2011 Newsgroup postings (07/21 - 08/14) Lynn Wheeler

2011 Newsgroup Postings (07/21 - 08/14)

program coding pads
Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation
House panel approves data breach notification bill
Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide
Announcement of the disk drive (1956)
What is an instruction?
At least two decades back, some gurus predicted
Innovation and iconoclasm
Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
program coding pads
program coding pads
Innovation and iconoclasm
program coding pads
program coding pads
Innovation and iconoclasm
New protocol to replace SMTP?
DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
Congressional Bickering
disclosing "business" information on the internet
disclosing "business" information on the internet
disclosing "business" information on the internet
MS-DOS is 30 years old today
Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
rating agencies
Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Linguistic loggerheads
Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
China Builds Fleet of Small Warships While U.S. Drifts
Boyd's Reading List Revisited
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
assembler help!
First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
S&P Downgrades USA; Time to Downgrade S&P?
S&P's History of Relentless Political Advocacy
Suffix of 64 bit instructions
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Opcode X'A0'
"How do you feel about 'gotos'"
How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?
Advice from Richard P. Feynman
How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?
Steve Jobs, the Whole Earth Catalog, & The WELL
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Graph of total world disk space over time?
Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
"How do you feel about 'gotos'"
Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?
Silicon Valley's Undertaker: 'We're Anticipating a Major Fallout'
Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

program coding pads

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:07:55 -0400

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
IBM used the term "parallel sysplex" to refer to what we now call "symmetric multiprocessing"; this might help.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#77 program coding pads

parallel sysplex is "loosely-coupled" (as opposed to tightly-coupled, Shared Memory multiProcessing and/or Symmetric MultiProcessing).

as mentioned previously, my wife had been con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture ... where she developed Peer-Coupled Shared Data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

which except for IMS hot-standby saw very little uptake until sysplex.

A combination of lack of uptake and battles with SNA contributed to her not remaining long in the position. In the SNA battles, there would be temporary truces that allowed her to use anything she wanted within datacenter walls (instead of mandating SNA for loosely-coupled operation) ... but SNA still had strategic ownership for everything that crossed the datacenter walls.

Bare-bones loosely-coupled relied on device reserve/release I/O commands for access to device and CTCA for coordination messages between processors.

As mentioned in previous post, the 3830 had ACP locking support for logical locks (could be used at finer granularity than whole device locking with reserve/release). The TPF wiki references the original ACP locking as LLF ... and then enhancement as ELLF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facility

and something from sysplex called "coupling facility" (can be used by loosely-coupled processors that don't share memory and can use things like compare&swap instruction against shared memory locations).

An enhancement to CTCA (channel-to-channel adapter allowing high-speed messaging between two processors) was 3088/trotter that provided CTCA semantics between eight processors. SNA wanted 3088 messaging limited to only supported by SNA. My wife wanted several hardware enhancements to 3088 and much more efficient message passing protocol.

There was a 4341 "cluster" effort in research that used some minor enhancements to 3088 and highly efficient cluster coordination protocol. Before being able to ship to customers, they were forced to be limited to vanilla 3088 that was only supported by SNA. As a result, various cluster coordination operations that took small fraction of second increased to nearly a minute.

the SNA group having corporate strategic ownership for everything that crosses the datacenter walls ... also shows up in the disk division position in the late 80s that the SNA group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division i.e. the SNA group stranglehold was seeing data fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms ... misc. past related postings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

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

Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 21 Jul, 2011
Subject: Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation
Blog: The Register

re:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/07/14/brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_2/

posts from two years ago ... after new feature presentation at hilltopics meeting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#43 From Annals Of Release No Software Before Its time
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#46 From Annals Of Release No Software Before Its time

in the later half of the 70s ... the internal, virtual-machine based HONE system (provided online world-wide sales & marketing support) implemented loosely-coupled single-system-image support ... with front-end load-balancing and recovery (but not live migration/relocation). In the early 80s this was extended when the US HONE datacenter had a 2nd and 3rd replicated datacenter at geographic distances. misc past posts mentioning HONE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

however, in the late 60s, there was two cp67 commercial online timesharing service bureaus startups (sort of precursor to modern day cloud computing). By the mid-70s, at least one had migrated to VM370 base and had made numerous enhancements ... including single-system-image, front-end load balancing and live guest migration (be able to transparently vary offline a processor complex for service/maintenance with all the virtual guests migrated to other processors in the complex).

past post in this thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#63 Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation (Cambridge skunkworks)

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

House panel approves data breach notification bill

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 21 Jul, 2011
Subject: House panel approves data breach notification bill
Blog: Google+

House panel approves data breach notification bill
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218554/House_panel_approves_data_breach_notification_bill

from above:
The bill would require breach notifications only when a customer's name, phone number or credit card numbers were compromised along with a Social Security number, driver's license number, or other government ID, Democrats said. The bill would not require notification if a Social Security number, credit card number or bank account number was compromised, unless it were combined with other personal information, Waxman said.

... snip ...

This appears to gut the cal. notification bill from end of last century. We were tangentially involved having been brought in to help wordsmith the cal. electronic signature bill. Some of the groups were also heavily involved in privacy issues and had done detailed public surveys. The #1 issue was "identity fraud", primarily the form of "account fraud" resulting from data breaches involving (just) account numbers. There appeared to be nothing being done about such breaches (institutions having breaches weren't at risk, it was their customer/clients were having fraudulent transactions). There apparently was some hope that the publicity from the notifications would prompt corrective action.

In the decade+ since the cal. bill was passed, federal has had numerous notification bills about equally divided between those similar to cal. and those (federal pre-emption) eliminating most requirements for notification.

Note that the same group was in the process of doing an "opt-in" privacy sharing legislation when (federal pre-emption) "opt-out" was added to GLBA. "opt-in" requires you to authorize specific sharing. "opt-out" allows unlimited sharing unless you object.

In the middle of last decade, there was a annual privacy conference in WashDC that included panel discussion with FTC commissioners. During the discussion, somebody in the audience got up and said they were associated with call center operations and wanted to know if the FTC commissioners were going to look into none of the financial industry call centers providing method for recording any details about 1-800 "opt-out" calls (no record of anybody ever opting out of privacy sharing).

Note that other provisions in GLBA played significant role in the financial bubble/mess.

