spin-up/spin-down frequency related to MTBF ... but does look at lightly loaded versus heavily loaded. slightly surprising is that after 3yrs, heavily loaded disks tend to have slightly better MTBF than lightly loaded disks (with possible explanation that less reliable heavily loaded disks tended to not make it to 3yrs).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: re: z/VM usability Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l,alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 17:14:27 -0600Dave Wade wrote:
the original model had 384k "370" memory ... and I did some application studies which showed that after the fixed cp kernel memory requirements ... that cms applications frequently would "page thrash" in the remaining real memory. Exaserbating the problem was that all disk i/o (both cp paging and cms file i/o) involved communication with cp/88 which would then simulate the operations on XT hard disk that had 110millisecond avg. access.
the publishing of the elapsed time & page thrashing results resulted in a corporate decision to ship the product with 512k "370" memory ... which involved a six month schedule slip ... which lots of people blameed on me.
However, in this time window ... I was allowed to incorporate an enhanced page replacement algorithm (over and above what i was able to ship in the vm370 resource manager) ... and CMS "paging access method" filesystem support ... i.e. page-mapped operation ... which I had originally done on cp67/cms ... but never shipped in standard vm370 release.
the problem was that normal CMS operations are highly disk intensive. DCSS sharing of applications on mainframes were somewhat able to compensate for some of this (by having programs & applications already available in real storage because of use by other users). However, in the xt/370 configuration none of this was applicable ... there wasn't enuf real storage for such caching ... and since it was a single user system ... there wasn't any "sharing" use. however, I had demonstrated avg of 300percent (or better) thruput improvement with the paged mapped cms filesystem support for disk intensive operations. The page mapped CMS filesystem support also allowed for asynchronous operation on program loading ... allowing large block load of CMS "module" into whatever available real storage ... but also allowing some asynchronous overlap of CMS application execution with loading of the program (keeping all the asynchronous activity straight and hidden from cms by playing games with page invalid/valid bits). The page mapped CMS filesystem support also had some enhancements for attempting to do contiguous (physical) allocation when MODULE was generated (and/or written to disk) ... which could be subsequently leveraged when program was loaded.
the same adapter board was later made available in ATs and called AT/370.
the "follow-on" was a full-blown 370 in separate box with 4mbytes of
memory code-name "a74" (for the department in POK) and released as
7437 ... old email with announcement of 7437
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#email880622
post that includes list of source update files that I had to the cp
kernel as part of A74 support ("dmkpam" is the source routine
containing the cp changes supporting paged mapped operation).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#56 ECPS:VM DISPx instructions
other past posts mentioning A74:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#55 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#56 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#19 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#51 DARPA was: Short Watson Biography
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#4 IBM Mainframe at home
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#27 End of Moore's law and how it can influence job market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#40 IBM system 370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#15 IEFBR14 Problems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#65 computer industry scenairo before the invention of the PC?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#7 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#8 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#10 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#14 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#76 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
old email mentioning some of the activity porting enhancements from
cp67 to vm370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430
misc. past posts mentioning some aspects of the resource manager
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
and/or page replacement algorithms
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
and other posts mentioning the paged mapped cms filesystem work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap
and past posts mentioning washington, xt370, at370 and/or getting
blameed for six month slip in scheduled to increase real storage
from 384k to 512k
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#42 bloat
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#23 Old IBM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#52 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#28 IBM's "VM for the PC" c.1984??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#20 Very CISC Instuctions (Was: why the machine word size ...)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#24 HP Compaq merger, here we go again.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#45 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#4 IBM Mainframe at home
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#8 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#40 IBM system 370
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#29 BLKSIZE question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#7 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#10 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#11 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#13 Whatever happened to IBM's VM PC software?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#6 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#10 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#10 How to restore VMFPLC dumped files on z/VM V5.1
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#2 using 3390 mod-9s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#56 DCSS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#5 Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#14 RCA Spectra 70/25: Another Mystery Computer?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#29 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#30 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#7 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#25 modern paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#5 Is computer history taugh now?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 20:22:23 -0600re:
Inside Intel's Spring Analyst Meeting: 8 Things To Know About Its Quad
Core, Penryn, Silverthorne & Mobile Plans
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199901501
... and
Then the Penryn Generation
http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/ibm-mainframes-nipped-tucked-for-cloud-a/240158991
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: re: z/VM usability Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l,alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 22:12:22 -0600Alan Altmark wrote:
well, cms (as in cambridge monitor system) started on cp40 (cambridge had gotten a 360/40 and did the hardware modifications to implement virtual memory ... pending getting 360/67) ... cambridge got 360/67 in 1967 and morphed cp40 into cp67 ... so it has been 40yrs (in part, CMS work could even start on real 360/40 before cp40 was operational)
from Melinda's history
https://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist
By September of 1965, file system commands and macros already looked
much like those we are familiar with today: ''RDBUF'', ''WRBUF'',
''FINIS'', ''STATE'', etc
... snip ...
cambridge installed cp67 out at lincoln labs in 1967 and then last week in jan68 came out to install cp67 at the univ where i was undergraduate. Note, that in jan68, the cp67 people were still apprehensive about CMS filesystem ... with cp67 source, assemble, and build still being done on os/360.
in the morph of cp67 to vm370 ... they changed the cms name to conversational monitor system.
major change in cms from cp67 to vm370 was a little re-arranging of cms kernel in anticipation of 370 (r/o) segment protection. However, in doing the virtual memory hardware retrofit to 370/165 ... they ran into problem with schedule slipping. In order to regain six months in the schedule for 370/165 virtual memory, they dropped r/o segment protect and some number of other features from the original 370 virtual memory architecture (and to have compatibility across the 370 product line ... the same features had to also be removed from other 370 models that already had implemented the full 370 virtual memory architecture). With 370 hardware r/o segment protect dropped ... vm370 had to revert to the page protect hack used by cp67 that involved fiddling the 360 storage protect keys.
Then during the "future system" period ... much of the corporation was
distracted and a lot of 370 product activity fell by the way side.
Misc. past posts about future system:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys
I had made some unflattering comments about practicallity of future
system stuff and continued to do both cp67 and cms enhancements ... and
then ported them from cp67 to vm370 ... some old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email731212
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750102
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email750430
after FS was canceled, there was rush to get stuff back into 370 product
pipeline. Part of this was reason that small subset of the "virtual
memory management" enhancements ... a lot of shared segment stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#adcon
that had been integrated with the paged mapped filesystem stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#mmap
was released as DCSS in vm370 release 3.
Canceling FS contributed to enabling me to also release the resource
manager (that included a lot of changes that were in cp67 that i had
done ... which were dropped in the morph from cp67 to vm370)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
It was also in the aftermath of killing FS that POK convinced the corporation to kill the vm370 product, shutdown the vm370 product group and move all the people to POK to help accelerate the mvs/xa development schedule (again attempting to make up lost time in 370 product pipeline resulting from the FS distraction). Eventually Endicott was able to salvage the vm370 product mission.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 06:54:14 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
when we were doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
... one of the places we talked to was the telco operation doing 1-800 implementation. they were using a smp fault tolerant platform ... where hardware/processor failures could be totally masked. 1-800 had five-nines availability requirement (5 mins outage per yr).
there was small issue ... kernel software maint. required taking down the system i.e. being "shared memory multiprocessing" ... all processors shared the same kernel image. Typical scheduled maint. for such an event could blow the five-nines outage budget for a century.
in the ha/cmp scenario ... having multiple "loosely-coupled" systems ... allowed any kind of downtime on any specific system (unscheduled hardware/software failures, scheduled hardware maint, scheduled software maint) ... to be totally masked by the availability of the other systems. this could be done with less-expensive traditional non-fault tolerant hardware ... although by that time ... regular hardware was getting very reliable ... ref to the study done in the early 80s about outages due to hardware failures becoming smaller and smaller fraction of total outages.