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

misc. past posts mentioning federal data breach legislation:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#44 Does the Data Protection Act of 2005 Make Sense
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#35 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#47 the personal data theft pandemic continues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#8 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008.html#2 folklore indeed
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#8 Hannaford case exposes holes in law, some say
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#4 You won't guess who's the bad guy of ID theft
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#42 Security Breaches
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#39 What is "timesharing" (Re: OS X Finder windows vs terminal window weirdness)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#49 Quality of IBM school clock systems?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#53 Quality of IBM school clock systems?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#55 With all the highly publicised data breeches and losses, are we all wasting our time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#66 With all the highly publicised data breeches and losses, are we all wasting our time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#70 Why SSNs Are Not Appropriate for Authentication and when, where and why should you offer/use it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#71 TJ Maxx - why are they still in business?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#72 What are security areas to be addressed before starting an e-commerce transaction or setting up a portal?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#73 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#7 Dealing with the neew MA ID protection law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#3 GPG
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#2 Payment Card + Digital Signature
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#1 PCI's Bob Russo: Data loss hurts brand more than a fine
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#58 HONEY I LOVE YOU, but please cut the cards
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#6 US credit card payment house breached by sniffing malware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#9 New Research Reveals 45% of Card Breach Victims Lose Confidence in Their Financial Accounts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#13 US credit card payment house breaches by sniffing malware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#14 question about ssh-keygen with empty passphrase
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#19 US credit card payment house breached by sniffing malware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#21 ICSF and VISA/MasterCard?amex reference list
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#62 Study: Data breaches continue to get more costly for businesses
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#63 Study: Data breaches continue to get more costly for businesses
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#6 Heartland Data Breach Update: Now More Than 150 Institutions Impacted
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#3 Cybersecurity hearing highlights inadequacy of PCI DSS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#36 PCI security rules may require reinforcements
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#10 Top 10 Cybersecurity Threats for 2009, will they cause creation of highly-secure Corporate-wide Intranets?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#20 Online Banking's Innate Security Flaws
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#68 Weak security enables credit card hacks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#13 PCI SSC Seeks Input on Security Standards
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#54 The satate of software
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#5 Internal fraud isn't new, but it's news
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#17 U.K. lags in information security management practices
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#22 FBI: National data-breach law would help fight cybercrime
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#27 FBI: National data-breach law would help fight cybercrime
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#58 Cyber breaches are a closely kept secret
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#82 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#73 Our Pecora Moment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#74 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#82 Costs Of Data Breaches Much Higher In U.S. Than In Other Countries, Study Says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#77 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#18 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#28 Mainframe Hacking -- Fact or Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#56 About that "Mighty Fortress"... What's it look like?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#52 Who are these people who think cybersecurity experts are crying wolf?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#76 Mainframe hacking?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#53 The Credit Card Criminals Are Getting Crafty
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#76 E-commerce smackdown as PCI standards revised
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#40 The Great Cyberheist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#55 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#9 Breaches and Consumer Backlash
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#55 CISO's Guide to Breach Notification
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#58 Pipeline and Network Security: Protecting a Series of Tubes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#60 Cyberwar vs. Cyber-Espionage vs. Cybercrime
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#45 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!

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

Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 21 Jul, 2011
Subject: Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide
Blog: Facebook

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#80 Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#81 Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide

Legal Decay in Soviet Style Collapse
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/07/journal-legal-decay-in-a-soviet-style-collapse.html
above mentions reward for malfeasance with generous government bailouts and huge bonuses aka Audit: Fed gave $16 trillion in emergency loans
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/21/audit-fed-gave-16-trillion-in-emergency-loans/
some of this leaked last year after year of litigation
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1201/Federal-Reserve-s-astounding-report-We-loaned-banks-trillions

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

Announcement of the disk drive (1956)

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Announcement of the disk drive (1956)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:02:43 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
This was pretty typical of vector graphics systems back then, except that most only had one field. Think Tektronix 40xx systems and IBM 2250s. To date myself I took a computer graphics course where we used a Tektronix scope attached to a PDP-8. You'd draw the image, then it would gradually fade to black until redrawn. The TEK's had a clear cey that flashed the screen to erase it immediately.

then there was the tektronics "3277ga" (3277 graphics attachment, tektronics tube wired into the side of a 3277 terminal)

2250-1 was a 360 "channel attached" 2250 ... which was the same price as 2250-4 ... which was 2250/1130 combination (basically 1130 providing the control function which was extra channel interface & control box in the 2250-1).

when i was undergraduate ... and playing with cp67 and 360/67 ... the univ. had a 2250-1 ... and I hacked the lincoln labs. 2250-1 fortran library into the side of cms editor ... for fullscreen editor on 2250.

later at the science center ... it had a 2250-4 and somebody had ported (dec1?) spacewars to 2250-4; it split the 2250 keyboard in half for two-player controls.

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

What is an instruction?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What is an instruction?
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:17:15 -0400

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
Reading some of the responses does make one aware of potential pitfalls.

Thus, for example, an MVC instruction certainly isn't atomic.

on 360 (for multiprocessor), the "test&set" instruction was atomic (with respect to all other test&set instructions on all processors)

360 had non-interruptable instructions ... it pre-tested starting&ending addresses of arguments and either aborted the instruction (interrupt) before starting or ran to completion.

charlie invented (atomic) compare&swap instruction while doing fine-grain locking work with cp67 on 360/67. initial efforts to get it incorporated into 370 were rebuffed ... the favorite son operating system people claiming test&set was more than adequate for SMP operation. owners of 370 architecture said to get compare&swap added to 370 required use that wasn't specifically multiprocessor. thus was born the compare&swap examples for application atomic multi-threaded operation (independent of whether multiprocessor or single processor).

370 also introduced MVCL/CLCL "long" instructions which executed incrementally (updating register parameters and not pretesting both starting and ending arguments) and were interruptable. I got involved in problem with a couple 370 models that initially "incorrectly" implented long instructions because they were doing 360 rules and pretesting both starting and ending locations of arguments (situation where code was using MVCL to both clear storage to zero and test for real storage size by using maximum length and expecting interrupt with residual length & address when reached end of memory; hardware bug and pretesting was implying zero memory size).

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

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

At least two decades back, some gurus predicted

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 22 Jul, 2011
Subject: At least two decades back, some gurus predicted
Blog: Mainframe Experts

re:
http://lnkd.in/mk79ZS

another example of where (other) technology is going ... and mainframe is tending to follow (aka the innovation is occurring elsewhere and mainframe starts to look more like more modern technology ... aka the previous example of all archaic, obsolete CKD DASD is now simulated on real FBA)

Made in IBM Labs: Researchers Demonstrate Breakthrough Storage Performance for Big Data Applications; IBM GPFS Storage Technology Scans 10 Billion Files in 43 Minutes
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35111.wss

The item references:

Storage Systems
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/storagesystems/

I had done CMSBACK in the late 70s, which later morphs into WDSF, then into ADSM and finally into TSM. misc. old email mentioning CMSBACK
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#cmsback

past posts in thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#15 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#16 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#17 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#19 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#33 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#35 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#37 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#39 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#42 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#45 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#46 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#54 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#8 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#27 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#9 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#43 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#52 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened

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

Innovation and iconoclasm

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 23 Jul, 2011
Subject: Innovation and iconoclasm
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/DdgdXS
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#79 Innovation and iconoclasm

somewhat unrelated "misuse of power to preserve status quo" (from today) ... not simply limited to intimidating whistle-blowers

A pound of flesh: how Cisco's "unmitigated gall" derailed one man's life
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/a-pound-of-flesh-how-ciscos-unmitigated-gall-derailed-one-mans-life/

and (I've been looking for some place to reference it):

Attritionist Letter #2 -- our military seeks to retreat from the future into the past
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2011/05/11/27461/
The Attritionist Letters (#2) (gone 404) http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/attritionist-letters-2 lives free at wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20110817133447/http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/attritionist-letters-archives|

late 60s I got involved in virtual machines at the univ. and then joined the small skunkworks group responsible for virtual machines. this was becoming increasingly popular with customers but mainstream part of the corporation felt threatened and wanted it killed off. As part of increasing popularity with customers there was plan to grow from a dozen people to a couple hundred over five year period ... along with delivery of items (item level detail were at the 3-30 person month effort and packaged for shipments to customers occurring every six months). There was complex PERT chart that showed items being finished as increasing staff ramp-up along with which items were dependent on other items (and six month customer deliverables). Some number of people in hdqtrs (intent of killing off the effort) had strategy of thousand cuts ... there would be weekly phone calls where they would pose hypothetical changes to the five year plan and wanted to know the effect ... something that would take much of the group resources to work out (rather than actual work) for the next week's conference call. I spent a week memorizing the whole thing and from then on ... could answer their hypothetical questions in real time (they fairly quickly grew tired of that ploy). recent article on "cambridge skunkworks"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/14/brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_2/page2.html

One of my hobbies was producing enhanced production computer systems for internal datacenters ... and got asked to periodically visit operations in other countries ... some of this involved some number of operations going into europe in the early 70s. The operations in Europe in the early 70s still reflected the conflict from the 40s ... with the Americans, Germans, French, British, etc. I was somewhat an anomaly since I would just drop in and work with local technical folks and existed outside the normal corporate structure. Possibly as a result, they would all brief me about the (corporate) European politics (apparently lobbying me to take sides, even difference between north & south Germany). I was similarly lobbied in Japan dealing with American corporate infrastructure.

Some amount of the computer things I did ... other people had a difficult time understanding ... and when they asked to me explain, they would blame me because they couldn't understand. Senior executives was seldom aware of my running around the corporation doing stuff ... but one of the responses when it impinged on their consciousness for one reason or another ... a common reaction was asking what if I got hit by a bus ... and how would they continue to operate.

One of the things that Boyd would mention in briefings was Guderian's verbal orders only for the blitzkrieg ... wanting the officers on the spot to make their best (tactical) decision possible w/o having to worry about CYA, monday afternoon quarterbacks and after action reviews.

aka bureaucracy & references to preserving status quo. Recently finished "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" ... quote "chiefs, who were motivated to increase their own prestige, even in cases where that might conflict with the good of the current society as a whole and of the next generation" ... which sometimes can be applied to whole bureaucratic infrastructure ... not just the chiefs. Boyd would also characterize these rigid bureaucracies as pushing decisions to as high a level as possible (he would make comments about American corporate culture having fallen into this).

From the S&L crisis ... there was an executive direction to cut the S&L reserves in half (as well as eliminating a lot of regulations). The responsible regulator refused ... who was then asked to resign so there could be a new appointee that would comply with executive direction.

The elimination of regulation allowed new owners to come in and make self-serving loans (conflict of interest) with no oversight. There was also observation that the previous heavy regulation allowed for no innovation, as a result primary S&L executive selection criteria had became "looking good" and "following the rules". There were lots of unflattering comments about such executives being totally at a loss in dealing the new environment (unqualified to hold any other position and some analogies with British military leadership in WW1) as well as sitting ducks for the investment bankers that swooped in (with suggestions about what to do with the freed up reserves).

when i was undergraduate, i did a lot of enhancements to cp/cms and ibm would even suggest some changes that i could make ... in retrospect, some of the suggestion may have originated from this customer set .... from long ago and far away
https://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 23 Jul, 2011
Subject: Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/NFGXAn

OODA-loop can be considered outgrowth of Boyd's experience in air-to-air combat ... high-tempo, continuous operation. Boyd also stressed looking at all possible facets; aka multiple perspectives resulting in strategic insight; might conjecture that fast moving aerial view contributed to new insight into things occurring on the ground. OODA-loop iterative, strictly sequential process has been leveraged as extension of business process activity/methodology taught in business schools .. but doesn't capture the full impact of what Boyd would communicate during his briefings ... aka rather than observation purely iterative refinement ... but also encompassing all possible viewpoints ... resulting in large number of orientations ... extending to strategic, rather than simply tactical.

past posts&URL mentioning boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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

program coding pads

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:03:42 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Most manufacturers' disk drives were at least physically compatible with one of the IBM models. I was going to quote some specs, but I'll just refer to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_magnetic_disk_drives).

Some Burroughs models used a big vertical Bryant(?) head-per-track disk, which may also have been the "RAD" on the SDS systems. This is about the only disk not used by IBM.

in the 60s, for 360 ibm had "fixed-head" drums, 2303 & 2301. 2303 transferred data from one head at a time. 2301 was nearly the same as 2303, but transferred data on four heads in parallel (four times the data transfer rate of 2303). they both had approx. 4mbyte total capacity.

ibm then did fixed-head 2305 disk ... replacing 2303/2301 ... 2305-2 had nearly three times the capacity of 2301, 1.5mbyte/sec transfer rate. 2305-1 had half the capacity (of 2305-2) and twice the transfer rate (3mbyte/sec) and half the rotational latency. It didn't actually spin twice as fast ... but half the heads were on the same track, off-set 180degrees with transfers in parallel (i.e. only had to do half rotation before start of track was under a head ... so avg. rotational delay was quarter-track). Standard channel peaked at 1.5mbyte/sec, so to get 3mbyte/sec had to have custom 2bytes in parallel and limited channel length (and only on higher speed processors).

later 3380 disks had 3mbyte/sec transfer but had "data-streaming" channel interface that reduced the requirement on hand-shake for every byte transferred ... this reduced (data-streaming) requirement also allowed increasing max. (bus&tag) channel distances to 400feet. some datacenters were running into physical configuration problems, place the processor in middle of room and then getting all disks placed within a 200ft radius (400ft diameter); "data-streaming" allowed that to be extended to 400ft radius (800ft diameter).

picture of 2305 fixed head disk (announced 28jan70, withdrawn 30jan80):
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2305.html

required 2880 block mux channel, initially announced 10feb1970 for (360) 85 and 195.

ibm also had channel attached 3838 array processor that ran at 3mbyte/sesc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#34 GA24-3639

Mentions 3838 announced in 1976 (also mentions that that first space shuttle rolled out that year)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1976.html

above also mentions Santa Teresa Lab (more recently renamed Silicon Valley lab). the lab was originally going to be called the Coyote lab (for closest post office). I was in WashDC with offspring during (76) spring break ... the week before Coyote lab (and smithsonian air & space) was to open ... and the "Coyote" (working ladies) union (from SanFrancisco) were demonstrating on the steps of the capital (prompting the quick change in name).

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

program coding pads

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:05:51 -0400

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Our 5-CPU site had to use Ampex memory. Our memories could be 2-way interleaved or 4-way interleaved. this was done as early as the KIs and was used a solution for increasing performance when we were still doing master/slave.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#77 program coding pads

the 750 ns memory was interleaved and used on 360/65, 360/67, and 360/76

360/67 single processor (360/65 & 360/75) was single ported memory ... so heavy i/o could have degradation of processor thruput.

360/67 multiprocessor ... implemented "channel controller" ... with all channels addressed by all processors ... but also had multi-ported memory. The multi-ported memory increased basic memory cycle time ... but in heavy i/o environment, could have higher processor thruput (a 360/67 multiprocessor configuration with channel controller, multi-ported memory, but only single processor installed ... could have higher processor thruput in heavy i/o environment compared to a normal single processor 360/67 operation and especially 360/65 multiprocessor operation) .