The issue then was whether the fault-tolerant solution would require a loosely-coupled installation of multiple fault tolerant systems in order to achieve the same "availability" of the non-fault tolerant ha/cmp configuration ... in which case, what was the justification for having the (additional) expense of fault-tolerant hardware at all?
There is an analogy here to disk RAID operation ... redundant array of inexpensive disks ... redundant array of inexpensive processors may be much more cost effective than traditional fault-tolerant hardware (especially as "normal" hardware reliability has continued to improve).
i've mentioned before in the past decade we had some discussions with one of the larger financial transaction networks ... they had attributed their 100percent availability over the previous several yrs to
• ims hot-standby • automated operator
when my wife was con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of
loosely-coupled architecture ... she had created peer-coupled
shared data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata
which saw very little uptake until sysplex (one of the reasons she didn't stay very long in that position) ... except for the ims hot-standby work. the financial transaction network had triple redundant ims hot-standby configuration in two separate geographically distributed datacenters.
these days ... the only practical way of approaching 100percent
availability is with geographical dispersed operation ... i.e.
when we were doing ha/cmp, we coined the terms disaster survivability
and geographic survivability to differentiate from disaster/recovery
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:09:44 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
in the early 90s ... we did some technical recruiting from cal. institutions ... all the 4.0 students were foreign born
in the mid-90s ... we did some work with large mid-western land grant
university ... one of their comments was that between the late 60s and
early 90s, they had to "dumb down" the entering freshman text books
three times. past threads mentioning the reference:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#12 DEC's Hudson fab
other posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#34 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:23:15 -0600Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
misc recent postings mentioning tandem:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#1 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#13 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#16 Attractive Alternatives to Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#36 Quote from comp.object
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#41 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#76 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#34 Internal DASD Pathing
for other drift ... tandem had bought atalla (and compaq had bought both
tandem and dec ... which hp subsequently inherited when they bought
compaq). this has reference to conference sponsored by main atalla sales
& marketing guy (hosted at tandem in cupertino):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security
for other trivia ... i've previously mentioned about having worked on
ibm clone controller built out of interdata
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#360pcm
which continued to be marketed under the perkin/elmer brand when perin/elmer bought interdata. the atalla "sponsor" of the above mentioned conference, once made the comment that in the early 80s he made quite a good living selling the boxes to NASA and other gov. agencies. He also mentioned that the "wire-wrap" mainframe channel attach board appeared to have still been the original design that had been done in the 60s.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 09:46:46 -0600hancock4 writes:
on ha/cmp platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
as well as ha/cmp scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
more than one lab commented that they were discontinuing their large ibm mainframe operation because they had outstanding REQs for system support people for over a year that they were unable to fill. The school systems were turning out lots of unix skills ... but few ibm mainframe skills. they were having to compete with commercial companies, like in the financial industry, for the increasingly scarce ibm mainframe system support skills.
somewhat unrelated, i've heard of some people that jumped from the army to silicon valley in the late 90s and quadrupled their salaries (unix sysadmins).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 10:12:36 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
for a little x-over ... the guy running the financial transaction
network mentioned here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#44 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
said that he had to do presentation to the executive board on major threats and vulnerabilities ... at the top of the list was most of the (mainframe) system support people had reached the age where their mortgages were paid off, their children were all through college and they had no real motivation to not retire (and there didn't seem to be any feasable way of backfilling the skills)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 12:36:20 -0600tbabonas@ibm-main.lst (Anthony Saul Babonas) writes:
Please colleagues, allow my to clarify by stating : SET FAVORITEEXPLETIVE='' 1. I do not believe "other platforms" are &favoriteexpletive. 2. I am not arrogant and certainly not blind. 3. I am not responsible for the mainframe market share situation. I neither buy nor sell mainframes. 4. I have heard the costs of hardware and software, but I still believe arrogance is no cost. 5. I do understand the competition (&favoriteexpletive). 6. Recent young graduates are free to work on any platform of their choosing. Undoubtedly the market influences their choices. 7. I do believe the learning curve for Novell, circa 1995, was orders of magnitude less than zOS + subsystems, circa 1995. So fast forward 12 years, is learning to be a PC based network "sysprog" more difficult than zOS, less so, or about the same? Please note, final question is posed without beliefs, opinions, standpoints, political biases, or prejudices. I reserve the right to invoke arrogance at some later date.a little x-over
from afc ng thread ... w/regard to post referencing some national labs ... discontinuing mainframe systems in the 90s because of inability to fill positions for system support (schools were turning out lots of unix skills but little or no mainframe skills). It wasn't a particular cost issue, it was an issue about being able to find/hire the (scarce) skills.
part of the problem is getting into a negative feedback loop ... programs to turn out mainframe skills can take a decade ... once it starts the reputation about skill shortages can contribute to choices made about platforms to use ... and the choice about platforms to use can contribute to choices about skills required.
for totally other topic drift ... in the very early 80s, the disk division had a PC network server project ... part of the implementation was being done under a work for hire contract by people in Provo. For a while, one of the people on the project was commuting between San Jose and Provo nearly every week. At some point, the corporation decided to cancel the project ... and allowed the group in Provo to retain rights to the work they had already been paid for. Not long afterwards there appeared a PC network server company out of Provo.
misc. past posts mentioning DataHub project:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#40 No more innovation? Get serious
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#19 When will IBM buy Sun?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#33 Over-the-shoulder effect
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#26 MP cost effectiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#13 Alpha performance, why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#16 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#23 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#9 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#36 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#39 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#31 "The Elements of Programming Style"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#17 Is computer history taught now?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 12:54:11 -0600"jerry chapman" <jerryc314@sbcglobal.net> writes:
the sending of attachments normally involves mime support.
********************** XXXX Internal Use Only ************************ • :nick.REMAIL • :sec.XXXX Internal Use Only • :title.REMAIL - trivial exec for VM/822 mail forwarding • :version.1 • :date.87/09/28 • :scp.VM/SP.3 ONWARDS • :oname.Lynn Wheeler • :onode. • :ouser.WHEELER • :aname.Lynn Wheeler • :anode. • :auser.WHEELER • :lang.REXX • :abs.REMAIL will process all spooled reader mail, convert it to • 822 mail format and forward it to the specified TCP/SMTP mail • gateway for sending to the specified tcp/ip node. If the VM/TCP/IP • SMTP mail gateway is installed, REMAIL can be used to forward • all VM mail to your <unix workstation>. • :kwd.MAIL TCP/IP SMTP 822 • :sw. • :doc.REMAIL MEMO • :support.N ********************************************************************* ** * &1 &2 REMAIL EXEC * Process spool reader files &1 &2 REMAIL XEDIT * Reformat cms mail to 822 format • * &1 &2 DISCRDR EXEC * Toy exec that activates REMAIL &1 &2 XROSSCAL EXEC * Toy exec for generating PROFS cal. req. • * &1 &2 REMAIL MEMO * Brief documentation
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 16:22:04 -0600Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
as i mentioned here ... curriculum for entering freshman had
to be dumbed down three times between late 60s and early 90s
... primarily because of "domestic" students
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
while this post references requirement for two yrs of college
in order to get "domestic" workers who had at least a
high school education
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
and this post (again) mentions interviewing 4yr college (technical
degree) graduates and the only 4.0 students were foreign born.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
in the mid-90s ... going into the internet bubble ... sjmn also had an
article that said half of the students graduating with advanced
technical degrees were foreign born. old posts mentioning the sjmn
article
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#1 More on Aging Legacy Workforce
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
on the other hand ... more recently NSF has been concerned about the
dramatic increase in the number of technical graduates from foreign
universities ... post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
with reference to most recent study:
Study: China Leaps Forward In Advanced Tech Education
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&artnum=2&issue=20070501
then there is census study from mid-90s claiming that half of the high
school graduate age people (i.e. includes dropouts, not necessarily
graduates ... just that age) are functionally illiterate. recent
posts that make reference to the study:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 16:56:22 -0600re:
sorry, last part of this url got snipped
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&artnum=2&issue=20070501
a little more from the above:
More than 60 percent of U.S. engineering doctorates were awarded to
foreign nationals, according to data from the American Society for
Engineering Education.