360/67 functional characeristics
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/functional_characteristics/GA27-2719-2_360-67_funcChar.pdf

discusses multiprocessor 2167 "configuration unit" and processor "control registers" reflected (/"sensed") the 2167 switch settings. There was at least one three-way multiprocessor built where the processor was able to change 2167 configuration settings by loading values into control registers.

misc. past posts mentioning multiprocessor operation (and/or compare&swap instsruction)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

charlie had invented compare&swap instruction while working on fine-grain cp67 multiprocessor locking (on 360/67) ... the instruction name compare&swap was chosen because CAS are charlie's initials.

I did design/work on 5-way 370 in 1975 ... but was canceled before it shipped ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bounce

and then involved in skunkworks 16-way 370 in 76/77 ... also canceled. there was lots of politics to keep the 16-way very low profile ... lots of people when they initially saw it were very favorable ... however, eventually somebody got around to telling the head of POK (high-end mainframe) that it would be decades before the POK favorite son operating system (MVS) could have 16-way support. then some number of people were invited to never visit POK again (the skunkworks had been co-opting spare time of some of the 3033 processor engineers ... and they were told to get back to totally focusing on 3033).

In parallel with this ... I was doing bunch of vm370 enhancements and supporting them for internal datacenters (csc/vm) ... 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

I was also involved in doing ECPS for 138/148
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#28 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

and then releasing some number of enhancements to customers ... including my resource manager
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
and page algorithm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

some amount of the above I had done originally as undergraduate on cp67 ... which had been dropped in the morph of cp67 to vm370.

note the 23jun69 unbundling announcement had started charging for application software (but they had made the case with the gov. that kernel software should still be free) ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

then in the early 70s, there was the future system project to complete replace 360/370 (during that period, I continued working on 360/370 stuff and world periodically ridicule the FS activity). The distraction of the FS activity (and killing off 360/370 efforts viewed as possibly competitive with FS) is credited with allowing clone processors to gain market foothold
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

The failure of FS and mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product pipelines, contributed to decision for releasing stuff that I had been doing all during the FS period. However, the clone processors also prompted decision to start charging for kernel software ... and my resource manager was selected as initial guinea pig ... and I had to spend some amount of time with business & legal people about kernel pricing policies. One of the issues was that (during the transition) kernel software directly related to hardware support was free ... and "free" kernel software couldn't have prerequisite on charged for software.

After the release of my resource manager ... it was finally decided to release multiprocessor support in vm370 ... which created a horrible problem. I didn't have any actual multiprocessor support in the resource manager ... but did include a bunch of extra kernel restructuring code (some amount restoring things to cp67 implementation) ... which multiprocessor support was dependent on. Supporting multiprocessor was "hardware support" and so had to be free ... but it was dependent on a whole bunch of stuff in the resource manager (which was charged for), creating a horrible dilemma. Eventually the decision was made to move approx. 90% of the code in my resource manager into the "free" base (w/o actually changing the price charged for the new reduced size resource manager).

Eventually in the early 80s ... there was transition to charging for all kernel software. VM370 Release 6 was the last "free" release (with BSEPP and SEPP charged for add-ons). The next release was called VM/SP and was all charged for.

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

Innovation and iconoclasm

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 23 Jul, 2011
Subject: Innovation and iconoclasm
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/DdgdXS
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#79 Innovation and iconoclasm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#7 Innovation and iconoclasm

Bureaucracy can result in lack of accountability ... which goes along with lack of transparency and visibility (bureaucrats then are free to do as little as possible and/or as much as possible in their own personal interest). This repeatedly shows up in gov. spending ... somewhat highlighted by what happen to the extra $Trillion at DOD during the past decade
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?documentid=4623

note cdi.org has moved to
http://www.pogo.org/straus/
... missing $1T is now
http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/defense-budget/2010/what-did-the-rumsfeld-gates-pentagon-do-with-1-trillion.html

In the Madoff hearings, the person that had tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get the SEC to do something about Madoff, was asked if there was new regulation needed. He replied that while new regulation may be needed (as part of accountability), much more important was significantly improved transparency and visibility.

In the late 90s, I was asked by NSCC to look at significant improving the integrity of trading transactions on exchanges ... this was before NSCC merged with DTC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_Corporation

After some amount of work ... I was told they couldn't use it after-all ... that a side-effect of integrity work would have significantly increased transparency and visibility ... which was/is antithetical to wallstreet culture. The transparency & visibility subject shows up on the above wiki page with regard to (illegal) naked short selling. An old reference to illegal naked short selling being pervasive and wide-spread
http://nypost.com/2007/03/20/cramer-reveals-a-bit-too-much/

About the same time, I was tangentially involved in the Cal. state data breach notification legislation having been brought in to help wordsmith the cal. state electronic signature legislation. misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#signature

Several of the groups were heavily involved in privacy issues and had done extensive public surveys. The number #1 issue was "identity theft", primarily the form of "account fraud" primarily resulting from data breaches. At the time, there was little or nothing being done about the breaches (criminals using harvested account numbers to perform fraudulent transactions against the public, the institutions having the breaches, weren't the subject of the fraud). It was hoped that the resulting publicity would result in corrective action and countermeasures. However, in the decade+ since, there been a whole series of federal bills introduced, about evenly divided between those similar to the original cal. bill and those that essentially eliminate notification requirement.

The most recent federal bill falls into the later category since the aggregate amount of personal information needed to require notification, far exceeds just account number (which prompted the cal. legislation, aka majority of past notifications)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218554/House_panel_approves_data_breach_notification_bill

It also shows up in what the Federal Reserve has been doing to cover up what went on during the past decade:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/07/journal-legal-decay-in-a-soviet-style-collapse.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1201/Federal-Reserve-s-astounding-report-We-loaned-banks-trillions
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/21/audit-fed-gave-16-trillion-in-emergency-loans/

free press has been repeatedly cited as providing transparency and visibility into gov. operations and very important part of providing some modicum of accountability

in the late 70s and early 80s, I was blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network (larger than the internet from just about the beginning until possibly late '85 or early '86). The folklore was that when the executive committee was informed of the activity (and the internal network), 5of6 wanted to fire me. Part of the wide spread internal computer conferencing was discussing internal business practices compared to other organizations ... which was an anathema and frequently referred to as not being a "team player" (and not the concern of anybody other than top executives).

misc. past posts mentioning naked short selling article
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#4 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#31 SEC bans illegal activity then permits it
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#1 illegal naked short selling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#83 Chip-and-pin card reader supply-chain subversion 'has netted millions from British shoppers'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#8 Global Melt Down
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#41 Profiling of fraudsters
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#43 WikiLeaks' Wall Street Bombshell
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#26 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#39 Back to architecture: Analyzing NYSE data
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#35 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear

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

program coding pads

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:57:42 -0400

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
What a mess! The way we "charged" was to ship CPNSER.MAC and CPNSER.REL on a magtape to those who bought the multi-cpu license. One just copied the .REL file into TOPS10.REL and rebuilt the monitor. IBM always did have a horrid method of booting ;-).

Were you able to REMOVE CPNn in the multiprocessor systems?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#77 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#0 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#9 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#10 program coding pads

multiprocessor support was in common assembler source with conditional assembly ... system distribution including both multiprocessor and non-multiprocessor version of the pre-assembled source as well as original source. kernel could be built with pre-assembled source specifying build option for multiprocessor or non-multiprocessor ... or could rebuild kernel from source with multiprocessor or non-multiprocessor.

this was all outgrowth of multi-level source update process originally developed for cp67 as part of the "virtual 370" effort.

the original cp67 process had started out with source on os/360, assembled and generated "text" deck (installed at univ jan1968). The "text" decks were arrainged in card tray and then "IPL'ed" from 2540 card read. this created a memory image of the kernel which was then written to disk (the disk image was IPL'ed/booted to run the system).

fairly early in 68, the cms filesystem was deemed sufficient that source process was moved to cms. also, rather than edit/change the original assemble source file, CMS "update" files were created ... which modified the original source, creating a temporary file that was then assembled ... producing "txt" deck. This was automated with CMS EXEC ... check for the existance of update file, if found apply it to create temporary file, assemble, erase temporary file, if not found assemble the original file.

another CMS exec was created to "punch" all the assembled "TXT" decks to the virtual 2540 punch ... which was then transferred to virtual 2540 reader and IPL/booted .... creating the kernel image in virtual address space ... which was written to (virtual) disk. If the virtual disk was mapped to the real system disk, then the next system boot would load the newly built kernel.

then there was a system enhancement that on system failure ... a image of real memory was written to a newly created disk file and the IPL/boot process was simulated ... to reload a unmodified kernel image and automatically restart the system. this is the story of the 27 (automatic) reboots in single day:
https://www.multicians.org/thvv/360-67.html

then for the virtual 370 effort ... the multilevel source update process was built which allowed for: some number of enhancements applied to the base source, there was the "L" system booted on the real 360/67. The additional source updates that were applied on top of the "L" updates that created the "H" system that was booted in a 360/67 virtual machine ... and simulated 370 virtual machines. The additional source updates that were applied on top of the "L"&"H" updates that created the "I" system that was booted in a 370 virtual machine.

Part of the reason for running the "L" system on the real machine and not the "H" system ... was the science center cp67 operation was also providing general timesharing services ... including for students and staff at various univ in the boston/cambridge area. Virtual memory for 370 had not been announced and there were high security requirements to keep knowledge of the existance from leaking outside the company. The extra level of virtualization isolated the virtual 370 work from the general users. The H/L/I operation was in regular use a year before the first 370 virtual memory engineering machine was operational.

As an aside, there was also the cp67 "G" updates done by group in yorktown which added simulated 4-way 370 multiprocessor ... with a special simulated "fifth" processor that provided debugging facilities (for code running in the simulated 4-way 370 multiprocessor). This was abandoned when the group was redirected to work on future system effort ... misc. past posts mentioning (failed) FS activity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

The multi-level source update was then picked up by the vm370 effort and was used later for things like having concurrent multiprocessor and non-multiprocessor versions of base "free", charged-for BSEPP, and charged-for SEPP.

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

program coding pads

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: program coding pads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:48:23 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Pugh has a chapter on the genesis of OS/360 and touches on this. Because of the spread between the smallest and largest system the intention always was to provide nested subsets, but the coordination between the groups doing the subsets was problematic, especially given the tight timeframe.

Someone (forget the name) came up with the idea of using the assembler to do the subsetting and let the user "assemble" the pieces he needed into a tailored OS for his system, PCP (batch, single job), MFT (mostly batch, memory allocated statically), and MVT (task-oriented, dynamic memory allocation) plus a couple of different schedulers were all built from the same code base.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#77 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#0 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#9 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#10 program coding pads
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#12 program coding pads

os/360 started out with "starter system" ... disk backup image distributed on tape; customer restored the tapes and booted the starter system.

customer had prepared a "stage1" sysgen deck ... maybe 40-100 cards that specified specific features. it was basically all (complex) macros with parameters (pcp, later added mft, and later still mvt, storage size ... which also controlled the selection of a number system components, real i/o configuration, etc). the stage1 sysgen was assembled and would "punch" a stage2 sysgen deck ... possibly 1500 cards ... basically a single job stream with a large number JOB/EXEC steps.

nearly all of the stage2 job steps involved move/copy of executables from the starter system libraries to the target new system disks (little source actually part of the starter system sysgen process). os/360 systems were real storage ... so executables had to fit in available real storage. An executable could be configured with a large number of sequentially loaded overlays ... to fit in smaller storage size ... and other versions of the application that would run with fewer or no overlays in larger real storage. Part of the storage size specification would control which flavor of executables were copied.

os/360 release 6 was till PCP, MFT shows up possibly release 9.5 and MVT was added in release 12.

univ. had 709/1401 where student fortran jobs ran on 709 ibsys tape-to-tape in around second elapsed time. Moved to OS/360 MFT (w/o HASP and WATFOR), same jobs ran more than minute on 360/67 (running as 360/65) using standard os/360 fortran G compile, linkedit and "GO". HASP got it down to somewhat over 30 seconds (effectively disk-to-disk with simulated unit record reader/printer, real reader & printing occurring asynchronously).

The univ. datacenter was normally shutdown over the weekend and I could have it all to myself from 8am sat to 8am monday. However, the IBM system engineer would periodically pre-empt me with doing new "starter system" sysgens. A single stage1/stage2 could take 8hrs elapsed time and it wasn't unusual to have glitches which would require repeating the operation a couple of times.

This somewhat annoyed me so I started examining the stage1/stage2 process and figuring how to do it much more efficiently ... including working out how to do it in production job stream (and being able to use HASP to further reduce elapsed time). I also worked out that standard OS/360 was extremely disk intensive (even in largest storage configuration) with lots of nearly random disk arm motion. I then worked out how to reorder all the statements in stage2 sysgen in order to carefully place files & library routines to achieve much improved disk arm motion. In MFT/HASP environment, got a approximately three times thruput improvement for typical student fortran jobs (compared to a vanilla built system).

This is part of old SHARE presentation from Aug68 ... which includes both work I had done on ("stand-alone") os/360 (and improvements in student fortran workload thruput) as well as bunch of source code enhancements I had done to cp67
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#20 CP/67 & OS MFT14

Internally, OS/360 had a convoluted component management ... source and executables.

HASP started out somewhat similar cp67 source distribution & maintenance process .... however, it was all done in OS/360 ... and didn't have the luxury of the CP67/CMS update process. Eventually HASP transition to internally doing their source management on CP67/CMS and it continued after HASP morphed into JES2. One of the eventually problems for JES2 was morphing all the CMS source files into form acceptable by the internal OS/360 management process (the CMS process was enormously more flexible). misc. past posts mentioning HASP, JES2, and/or JES2 networking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#hasp

there is folklore about certain 3letter gov. agency in the early 80s, requesting the source that exactly corresponded with any specific running MVS system (os/360 descendent & POK favorite son operating systeme) ... and after spending $5M studying the issue, it was decided that it wasn't practical.

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

Innovation and iconoclasm

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 23 Jul, 2011
Subject: Innovation and iconoclasm
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/DdgdXS
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#79 Innovation and iconoclasm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#7 Innovation and iconoclasm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#11 Innovation and iconoclasm

From "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" basically claims that bureaucracy was created to preserve societies/institutions more than what could be done by single person and/or single lifetime. A problem is when bureaucracy becomes cancerous and individuals start using it for their own personal self-interest ... rather than for common good. Another analogy is that normally it is in the best interest of parasites to preserve the host, but sometimes parasites exhibit pathological behavior and start acting in a way that kills the host.

following from "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood":
A problem arose when Stephen Hawking, adding quantum effects to the usual calculations of general relativity, argued in 1974 that black holes should, after all, radiate particles -- a consequence of quantum fluctuations near the event horizon. Black holes slowly evaporate,

... snip ...