The U.S. is producing the same number of Ph.D.s for its citizens as it
did in the 1970s — about 3,000 a year, says Michael Gibbons, ASEE
Director of Data Research.
... snip ...
the sjmn article in mid-90s said 50precent for any phd in technology area ... this more recent study says more than 60percent (engineering specifically).
part of the article raises the issue that as society and global economy shifts more and more to high-tech areas, there will be ever increasing requirement for competitive high-tech skills.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 07:24:49 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
i didn't mean to imply that the fault tolerant server that was being used by the 1-800 (telco) guys was from same vendor ... in fact it was from totally different vendor.
my impression was that a (software) system upgrade for the fault tolerant server vendor ... i.e. system build and related system files on disk, kernel image on disk, kernel image in processor (shared) memory ... required taking exclusive control of those resources to replace existing copies with new copies. It would happen periodically, even if only once every yr or so.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 08:48:45 -0600"Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> writes:
it isn't code ... it is a "package" file description ... used by toolsrun (also implemented in rexx) ... somewhat analogous to README file.
toolsrun provided all sorts of function ... it had listserv type function for email distribution lists ... for conferencing and file distribution (like application packages). it also had support for repositories ... where local "slave" toolsrun could maintain the same kind of information that might be distributed via email, sort of being able to operate either in listserv mode and/or more similar to early usenet.
by the way, it predated listserv that evolved for bitnet ... some old
posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet
in the late 70s and early 80s ... I had been doing some semi-automated computer conferencing type stuff on the internal network. at some point top executives became aware of the situation ... and there was an "investigation" ... one of the outcomes was decision to have some official corporate supported computer conferencing facilities ... which then contributed to the wide-spread deployment of toolsrun.
there was also a researcher hired to sit in the back of my office and
follow me around for nine months ... investigating how i communicated
(face-to-face, telephone, etc ... they also had copies of my incoming
and outgoing email as well as all of my instant messages). The resulting
research report was also a Stanford PHD thesis (joint between language
and AI depts) ... and the material for subsequent books and papers.
somewhat related posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:08:51 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
and old post discussing some related work with world bank
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm15.htm#31 Electronic Safety and Soundness: A Four Pillar Approach; Public Policy Issues
... chapter 6, Twelve Layers of Security (Pillar 4)
some World Bank E-Security/E-Finance publications
http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/html/FinancialSectorWeb.nsf/SearchGeneral?openform&E-Security/E-Finance&Publications
and presentations:
http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/html/FinancialSectorWeb.nsf/SearchGeneral?openform&E-Security/E-Finance&Presentations
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:24:34 -0600Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
i.e. a decade after Charlie was doing work on fine-grain locking for
cp67 smp support on 360/67 ... and invented compare&swap instruction ..
recent posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#31 Latest Principles of Operation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#49 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#23 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
collected posts mentioning, tightly-coupled, smp, and/or compare&swap
instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 10:46:47 -0600kkt <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
earlier apprehension was that since so much of domestic high-tech industry was being fueled by foreign graduates, who stayed in the states ... that it possibly only required slight changes in the relative standard of living between here and their home country ... to result in mass migration back to their home countries.
in fact, numerous of these foriegn graduates (getting 4.0) are here paid for by their home govs. ... and directed to stay on, spend 5-10 yrs in high-tech employment and then return home ... as "tech transfer". Some surveys had even found some of the leading edge corporate high-tech departments totally composed of such foreign employees (obligated to return home after graduation and spending 5-10 yrs working in leading edge, high tech activities).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 13:42:33 -0600"Micheal H. McCabe" <mhmccabe@alltel.net> writes:
old post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#38 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
references national institute for literacy
http://www.nifl.gov/
http://lincs.ed.gov/
and quoted some numbers from 1994-1998 international literacy survey
• The average composite literacy score of native-born adults in the U.S. was 284 (Level 3); the U.S. ranked 10th out of 17 high-income countries; • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with primary or no education, ranked 14th out of 18 high-income countries; • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with some high school, but no diploma or GED, ranked 19th out of 19 high-income countries; • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or GED (but no college), ranked 18th (tie) out of 19 countries; • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with 1-3 years of college, ranked 15th out of 19 countries;... snip ...
and more recent statistics show declining situation over the last decade or so from the earlier studies
recent thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#6 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#35 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#68 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 17:09:53 -0600D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
and related topic drift from another thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#76 Working while young
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#79 Working while young
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#19 Working while young
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 18:27:09 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
Double trouble for ID theft victim
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/05/id_thief_bounce.html
from above:
But that was just the beginning of her ordeal. For two full weeks after
Poor reported the crime to her bank, her imposter continued to withdraw
money from her account as fast as she added it. As a result, she was hit
with 20 overdraft fees totaling $670, and nearly six weeks after the
fact, she was still fighting to get all her money back.
...
Banks constantly market their zero liability programs, which aim to
convince consumers that they stand to lose nothing from most cases of
identity theft.
...
But these reports rarely discuss the more challenging problems connected
with the theft of debit card or checking account data theft. Getting a
credit card company to waive fraudulent charges may be hassle-free for
most people, but beating back electronic transfer fraud – usually
carried out via cloned debit cards or counterfeit checks -- is another
matter entirely.
... snip ...
the blog comments following the above article must be 50 times longer than the original article.
lots of past posts on subject of threats, exploits, fraud,
vulnerabilities and/or threats:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 19:25:34 -0600edgould1948@ibm-main.lst (Ed Gould) writes:
past post w/reference to dedication of Boyd Hall, United States Air
Force Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. 17 September 1999
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#20 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#74 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
...
"There are two career paths in front of you, and you have to choose
which path you will follow. One path leads to promotions, titles, and
positions of distinction.... The other path leads to doing things that
are truly significant for the Air Force, but the rewards will quite
often be a kick in the stomach because you may have to cross swords with
the party line on occasion. You can't go down both paths, you have to
choose. Do you want to be a man of distinction or do you want to do
things that really influence the shape of the Air Force? To be or to do,
that is the question." Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF 1927-1997
... snip ...
misc. past posts mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd
misc. URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2
... there have also been corporate stepping stone positions ... for individuals that got put on "fast track". Woe was you if the head position of your organization was designated as a "fast track" stepping stone ... there could be turn-over in the position every six months (executives playing musical chairs).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 08:06:16 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
... "smp" as in symmetrical multiprocessing ... as opposed to shared memory processing ... both also "tightly-coupled".
other master/slave variation was asymmetrical multiprocessing.
previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#32 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
referencing mar88 vms announcing support for symmetric multiprocessing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#46 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
and of course, past posts mentioning my wife being con'ed into going to
pok to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 08:42:01 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
5yr plans and what really happens are the difference between strategic
and tactical ... very boyd, i've considered boyd the greatest strategic
thinker that i've ever interacted with (and he could simulataneously
plan for tactical within strategic structure)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html
for a little different pespective, x-over post from thread in bit.listserv.ibm-main
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
past posts in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#19 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#34 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#47 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#48 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#52 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#57 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#58 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#59 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Disc Drives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 09:09:01 -0600"Michael N. LeVine" <mlevinespmfltr@redshift.com> writes:
slight drift ... past posts mentioning air-bearing simulation work
that went into designing 3380 heads:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was: Movies with source code
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#30 Weird
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#63 Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#74 They Got Mail: Not-So-Fond Farewells
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#51 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#52 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#69 Multics Concepts For the Contemporary Computing World
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#20 360 Microde Floating Point Fix
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring, wandering story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#21 40th anniversary of IBM System/360 on 7 Apr 2004
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#15 harddisk in space
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#25 CKD Disks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#8 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#4 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#5 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#44 Intel engineer discusses their dual-core design
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#29 IBM microwave application--early data communications
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#0 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#13 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006d.html#14 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#6 Google Architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#18 virtual memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#42 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#41 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#18 Why so little parallelism?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#27 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#31 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#43 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#44 Is computer history taught now?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#46 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#83 Disc Drives
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#13 Interrupts
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Help settle a job title/role debate Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 09:42:20 -0600Steve Samson <ssamson@dc.rr.com> writes:
before 23jun69, for a period as an undergraduate, i had responsibility for the univ. production os/360 system (and also got to play with cp67). I had done a lot of stuff to significantly soup up mft (and then mvt) thruput ... part of of it doing carefully crafted sysgens. There was a period where I would see brand new SEs in the branch office (fresh out of corporate schools) for 3-4 month period and then be replaced by new batch (getting their "hands-on" by "helping" me).
the early "HONE" system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
was largely instituted as countermeasure to training issues introduced
with 23jun69 announcement ... started out as clone of science center's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
cp67 (virtual machine) system on a few 360/67s at locations around the states and remote login access from branch offices ... being able to use dos/360, os/360, etc (i.e. motivation for the original "hands-on" in the HONE acronym).
the focus somewhat changed after science center did the port of apl\360 to cms for cms\apl and the explosion in the number apl applications supporting sales & marketing appeared ... like the "configurators". Early in 370 product time-frame ... there was transition where sales couldn't even submit orders until after they had been processed by HONE configurator. The explosion in the use of HOME by direct sales & marketing sort of swamped the processors and there was then transition away from its original purpose of allowing SEs to get "hands-on" system experience.
HONE would migrate (from cp67) to vm370 and eventually had HONE (clone) systems sprouting up all around the world ... some of the early ones, i even got to do the installation. Many of the HONE APL modeling applications would also permeate hdqtrs locations (in addition to direct branch office sales & marketing support). One of my first HONE installs outside the US was when EMEA hdqtrs moved from NY to La Defense (outside Paris) in the early 70s.
for other drift ... misc. posts mentioning 23jun69 unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Help settle a job title/role debate Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 11:22:29 -0600mark.zelden@ibm-main.lst (Mark Zelden) writes:
later, i would have battles to have no title at all ... and have my business cards w/o any title (I would sometimes joke that if it was necessary to get things done based on a title ... then it was time to retire ... i should be able to convince people to do something based on it was the right thing to do).
the other battle was being one of the first to have email address on business card.
... there is old joke about person that use to fly a kite from the roof
of 705 bldg. in pok on april 1st ... who had pencils made up with his
name ... "Elect .... lab director, raises or promotions, but not both".
old references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#60 South San Jose (was Tysons Corner, Virginia)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#38 S/360 development burnout?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#22 Patent #6886160
this is slightly different than the Boyd line effectively about neither
raises nor promotions ... recent ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
which is more along the lines of references at some number of locations (across a variety of large bureaucratic organizations) being primarily mushroom factories (i.e. most of the people are kept in the dark and feed .... )
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: open source voting Newsgroups: alt.politics,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.programming,alt.comp.opensource,sci.crypt Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 11:50:04 -0600Ben Rudiak-Gould <br276deleteme@cam.ac.uk> writes:
... and X9 chairs the international ISO TC68 financial standard group.
https://www.iso.org/committee/49650.html
X9F subcommittee primarily deals with security and encryption
items. Although, X9A, retail banking subcommittee was responsible for
X9.59 standard
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
in part because there was requirement to make sure things were aligned with the actual business processes ... as opposed to possibly being totally unrelated to any practical use.
part of this was because it was in the heyday of "PKI is the answer, now
what is the question?" ... and the adding of digital certificate processing
to existing payment transactions was resulting in factor of two orders
of magnitude (100 times) bloat in both payload size and processing
overhead:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#bloat
the issue is more along the lines of risk adverse in disputes and where the burden of proof lies. a financial institution electing to not use a "standard" will find that they have a significantly more difficult burden of proof placed on them in any dispute/litigation. this has actually shown up in at least one litigation dispute in europe ... where the plantiff claimed damages (and prevailed) from financial institution in a an unexplained large financial transaction and only cited DES as still being used (after it had been depreciated). as a result, the burden of proof fell on the financial institution to prove that the continued use of DES could not be a factor.
there was some additional transformation when NIST announced that it no longer needed to create standards from scratch ... but could cite as standards, work done by other bodies ... like X9F (I think the first instance was x9.62 having to do with elliptical curve cryptography).
we had been called in to work with a small client/server startup that
wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... and they had this
technology called SSL ... old reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3
references having previously worked, in a prior life, with the people
(at the startup) responsible for the "commerce server"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15
some other recent topic drift on the subject in financial cryptography
blog:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#0 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#1 H6.2 Most Standardised Security Protocols are Too Heavy
more accurately ... to go to the very core of secure ... is to actually do a detailed end-to-end vulnerability and threat analysis ... and stop trying to get by with wonderkind point solutions.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Disc Drives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 12:18:38 -0600"Michael N. LeVine" <mlevinespmfltr@redshift.com> writes:
it likely was other than 3380 drives ... but i was referring to dealing with the 3380 drives
misc. past posts about getting to play disk engineer and wander around
bldg. 14 (disk development lab) and bldg. 15 (disk product test lab). i
didn't very often wander onto actual assembly and manufacturing floor.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk
i didn't get to play disk engineer for other vendors.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 12:29:05 -0600rfochtman@ibm-main.lst (Rick Fochtman) writes:
for other boyd drift, he did yr running datacenter at "spook base"
... possibly largest in the world ... or at least largest in the
fareast at the time, claim was that it represented a $2.5B windfall
for IBM.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#1 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#2 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#5 Dangerous Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#51 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#13 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#4 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
and for other drift ... boyd's briefing on organic design for command
and control ... past posts mentioning the briefing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#8 scheduling & dynamic adaptive ... long posting warning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#34 War, Chaos, & Business (web site), or Col John Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#33 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#34 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#46 employee motivation & executive compensation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#25 Timeless Classics of Software Engineering
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#34 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain the
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#69 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#2 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#3 Computerworld Article: Dress for Success?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#41 was change headers: The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#25 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#35 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source
and as before ... lots of other past posts mentioning Boyd as well as
other URLs from around the web
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Using rexx to send an email Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx,alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:43:23 -0600Phil Hobbs <pcdh@SpamMeSenseless.pergamos.net> writes:
from long ago and far away, other TOOLSRUN folklore, old email regarding enhanced RSCS drivers for HSDT (t1 & higher speed) links & conflict with TOOLSRUN.
Date: 11/25/86 14:44:06
From: wheeler
To: distribution
re: hsdt link;
the only conflict that I'm aware of with HSDT RSCS drivers are a
current conflict with the TOOLSRUN exec (the REXX exec from <<rexx
author>> that handles all the tools disks). The REXX exec expects that
for files that originated from VM nodes, the second NOP/TAG record (i.e.
RSCS control information) alwas contained the origin nodeid & userid. If
that is not found in the 2nd record, TOOLSRUN rejects the file.