In the early 70s, IBM started the massive Future System project (which was going to replace everything). I would periodically ridicule them, including drawing comparisons with a cult film that had been playing nonstop down at (Cambridge) central square. I would also draw analogy to the activity with black holes ... that the associated bureaucracy had reached critical mass, collapsing into a blackhole, from which nothing could ever escape. For awhile I was at a loss to resolve the blackhole analogy until the above article was published (coming near the demise of Future System effort). A strategy than becomes staying outside the (bureaucracy) blackhole gravitational field and waiting for it to evaporate. misc. past posts mentioning Future System
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

An analogous scenario was little over decade ago I was asked to look at a periodic financial publication that gave the avg. of 20 largest regional institutions compared to the 10 largest (too-big-to-fail) national institutions for thousands of measures. One of the results was that the avg of 20 regional institutions showed better profit margin than avg. for the national institutions ... an implication would be that the bureaucracy in the national institutions had exceeded optimal efficiency (leaving the primary purpose for their size being top executives compensation being proportional to institution size ... not operating efficiency).

As to specifically Boyd and the USMC ... late 80s "maneuver warfare" (claims that it was heavily influenced by aerial dogfight experience) provided for differentiation between the corp and the army (countermeasure to dissolving the corp and absorbing into the army). Somewhat at the opposite end was corp being forced to buy Abrams ... in order to make the Army quantity discount threshold. The weight of Abrams are twice the load limit of areas making up nearly all corp mission profiles (resulting in Abrams activity effectively being part of army activity).

A couple days into "Desert Storm", US News&Reports had article on Boyd and "The Fight to change how America Fights" referencing latest crop of majors&cols as his Jedi knights ... having been exposed to his briefings. Also provided contrast to army strategy/tactic of tank slugfest until last tank standing.

The first time I sponsored Boyd's briefing in IBM ... I tried to do it through employee education department. Initially employee education department agreed to sponsor his briefings (first time it was only Patterns Of Conflict). As I provided the education department with additional details of the briefing, they eventually decided that they would not sponsor his briefings and advised that only senior people from competitive analysis departments attend (i.e. how to prevail in competitive environment). The explanation was that the corporation spends significant amount of money on training managers to handle employees and they came to view exposing general employees to his briefing as incompatible with those objectives.

Subsequent briefings would cram both Patterns Of Conflict and the evolving new Organic Design For Command And Control into a single day.

POC & ODFC&C made for a long day ... people would be getting up and leaving before ODFC&C was finished.

In the IBM case, there are various descriptions that the (old) culture under Watsons (harsh but encouraged dissent and open controversy) died with the failure of the Future System effort and was replaced with sycophancy and make no waves under Opel and Akers. The failing FS effort took years to kill off because top management was tightly tied into the effort and the corporation lived under the dark shadow of the failure for decades.

There was a recent comment in one of the IBM employee discussions about one differentiation in renaming the personnel department "human resources" and employees are treated as just another corporate resource.

I mentioned upthread that I was blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal corporate network in the late 70s & early 80s (larger than internet from just about beginning until mid-80s) ... there were thousands directly involved and something like 20-30 thousand at least reading the material. One of the observations was that a manager that believes they know what they are doing, can be far worse than a manager that knows they don't know what they are doing.

misc. past posts mentioning the US News&Reports article:
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/2005j.html#15 The 8008
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#9 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#37 Young Developers Get Old Mainframers' Jobs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#38 The 50th Anniversary of the Legendary IBM 1401

misc. posts &/URLs referencing Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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

New protocol to replace SMTP?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: New protocol to replace SMTP?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:57:00 -0400

Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> writes:
Could you elaborate on this? AFAICT, SMTP has hardly changed at all from its first specification in RFC 821. What 'updates' are you talking about [and in particular, how they affect security]?

Postel let me do 6.10 stuff for STD1 (no longer maintained) ... doing a lot of clean up of the standards ... eliminating lots of stuff where subsequent RFC obsoleted previous RFC ... but the standards weren't updated to show an obsoleted RFC had been replaced by subsequent RFC.

However, there were some real glitches in the standards process where previous standard RFCs (like 821 & 822) had been obsoleted by subsequent RFC ... but the new RFCs hadn't actually made it through the standards process.

821/822 were obsoleted (but not actually replaced) by 2821/2822. 2821/2822 have been subsequently obsoleted by 5321/5322.

furthermore 2821/2822 have been updated by 5335 & 5336 (as opposed to updating 5321/5322; 5335&5336 were published slightly before 5321/5322).

rfc nos. are somewhat assigned sequentially as they are published, however 2821/2822 was reserved well before their publication (being published nearly a year after the other RFCs in close numerical sequence). they weren't as well prepared for the replacements ... not being able to work in 4821/4822 or 5821/5822.

for other "glitches" ... the "See Also" relationship (between RFCs) was originally introduced for RFCs that reference each other (aka peer relationship as opposed to hierarchical relationship of reference and referencedby). That purpose (for "See Also") has since been subsumed for things like RFCs that are also Best Current Practices ... however, in my index, I still use it for its original purpose.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

5321 section 7 discusses SMTP security ("inherently insecure")

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

DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:28:34 -0400

blp@cs.stanford.edu (Ben Pfaff) writes:
IBM started shipping the "enhanced" keyboard layout with F11 and F12 in 1986, so it's been 25 years.

The original IBM PC keyboard, in 1981, had F1 through F10, so it's been 30 years.

3277 keyboards came with PF keys ... early 3278 keyboards didn't have PF keys as standard. we complained a lot about 3278 being much worse than 3277 for interactive computing (not just PF keys, but number of human factors). eventual response from the 3278 product group was that 3278 wasn't targeted at interactive computing ... but data entry ... aka an online/connected keypunch.

from bitsavers ... doesn't show keyboard but gives code for f1-f12 transmitted
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3270/3791_to_3277_Display_Station_Interface_Product_Attachement_Manual_Mar75.pdf

page 25 shows 4 3277 keyboard layouts ... two with function keys and two "data entry" (w/o function keys)
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/3270/GA27-2749-5_3270descr_Nov75.pdf

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

DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:24:49 -0400

despen writes:
Before the PC was introduced the IBM 3270 terminal had F1 through F12. Technically, the architecture allows for F13 through F24 too.

How did IBM introduce the IBM PC with at least 2 missing function keys?

Somebody goofed.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#16 DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems

3277 had pf keys instead of numeric keypad to the right. 3278 would add pf keys in new row across the top. then you could get a 3278 with both row across the top as well as to the right (F13-F24). special software would then remap F13-F24 to F1-F12.

this shows original with 10 function keys on the left ... two columns of five each ... possibly cost reduction measure
http://www.vintagecomputermanuals.com/Articles/Hardware/History%20IBM%20Keyboard.htm

and here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

lot more here:
http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb03.htm

all kinds of motivations for converged keyboard ... including using PCs for 3270 terminal emulation.

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virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Congressional Bickering

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 28 Jul, 2011
Subject: Congressional Bickering
Blog: Facebook

one scenario is all the bickering is staged show by congress ... obfuscation and misdirection for the public and significantly increasing political contributions. there was artcile that claimed lobbying the last decade (tax cuts, deregulation, influence, one liners in medicare drug bill) had best ROI around (thousands for special interests for every lobbying dollar spent, trillions in aggregate) ... contributing to claims that congress is most corrupt institution on earth.