As part of improving the efficiency of HSDT links, the RSCS line driver
code to do character compression was removed (it was determined that the
cpu overhead was costing much more than the transmission time savings
... i.e. actually ran slower). With that change, "S&F" records began
appearing as the 2nd nop/tag record.
After a bit of analysis, it turns out that S&F records were RSCS
information records that alwas were part of the file, but somewhere in
the far distant past a change to the compression code inadvertantly also
deleted forwarding of S&F records. With the deletion of the compression
code, the S&F records magically reappeared.
There is a simple 3 line change to the TOOLSRUN EXEC to recognize S&F
records and bypass them when looking for the origin information
record. There is a separate 40-60 line change to the TOOLSRUN exec which
generalizes the processing of the nop control information, which
recognizes a large number of different formats based on content (rather
than position). This more complex change also correctly handles
recognition of origin information from MVS/JES systems.
There is currently discussion about how best to resolve the TOOLSRUN
EXEC problem. The removal of the compression code makes sense in a
number of situations ... not just for HSDT links but for other links
where the speed may be as slow as 56kb (i.e. CPU compression overhead
taking more time than the transmission savings of transmitting
uncompressed record).
... snip ... top of post, old email index, HSDT email
for other topic drift, old email referencing DATASTAG EXEC, a
pre-TOOLSRUN facility that provided ftp/anonymous type function
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#email800409
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email821214
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email821217
lots of posts related to HSDT (high-speed data transport) project
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt
and for other topic drift, past posts related to the internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
and for even more topic drift ... old email dealing with various
aspects of HSDT dealing with events surrounding the NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
i.e. while tcp/ip is the technology basis for the modern internet, we claim that hte NSFNET backbone was the operational basis for the modern internet.
in related hsdt activity, the mainframe tcp/ip product had been
implemented in vs/pascal. it had several thruput issues; it could
consume a full 3090 processor while only getting 44kbytes/sec
aggregate thruput. I made the modifications to the product to support
RFC1044 and in some testing at Cray research between a Cray machine
and a 4341-clone, was sustaining 4341 hardware interface speed
(1mbyte/sec) using only a modest amount of the 4341-clone processor
(over 20 times the aggregate data rate for less than 1/20th the
processor overhead). past posts mentioning doing rfc 1044 support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044
some recent posts mentioning mainframe tcp/ip support and
vs/pascal
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#12 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#29 Being "Open" (Was: Mainframe vs. "Server")
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#8 whiny question: Why won't z/OS support the HMC 3270 emulator
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#41 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#60 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 08:27:58 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
she could design features in support of loosely-coupled ... but then the features had to be justified. this was heyday of buillding bigger iron and if single processors weren't big enuf .. then go to SMPs. at the time loosely-coupled didn't get as much attention ... that is one of the reasons she didn't last long.
she also had constant battles with the "SNA" group ... "SNA" supposedly had
responsibility for terminal communication ... but actually wanted
control over anything that had the words communication and/or
networking. one of the (temporary) truces was that "SNA" had control
over everything that crossed the walls of the datacenter/machine room
(and therefor wasn't supposedly mandated also for everything that might
go between machines within the datacenter walls). semi-related posts
mentioning SNA group and terminal emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
as I've mentioned numerous of times before, her Peer-Coupled Shared Data
architecture didn't see much take-up ... except for by the ims group
doing ims hotstandby ... until much later with sysplex (which is found
in current generation of mainframes):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata
An example, battle she fought and lost was over 3088/trotter ... a "new" channel-to-channel multiple processor interconnect. She had a bunch of enhancements for it ... but it eventually shipped as a product with little more than the earlier CTCA (channel-to-channel adapter) implementation.
an example of the "temporary" truce ... was past story about sjr having
implemented 4341 clusters using 3088/trotter (doing a couple of the
hardware enhancements on their own) ... and w/o SNA. When it finally saw
limited customer release ... they were required to convert to standard
SNA (even tho it was purely within datacenter walls) ... which severely
degraded its operation. a couple past posts mentioning the effort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#6 Blade architectures
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#7 54 Processors?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#4 Google Architecture
part of the sjr 4341 cluster was sjr had done the original
relational/sql implementation, System R
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr
there were then follow-on projects for distributed/cluster
relational database ... some past mentions of System R follow-on
work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#17 disk write caching (was: ibm icecube -- return of
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#15 Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#18 Wars against bad things
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#39 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
lots of past posts about loosely-coupled, clusters, and also later
doing our own ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
and past email about almost being allowed to do ha/cmp scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
semi-related is the work done of hsdt activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt
and while we did a lot of work leading up of NSF backbone NSFNET
we were eventually prevented from bidding
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet
even tho a NSF audit of what we had running claimed it was
at least five hrs ahead of NSFNET bid submissions (to build
something new) ... some old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
and we also ran afoul of the SNA group when we had come up
with 3-tier architecture and were out doing executive customer
presentations
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:53:51 -0600John Byrns <byrnsj@sbcglobal.net> writes:
time-and-time again there are situations where individual agendas appear to have little or nothing to do with the organization they supposedly represent. sometimes this difference becomes more pronounced as individuals near their own retirement age. possibly one last "bonus" or some other kind of reward is tied to some strictly short-term objective ... and the individual places their personal benefit over that of the organization's long-term benefit (especially if they are shortly to be long gone).
semi-related is the saying that business ethics is an oxymoron.
my wife was sent to "executive school" (step up from "managers school") a couple times. one of the things that they do in such environments is play team building games ... split the group into two teams and play act on how to resolve issues. one of the scenerios has to do with win-win, win-loose, and loose-loose strategies. now in real life ... for ongoing interactions ... win-win tends to build better cooperation and long term benefits for everybody. however, win-loose may provide significant advantage, if life is viewed as a one-shot game (or purely a series of one-shot games). so she had her team play win-win up to the last round ... and on the last round (since in the game, there was apparently no long term downside), she had her team play win-loose. This brought some members of the other team nearly to the brink of tears.
old past posts with related scenerio for railroad industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#7 Big Brother -- Re: National IDs
somewhat related scenario prompting call for 100precent unearned profit
tax
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 09:00:02 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
lots of past posts about virtual memory paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
and numerous past future system posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 10:10:50 -0600hancock4 writes:
it isn't the organizations that are playing greedy ... it is the individual members that compose those organizations that play greedy. the composite organization may be characterized as being greedy when that reflects the aggregate behavior of the individual members.
individual benefit, greed and win-loose strategies can be seen at all levels of social interaction ... from driving behavior on highways to "business as usual" on wall street. the win-loose strategies can sometimes have wide-spread disastrous results ... where individuals are willing to compromise group welfare for relatively small individual benefit (i.e. the downside of their behavior to the overall group welfare can be several orders of magnitude larger than the relatively small individual benefit gained). In some cases, even a million yrs in jail may not approach the penalty for the damage they do (which is all out of propotion to their individual gain).
the stuff around sarbanes-oxley is small example. one of the people that does a TV financial show ... in an interview a couple weeks ago, stated that when he was involved in day-to-day trading a decade or so ago ... everybody in the industry practiced stock manipulation on a regular basis and he has no reason to believe that has changed (and the regulators apparently have no clue).
misc. past posts mentioning sarbanes-oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#33 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#58 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#1 Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#28 Password Complexity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#22 AOS: The next big thing in data storage
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#63 Is Silicon Valley strangeled by SOX?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#0 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 12:16:13 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
for other drift ... this was a very long-winded post ... but includes a
discussion of the aggregate long term financial consequences stemming
from the S&L incident of the 80s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm The Thread Between Risk Management and Information Security
possibly i have a jaundiced view partly based on past experience.
recent post about after going on 15yrs, finding out that the new hires I
was interviewing (to work in a new group under my direction) were being
offered 1/3rd more than i was currently making ... and then finding it
tough slogging to argue that I should get a raise so i was making the
same as what new hires were being offered.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
also colored my view of what went on during the whole NSFNET backbone
sequence
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
and the ha/medusa scale-up work
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
and all that was happening in supposedly one of the "best" corporations.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 13:03:43 -0600David Powell <ddotpowell@itiscali.co.uk> writes:
was couldn't get line dynamic baud rate.
the standard telecommunication controller had a "SAD" command that allowed dynamically associating the type of controller line scanner with each specific line (i.e. 1052, 2741, tty). The standard cp67 terminal support code provided for 1052 & 2741 support with dynamic terminal identification and "switching" the appropriate line-scanner with the "SAD" command.
So when I went to add TTY/ascii terminal support to cp67 ... I attempted to integrate it in such a way that it would also do dynamic terminal determination and switching the appropriate line scanner with the SAD command. All this worked with "hard-wired" lines ... however, wanted to extend the support to dial-up lines ... so a single phone number and common dial-up rotory pool could be used for all terminals. This is where the problem showed up ... since the standard terminal controller implementation had took a short cut ... hardwiring the (line baud rate) oscillator to each line (so that while the type of line-scanner was dynamically assignable to each line ... it wasn't actually possible to change terminal type when different baud rates were involved).
the line-scanner in the interdata3 clone was implemented in software and on initial connection would probe signal rise/fall at very high rate .... until it figured out where the edges appeared and calculate the baud rate.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 14:39:22 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
and very boyd ... a few past references to dedication of Boyd Hall at
Nellis AFB:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#20 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#74 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
lots of past posts mentioning John Boyd and/or Boyd URLs from around
the web:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM 360 Model 20 Questions Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:44:46 -0600"Nico de Jong" <nico_at_farumdata_dot_dk> writes:
recent post about doing tty terminal support for cp67
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#76 Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler
a couple recent posts mentioning crje
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#14 ISPF not productive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#43 Wylbur and CRBE
numerous past posts mentioning HASP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp
there was supposedly a 360/20 installed in the univ. admin bldg (which i never bothered to go by and see) ... i had the impression it was done as sort of an upgrade of some old mechanical tab equipment.
there was the semi-famous incident of a daily (cobol) job that univ. admin would run on the datacenter's 360. One day the whole place ground to a whole when the person overseeing the admin run said that the results were something he hadn't seen before. It turns out that the application had originated as a 407 plugboard application ... which was converted to autocoder that simulated the 407 plugboard, which was converted to 709 cobol still simulating 407 plugboard, which then was converted to 360 cobol) still simulating 407 plugboard. The last thing the application did was simulate the printing of the 407 sense switches. The problem on this particular day was that there was an unfamilar (407) sense switch settings. The whole place had come to a dead halt while it was decided what to do (i.e. all product work on the 360 was drained). Finally it was decided to rerun the admin job ... to see if the final results printed were the same.
old postings mentioning 407 and/or 360/2-something
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#137 Mainframe emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#11 I'm overwhelmed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#12 I'm overwhelmed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#19 Computer of the century
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#71 HASP vs. "Straight OS," not vs. ASP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#5 Emulation (was Re: Object code (was: Source code - couldn't resist compiling it :-))
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#52 Author seeks help - net in 1981
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#49 OT Friday reminiscences
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#21 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#53 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#62 history of CMS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#20 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#39 HASP:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#69 OT: One for the historians - 360/91
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#23 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#41 When nerds were nerds
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#44 who were the original fortran installations?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#29 Using the Cache to Change the Width of Memory
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#3 Data communications over telegraph circuits
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#37 CRJE and CRBE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#5 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#66 Why these original FORTRAN quirks?; Now : Programming practices
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#72 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM 360 Model 20 Questions Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 16:14:02 -0600re:
here is referenece titled "The History of Computing at Cornell
University"
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/82/10/History_Computing_Cornell_Rudan.pdf
that showed up in a search engine query for 360/20 and RJE (there is a passing reference).
It also mentions Worley and HASP on 360/65 at Cornell. I've mentioned
before the Univ. sending me on a trip to east coast SHARE meeting along
with a side-trip to Cornell to talk to Worley about HASP. I remember it
well because of catching a DC3 at LaGuardia marine air terminal and
sitting on the tarmack for a couple hrs (w/o airconditioning in
extremely hot, humid air heavily laden with the smell of kerosene)
waiting for a thunderstorm to pass. when we did get off ... it turns out
we were flying through the middle of the storm ... violently bouncing
around and lightening appearing to repeatedly strike the plane and I got
extremely air sick. I staggered off at the first stop (Elmira) and found
a motel to sleep it off. The next morning I rented a car and drove to
Ithaca. A few past posts mentioning that trip:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#27 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#27 Mount DASD as read-only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#1 About TLB in lower-level caches
lots of past posts mentioning hasp
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp
and other past posts that make mention of bill worley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#84 Is a VAX a mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#57 Why not an IBM zSeries workstation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#18 Black magic in POWER5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#35 why doesn't processor reordering instructions affect most
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#28 [Meta] Marketplace argument
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#29 [Meta] Marketplace argument
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#18 address space
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#39 What happens if CR's are directly changed?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#1 About TLB in lower-level caches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#42 old hypervisor email
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 20:21:05 -0600kkt <kkt@zipcon.net> writes:
misc. past posts mentioning functionally illiterate and/or not
understanding middle school arithmetic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
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/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#61 Health Care
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#21 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 22:38:24 -0600Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
i think the simple version of the scenario is statistically insignificant among all the events that are in the news about problems in the subprime mortgage market.
The above hypothetical scenario applied to the subprime scenario, is that a person with two yrs of $200k/annum earnings, signs a subprime contract for a mansion that will have regular monthly payments of $20k/month after the introductory period. Doesn't make any difference whether the earnings stay at $200k/annum (gross), the payments rise to $240k/annum (after the introductory period). At $200k/annum or $35k/annum, the bank still forecloses. The subprime scenario is that the introductory subprime mortgage payments are sized based on current income ... and then rise to potentially more than even the gross income after the introductory period.
the majority scenario in the news are the people that got subprime mortgage ... for the a couple yr introductory period and then becomes standard variable adjustable. the vast majority have standard hrly wage that varies little ... and they are possibly barely able to afford the contracted subprime rate introductory payments ... and then at the end of the introductory period ... the payment suddenly doubles or triples (as specified in the contract).
There was basically no reasonable foreseable circumstance where they were going to be able to afford the post-introductory mortage payment as stated in the contract (i.e. contractual payments potentially even larger than gross income).
Various analysts talk about the big boom/bust in the subprime mortgage market as irresponsible mortgage lenders throwing money at irresponsible home buyers.
Recent article from the 9th says total mortgage lending up 11pct ... while subprime lending sank 49pct.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:15:44 -0600Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
from previous post
The above hypothetical scenario applied to the subprime scenario, is
that a person with two yrs of $200k/annum earnings, signs a subprime
contract for a mansion that will have regular monthly payments of
$20k/month after the introductory period. Doesn't make any difference
whether the earnings stay at $200k/annum (gross), the payments rise to
$240k/annum (after the introductory period). At $200k/annum or
$35k/annum, the bank still forecloses. The subprime scenario is that
the introductory subprime mortgage payments are sized based on current
income ... and then rise to potentially more than even the gross
income after the introductory period.