The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/the-chart-that-should-accompany-all-discussions-of-the-debt-ceiling/242484/

after the fiscal responsibility act expired late 2002 and congress started going wild cutting taxes AND significantly increasing spending and unfunded mandates ... the US comptroller general would make comments about nobody in congress was capable of middle school arithmetic (claimed the early 2003 medicare drug unfunded mandate alone would come to be $40T and totally swamp everything else, significantly aided by a one-line sentence slipped in at the last hour that precludes competitive bidding, 60mins had segment that one sentence inflated drug costs 300%)

extra $2T for DOD past decade,
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?documentid=4623

note cdi.org has moved to
http://www.pogo.org/straus/
... missing $1T is now
http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/defense-budget/2010/what-did-the-rumsfeld-gates-pentagon-do-with-1-trillion.html

$1T for the war and $1T for who? ... but that is only part of the enormous debt created

misc. mentioning the DOD $2T:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#83 End of an era
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#28 US military spending has increased 81% since 2001
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#30 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#32 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#67 U.S. can't account for $8.7 billion of Iraq's money: audit
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#70 Pentagon Struggles To Keep Ships Sailing, Planes Flying As Budget Cuts Loom
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#11 Innovation and iconoclasm

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

disclosing "business" information on the internet

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From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: disclosing "business" information on the internet
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 29 Jul 2011 07:14:11 -0700

rfochtman@YNC.NET (Rick Fochtman) writes:
My two cents' worth: that auditor needs to find a more challenging shop. He's "nit-picking" on trivia and showing just how paranoid he really is. Too much time on his hands.

one of the biggest challenges when we started doing the (internal) online telephone book were the plant site security officers. we wanted the softcopy of original source used for printed plantsite telephone books (which were unclassified or internal use only). almost uniformly plant site security officers (and random other individuals) would claim that making the same information available online (internal only systems) would be a security risk (and should require much higher security classification ... like "ibm confidential" or "confidential-restricted"). we eventually were able to convince security officer at one large corporate plantsite ... and then used that location as an argument with all the other plantsite security officers.

by '83 or so ... it was all over ... but it was really tough slogging with security officers (and random other security want-a-bees) for a time ... the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until possibly late '85 or early '86 (vast majority were vm370 systems ... even for operations that were primarily mvs development). misc. past posts mentining internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

old post with corporate locations that new/added nodes during 1983:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#8

one of the big divergence between internal network and internet in the mid-80s ... was the communication group forcing PCs and workstations to be limited to terminal emulation ... while the internet was starting to see big explosion in PCs and workstations as (peer) network nodes.

on the other hand ... this item from today

Experts complacent about network attacks: Study shows physical attacks to communications network infrastructure deemed low priority risk
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110728111452.htm

early 80s, security study prompting special corporate encrypting modems for home&traveling terminal program identified (physical compromise of) hotel pbx system as major vulnerability.

on the other hand ... one of the early installations of the modems was at home for senior executive ... who had EE background. he was testing the contacts with his tongue when the phone rang ... which resulted in directive that all future modems made by the corporation had to have the phone jack contacts recessed far enough that they couldn't be touched by the tongue of babies and senior executives (which frequently makes it difficult to remove phone connection).

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

disclosing "business" information on the internet

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: disclosing "business" information on the internet
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 29 Jul 2011 07:26:35 -0700

eamacneil@YAHOO.CA (Ted MacNEIL) writes:
Recently, I worked at a shop where our VP told us we must have all that info in our signature block -- quite the opposite!

a group of us were the first to have business cards made up with our internal newtwork email address (as well as arpanet email address). some people complained ... with an excuse that business cards were only for use with customers ... who wouldn't be able to contact us on the internal network.

now it turned out that for quite some time, it was common to have business cards with both external phone number and the internal corporate tieline number ... for use with both customers and internal corporate colleagues ... so the internal email address was just the equivalent of the internal corporate tieline number (aka whole thing prompted by individals that weren't comfortable with this new fangled email stuff).

old post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#59

with email regarding the email gateway between arpanet/internet and the internal network:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#email821022

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

disclosing "business" information on the internet

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: disclosing "business" information on the internet
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 29 Jul 2011 07:36:20 -0700

Steve_Conway@AO.USCOURTS.GOV (Steve Conway) writes:
From a security standpoint, the less you expose to the outside world, the better. Join a few security newsgroups / mailing lists, and see what (justified) paranoia REALLY looks like.

we were tangentially involved with the cal. state data breach legislation ... having been brought in to help wordsmith the cal. state electronic signature legislation. several of the parties were heavily involved in privacy issues and had done in-depth public surveys. the number one issue was "identity theft", primarily "account fraud" that were result of some sort of data breach. The issue was little or nothing was being done in this area (the institutions with the breaches frequently had little or nothing at risk, the fraudulent transactions were against their customer accounts). there was some hope that the resulting publicity from the notifications would prompt corrective actions as well as give the public some chance to take countermeasures.

in the decade plus since the cal. legislation there have been several federal bills introduced ... somewhat falling into two categories, those similar to the original cal. legislation and "federal pre-emption" that would eliminate most requirements for notification.

the most recent federal legislation falls into the later category ... notification only when the records contain long list of personal details (would eliminate nearly all breaches ... including the original reason that prompted cal. legislation ... simple account numbers that can result in fraudulent financial transactions).

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

MS-DOS is 30 years old today

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 30 Jul, 2011
Subject: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
Blog: Greater IBM

MS-DOS is 30 years old today
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/91202-ms-dos-is-30-years-old-today

from above:

30 years ago today, Microsoft bought the rights to the Quick and Dirty OS, re-branded it as MS-DOS, struck a deal with IBM, and made history.

... snip ...

there is folklore that Kildall used cp/67 at Monterey NPG school in 72 ... and accounts for the choice of "CP/M" for the name (as well as some other characteristics)

ibm cambridge science center did (virtual machine) cp/40 ... control program for 360/40 which had special hardware modifications that supported virtual memory.

when 360/67 became available (standard product ... basically 360/65 with virtual memory hardware as standard product), cp/40 morphed into cp/67 ... control program for 360/67.

Kildall used cp/67 at Monterey NPG school in 1972 ... as per (gone 404 but still at wayback machine)
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011100440/http://www.khet.net/gmc/docs/museum/en_cpmName.html

a little x-over
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/14/brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_2/page2.html

later cp/67 morphed into vm/370 ... when virtual memory became standard on 370s.

misc. past posts mention ibm cambridge science center at 545 tech. sq.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

for other trivia ... original relational/sql implementation was done little later in 70s up the road on vm370 in bldg. 28 (on san jose plant site).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

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

Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:38:56 -0400

"Jim White" <no.spam@thank.you.invalid> writes:
Is Cloud computing merely a ruse to keep funding the coffers of Microsoft et al, now that their effective rate of development has ceased but they need to keep the revenue coming in?

cloud computing combination of the online services mega datacenters ... looking for more ways to monetize their investment and various vendors involved in GRID computing (and lots of the technology that dominate the supercomputer top 500). the online services are selling cloud services out of their mega datacenters. the GRID vendors are selling their hardware/software as solutions for cloud computing.