...
i.e. given a $200k/annum scenario ... possibly the person takes out a $3.5m mortgage with say an introductory subprime 2.5percent interest only payment ... around $85k/annum. after the introductory period it becomes a normal variable mortgage interest+principle ... say $270k/annum.
also from previous post:
Various analysts talk about the big boom/bust in the subprime mortgage
market as irresponsible mortgage lenders throwing money at
irresponsible home buyers.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:23:36 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
but my scenario was that after nearly 15yrs ... i find that they are offering new hires (that i was interviewing to work under my direction) 1/3rd more than what i was making ... and initially when i raised the subject, they claimed that they had done a detailed study and i was making exactly what i was suppose to (that was before I raised the discrepancy between what i was making and what they were offering the new hires that i was interviewing).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:45:48 -0600Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com> writes:
115, 125, 135, 145, etc ... was vertical microcode ... something that looked like more traditional sequential programming.
the low-end and mid-range vertical microcode tended to characterize the avg. number of (microcode) instructions executed per 370 instruction i.e. ten.
the high-end horizontal microcode tended to characterize the avg. number of machine cyles per 370 instruction (since some amount of stuff went on in parallel) ... i remember one of the 165 engineers making some statement that one of the microcode optimizations going from 165 to 168 was getting avg. machine cycle per 370 instruction from 2.1 to 1.6. then the transition from 168 to 3033 (started out using 168 wiring diagram mapped to faster chip) got it down to approx. 1.0.
misc. past posts mentioning 165 to 168 avg. machine cycles per
instruction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#23 Old IBM's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#61 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs (was: Re: 36 to 32 bit transition)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#82 "all-out" vs less aggressive designs (was: Re: 36 to 32 bit transition)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#56 ECPS:VM DISPx instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#37 S/360 undocumented instructions?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#56 RFCs that reference MD5
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#59 System/360; Hardwired vs. Microcoded
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#29 Documentation for the New Instructions for the z9 Processor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#54 Hey! Keep Your Hands Out Of My Abstraction Layer!
misc. past posts mentioning slow down going from 3830 (disk
controller) horizontal microcode to 3880 vertical microcode (one of
the justification for transition to vertical microcode was that the
burden placed on horizontal microcode programmer was so enormous).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#38 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#75 Does the word "mainframe" still have a meaning?>
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#54 VLIW at IBM Research
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#28 checking some myths.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#63 MVS History (all parts)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#2 Microcode? (& index searching)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#3 PLX
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#7 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#43 S/360 undocumented instructions?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#45 hung/zombie users ... long boring, wandering story
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#15 360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#6 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#46 Hercules 3.04 announcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#0 IBM 3380 and 3880 maintenance docs needed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#50 Was FORTRAN buggy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#36 REAL memory column in SDSF
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#32 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#17 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#6 21st Century ISA goals?
one of the things that Amdahl introduced (for high-end horizontal
microcode machines) was something called "macrocode" ... which was
sort of a special 370-mode microcode ... where the engineer could
implement more complex machine features using much simpler "vertical"
(370) microcode ... as opposed to the much more complex task of
horizontal microcode ... misc. past posts mentioning "macrocode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#44 Linux paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#48 Linux paging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#9 Mainframe System Programmer/Administrator market demand?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#56 Wild hardware idea
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#59 Misuse of word "microcode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#60 Misuse of word "microcode"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#24 Description of a new old-fashioned programming language
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#14 Multicores
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#29 Documentation for the New Instructions for the z9 Processor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#40 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#43 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#48 POWER6 on zSeries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#38 blast from the past ... macrocode
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#9 Mainframe Jobs Going Away
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#32 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#35 Code density and performance?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#39 Using different storage key's
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#42 old hypervisor email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#33 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#34 Assembler question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#20 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#1 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#3 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#9 Has anyone ever used self-modifying microcode? Would it even be useful?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 09:03:32 -0600CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> writes:
there was the example about HS graduates from large land grant
mid-western univ. claimed that went thru three different cycles
dumbing down entering freshman texts three times between 60s and the
90s (indication that level of HS graduates was declining). few past
posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#23 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#21 Are there more stupid people in IT than there used to be?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#45 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
there was general statement by census in the early 90s that half of HS
graduate age were functionally illiterate (but that would have
included dropouts and non-graduates ... all of that age). few past
posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#45 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#55 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#33 [IBM-MAIN] NY Times editorial on white collar jobs going
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#42 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#18 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#18 Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#43 Academic priorities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#63 DEC's Hudson fab
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#80 IBM Unionization
another scenario was that foreign automakers when they first came over
(auto manufacturing plants in the us), found that they had to require
2yr college to get workers that had HS graduate level eduction that
they were used to (however that was comparing US to other countries
... not whether US was in general declining). some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
and then the general literacy survey from the 90s how US (across all
levels of education) stacked up with the rest of the world ... a few
past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#45 How will current AI/robot stories play when AIs are real?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#38 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#25 SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#58 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 10:10:23 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 10:19:08 -0600Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes:
lots of past posts related to XTP/HSP (and some mentioning of trying to
work with ISO and running into problem that both IP, internetworking
protocol and LANs violate OSI).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 14:36:16 -0600D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
they profusely apologized ... of course this is all within the last 15
yrs. quite a lot has changed since i first went over their in the
early 70s to do a HONE install ... a recent x-over from another thread
about doing HONE installs in the early 70s (from mainframe n.g.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#65 Help settle a job title/role debate
lots of past posts mentioning HONE (&/or APL):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
a thread in this n.g. about trips in the early 70s and yen was over
300/$
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#35 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
it was about 20yrs ago when there was this short period that Nippon Steel was going to buy Oracle. The next qtr, Oracle had signed a really large enterprise license with one of the oil companies and was able to back out of the Nippon Steel purchase.
Nippon Steel buying a database company sort of surprised me, so I looked a little into what was going on. Supposedly, the gov. had decided that Japan was going to be world leader in information technology country by 2010. As part of that gov. economic policy all the profitable manufacturing companies (including automobiles) were told that they had to invest some specific percentage of their profits in information technology or have it taken as gov. taxes (of course, not included was buying computers for corporate operation)
this is sort of along the lines in the US a decade earlier with the
call for one hundred percent unearned profit tax on the US automobile
industry when they weren't investing their profits (in the wake of the
embargo) in becoming more competitive. past posts mentioning the call
for 100% unearned profit tax on the US automobile industry:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#52 The SOB that helped IT jobs move to India is dead!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#22 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#2 Internet today -- what's left for hobbiests
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#14 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#20 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#49 The Pankian Metaphor (redux)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#72 IBM Unionization
the difference being that all the profitable manufacturing companies in japan were going ahead and doing the investment to become more competitive. in any case, as a result, a lot of the technology investments (in US companies) that went on in the 80s & 90s was actually coming from overseas (this is separate from recent posts about the high-tech boom of the 90s in the US was helped significantly by the large number of highly skilled foreigners with advanced technology degrees).
a past post mentioning Nippon Steel
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#49 How did Oracle get started?
for lots of topic drift related to RDBMS ... original relational/sql
implementation was system/r
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr
and other Oracle mention here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15
when we were doing ha/cmp product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
and cluster scale-up
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
a few past posts about countries having specific economic policies
and goals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#28 Offshore IT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#4 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#7 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#8 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#17 The Pankian Metaphor
and few recent posts mentioning fifty percent or more of high-tech
graduates being foriegn.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#24 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#31 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#57 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:02:04 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
strategy/strategic frequently is described as deciding what needs to be done ... and tactical is deciding on how it gets done.
one of boyd's highlights on this was with regard to the american army in ww2 ... was that they had to field a large number of unexperienced troops ... as a result they went with a very rigid command & control structure with both tightly controlled top-down strategy as well as tightly controlled top-down tactical.
some of this shows up in boyd's briefing on organic design for
command and control ... recent reference here
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#69 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
the claim could be made that a decision to be the world leader in
information technology by 2010 was a strategic decision ... along with
forcing profitable manufacturing companies to invest at least minimum
of their profits in IT. However, the specifics of such investments
were tactical decisions left up to every company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#88 IBM Unionization
lots of past posts and/or URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html
misc. past posts mentioning rigid, top-down command and control
structures not being very agile and/or adaptable:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#8 scheduling & dynamic adaptive ... long posting warning
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#120 atomic History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#34 War, Chaos, & Business (web site), or Col John Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#45 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#16 mainframe question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#40 Beginner question on Security
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#33 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#34 Star Trek: TNG reference
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#21 MP cost effectiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#46 employee motivation & executive compensation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#25 Timeless Classics of Software Engineering
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#34 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain the
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#18 Boyd makes wikipedia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#69 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#86 Organizations with two or more Managers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#5 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#2 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#3 Computerworld Article: Dress for Success?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#40 Microcomputers As A Space Spinoff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#10 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#25 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#45 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#55 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#35 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 15:48:41 -0600D.J. <alphmoe23@cableone.net> writes:
my wife's father was engineering combat group. near the end, he was frequently ranking officer into enemy territory and accumulated a variety of officer daggers (platinum, gold, silver) in surrenders. he also liberated some number of camps. supposedly after the end of hostilities, it was the reason he turned down staying on with a military district command ... so they posted him to Nanking (instead).
minor topic drift reference
http://germandressdaggers.com/Army%20Dagger.htm
He was graduate of west point with an graduate engineering degree from
UC Berkeley. After coming back from China, he did a "tour" at
MIT. recent reference about co-worker, many yrs later, claiming my
wife's father was his favorite instructor at MIT.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#4 Even worse than UNIX
other refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#19 Message To America's Students: The War, The Draft, Your Future
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#14 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#3 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#27 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#30 Empires and Imperialism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#30 Empires and Imperialism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#33 IBM 610 workstation computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#27 Mount DASD as read-only
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#15 The Fate of VM - was: Re: Baby MVS???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#47 Mickey and friends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#44 Universal constants
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 17:58:32 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
recent article from yesterday
Tremble for your old age, The world's underfunded pensions
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9172498
i.e. funding the obligation at the time it is incurred ... while the person is working ... instead of waiting to worry about it when it comes time to actually pay the pension. article mentions the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (PBGC) and companies with insurance with PBGC have $340B in unfunded liability. It also estimates that state and local govs. have $2T in unfunded liability for public-sector employees. There is some snide reference to legislation has at least forced chief executives to be (somewhat) more responsible than politicians. also mentioned somewhat delicate balance of how fast some of these companies can be forced to makeup for past failures and transitioning to fully funded obligations (too aggresive could make the company insolvent)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 22:33:52 -0600"Del Cecchi" <delcecchiofthenorth@gmail.com> writes:
which is on par with some people doing stock speculation on 20percent margin ... as long as it doesn't drop more than 20percent and they actually loose more than they put into it.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:19:09 -0600Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
the old time was that there was pension obligations agreements for the current employees at possibly 30yrs in the future ... but not providing current funds to meet those obligations ... planning instead of paying for those pensions out of operating revenue at that future date.
in some of these old corporate and gov. retirement funding scnearios it could almost be viewed as pyramid scheme. there are only a few current retired workers and they are paid out of current revenue w/o setting anything aside for pension obligations that have to be paid at 30yrs in the future. this sort of assumes that situation at 30yrs in the future remains the same as it is today ... there continues to only be a very small number of retirees receiving funds and the business hasn't changed i.e. possibly ratio of 100 workers per retiree.
however, at some point in the future ... the ratio of retirees to workers significantly changes ... which can happen even if the business stays the same, the number of workers stay the same ... but the life expectency of the retirees goes up.
in the fully-funded pension/retirement scenario ... the money being set aside is based on the pension obligation of the current workers. in effect, money is being set aside out of the current profits, based on current workers (funding the pension payments for those current workers). if the business drops off ... there is no issue of having to take out money to pay for the pension payments for past workers.
in fully funded pension/retirement scenario, there is much tighter feed-back control between the amount of funding that needs to be set aside for pensions, the number of current workers, and the amount of current business. any contract obligations that might have to be renogiated is if the profit margin for the business changes ... and cutting the number of workers isn't sufficient adjustment. in a fully funded pension/retirement scenario ... since each employees future pension obligation appears as benefits paid against the current work of the current employees ... the contract renegotiation may reduce size of direct salary and also indirect benefits (medical insurance, pension contribution, etc) of current workers. In fully funded pension/retirement scenario, such renegotiation would have no effect on the payments to existing retirees ... since that money had already been payed into the pension fund during the lifetime of those workers.
in the unfunded and/or partially funded scenario ... a downturn in current business would affect the pension benefits payments for everybody (since the responsible entities had not bothered to set aside the funds at the point in time that the pension obligation had been incurred).
past posts/threads mentioning pension/retirement funding:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#9 A hundred subjects: 64-bit OS2/eCs, Innotek Products,
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#37 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#27 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#35 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#20 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#22 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#91 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM Unionization Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:32:42 -0600jmfbahciv writes:
ok, how 'bout this example ... say JMF has 15yrs experience and is the senior technical person working on a project, was providing technical direction for the whole project and was asked to interview some recent college graduates (to join the company to also work on the same project). The HR department decides that starting salary offer for all the new hire candidates should be 1/3rd more than the existing salary of the most senior and experienced person working on the project.
Possibly conversely ... HR department had almost never bothered to give JMF a raise in his 15yrs of employment ... so that after 15yrs, the standard starting salary offer for all recent college graduate new hires ... was now 1/3rd more than what JMF was currently making (after 15yrs of employment).
What would JMF think if he finds out that all the recent college graduate new hires, that were being brought in to work on a project that he was technically heading up, were being paid 1/3rd more than what he was being paid?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:49:47 -0600Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
one of the reasons i mentioned that horizontal microcode was quoted in
avg. number of 370 instructions per machine cycle was that there could
be different operations for multiple 370 instructions going on in
parallel/overlapped ... so they counted the avg. number of 370
instructions that completed in some unit of machine cycles. ref
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIW pre-history
part of the complexity for the horizontal microcoder was that they had to constantly keep track of which operations were in flight and approximately how many instructions later could they start the next operation (i.e. had transfer finished so add operation could be kicked off, etc).
besides FS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys
contributing to creation of early 801/RISC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801
... i.e. exact opposite from future system in terms of hardware complexity ... there were (801 related) comments in the 70s like all operations being fixed single cycle (in part eliminating the type of complexity and variability that the horizontal microcoders were having to deal with) and no cache consistency (eliminating the significant cache consistency overhead/slowdown that was going on in high-end 370s).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 10:06:50 -0600Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
... or more accurately ... the level of control that horizontal microcode instruction provided was at extremely primitive hardware component level. the reason that it was referred to as horizontal microcode was that there was possible control over every primitive hardware component (in the system) in every instruction (in theory allowing each single instruction to activate every hardware component in the infrastructure ... concurrently and in parallel).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: VLIW pre-history Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 10:30:08 -0600Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#95 VLIW pre-history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#96 VLIW pre-history
some of the VLIW implementation have multiple instructions with multiple op-codes ... encoded in a wide word ... allowing things to be done in parallel.
this is somewhat similar to mainframes that do i-instruction fetch in double words or larger units ... fetching multiple instructions in one operation from storage.
however, an issue in horizontal microcode ... was that it didn't have instruction op-codes in the sense that most vertical programmers are familiar. an horizontal microcode instruction had positions for control of the various low-level/primitive hardware components ... it could be doing i-fetch, decoding i-fetch opcode, moving stuff to various execution units, etc ... all in one instruction. basically lots of the kinds of stuff that current supercaler processors perform under strictly hardware control ... but left up to the microcoder to implement in horizontal microcode.