Both the online services mega datacenters and GRID computing have been dominated by linux. other vendors have tried to move into the market segment since it appears to be having quite a bit of growth (new incremental revenue).

I've periodically pontificated that a 60s version of cloud computing was various online commerical (virtual machine based) timesharing service bureaus ... misc. past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#timeshare

one such operation, started providing their online computer conferencing as free service to (ibm user group) SHARE in Aug76 ... archived here
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

mega datacenter comment that there are possible some number of such datacenters, each individually having more MIPs that the aggregate of all currently installed (IBM) mainframes:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#9 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened

misc. other past posts mentioning the mega datacenters:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#72 Price of CPU seconds
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#68 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#79 Google Data Centers 'The Most Efficient In The World'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#56 IBM drops Power7 drain in 'Blue Waters'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#90 A Faster Way to the Cloud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#78 Entry point for a Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#27 A "portable" hard disk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#62 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#51 Mainframe Hacking -- Fact or Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#14 Facebook doubles the size of its first data center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#3 When will MVS be able to use cheap dasd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#46 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#16 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#17 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#19 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#8 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#75 Check out June 2011 | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites

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

rating agencies

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 31 July, 2011
Subject: rating agencies
blog: Google+

During the fall 2008 congressional hearings into the rating agencies some of the news commentators speculated that the rating agencies would be able to avoid federal prosecution with blackmail of gov. rating downgrade

mortgage backed securities had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate fraudulent mortgages. in the early part of the century we were asked to looked at ways of improving the integrity of the underlying documentation (for reducing fraud). One of the side-effects of triple-A ratings was that they were able to do no-documentation mortgages ... eliminating the documentation then eliminated the associated integrity work.

Being able to pay for triple-A ratings and immediately unload at premium price, loan originators no longer had to care about loan quality ... just how large, how many, how fast. Whole industry became drunk on the transaction commissions ... although the instruments posed enormous risk to the institutions and the economy. Reports that financial industry tripled in size (as percent of GDP) and wallstreet bonuses spiked over 400percent during the bubble (on estimated $27T in triple-A rated toxic CDOs transactions; and that bubble spike appeared not to significantly leak through in tax revenue) ... along with significant efforts after the bubble burst for them to not return to pre-bubble levels.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

Sarbanes-Oxley included provisions for rating agencies ... but SEC appeared to doing no more than they were doing about SOX audits. Apparently GAO also thought that SEC wasn't doing anything and started reports on public company financial filings ... showing uptic in fraudulent filings even after SOX ... snide reference: Do you think SOX audits 1) had no effect on fraudulent filings, 2) motivated more fraudulent filings, 3) if it wasn't for SOX audits, all financial filings would be fraudulent.

misc. past posts mentioning triple-A ratings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#1 independent appraisers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#46 independent appraisers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#57 independent appraisers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#71 Bush - place in history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#32 independent appraisers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#44 Fixing finance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#51 IBM CEO's remuneration last year ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008g.html#62 Credit crisis could cost nearly $1 trillion, IMF predicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#9 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#20 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#23 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#48 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#51 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#60 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#69 lack of information accuracy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#71 lack of information accuracy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#84 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#1 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#6 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#10 Why do Banks lend poorly in the sub-prime market? Because they are not in Banking!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#11 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#13 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#14 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#16 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#19 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#20 IBM's 2Q2008 Earnings
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#23 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008k.html#33 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#42 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#67 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#70 dollar coins
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#15 Fraud due to stupid failure to test for negative
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#26 Fraud due to stupid failure to test for negative
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#80 Fraud due to stupid failure to test for negative
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#91 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#92 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#95 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#96 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#99 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#3 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#12 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#14 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#19 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#21 Michigan industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#23 Michigan industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#24 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#25 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#33 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#37 Success has many fathers, but failure has the US taxpayer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#40 Success has many fathers, but failure has the US taxpayer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#42 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#44 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#49 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#52 Technology and the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#56 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#69 Another quiet week in finance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#72 Why was Sarbanes-Oxley not good enough to sent alarms to the regulators about the situation arising today?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#74 Why can't we analyze the risks involved in mortgage-backed securities?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#78 Isn't it the Federal Reserve role to oversee the banking system??
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#82 Fraud in financial institution
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#88 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#94 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#15 Financial Crisis - the result of uncontrolled Innovation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#18 Once the dust settles, do you think Milton Friedman's economic theories will be laid to rest
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#19 What's your view of current global financial / economical situation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#26 SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), is this really followed and worthful considering current Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#28 Does anyone get the idea that those responsible for containing this finanical crisis are doing too much?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#31 The human plague
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#34 The human plague
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#39 The human plague
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#43 The human plague
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#45 The human plague
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#51 Why are some banks failing, and others aren't?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#52 Why is sub-prime crisis of America called the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#62 Would anyone like to draw a diagram of effects or similar for the current "credit crisis"?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#68 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#71 Why is sub-prime crisis of America called the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#74 Would anyone like to draw a diagram of effects or similar for the current "credit crisis"?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#75 In light of the recent financial crisis, did Sarbanes-Oxley fail to work?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#78 Who murdered the financial system?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#80 Can we blame one person for the financial meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#82 Greenspan testimony and securization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#3 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#8 Global Melt Down
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#9 Do you believe a global financial regulation is possible?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#47 In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#60 Did sub-prime cause the financial mess we are in?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#70 Is there any technology that we are severely lacking in the Financial industry?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#11 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#12 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#19 Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#20 How is Subprime crisis impacting other Industries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#32 I was wondering what types of frauds the audience think will increase?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#49 Have not the following principles been practically disproven, once and for all, by the current global financial meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#50 Obama, ACORN, subprimes (Re: Spiders)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#51 Obama, ACORN, subprimes (Re: Spiders)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#54 Obama, ACORN, subprimes (Re: Spiders)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#58 Obama, ACORN, subprimes (Re: Spiders)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#68 Obama, ACORN, subprimes (Re: Spiders)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#69 if you are an powerful financial regulator , how would you have stopped the credit crunch?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#4 Basel Committee outlines plans to strengthen Basel II
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#10 Blinkylights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#35 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#58 Blinkenlights
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#64 Is This a Different Kind of Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008r.html#67 What is securitization and why are people wary of it ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#8 Top financial firms of US are eyeing on bailout. It implies to me that their "Risk Management Department's" assessment was way below expectations
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#9 Blind-sided, again. Why?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#20 Five great technological revolutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#23 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#24 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#30 How reliable are the credit rating companies? Who is over seeing them?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#35 Is American capitalism and greed to blame for our financial troubles in the US?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#55 Is this the story behind the crunchy credit stuff?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#59 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#60 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#14 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#15 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#21 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#31 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#42 Lets play Blame Game...?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#52 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#63 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#73 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#74 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#77 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#79 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#80 Are reckless risks a natural fallout of "excessive" executive compensation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#1 Are Both The U.S. & UK on the brink of debt disaster?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#8 Do emperors from the banks have new clothes?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#23 BarCampBank - informal finance rantathon in London
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#25 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#36 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#37 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#51 Will the Draft Bill floated in Congress yesterday to restrict trading of naked Credit Default Swaps help or aggravate?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#52 What has the Global Financial Crisis taught the Nations, it's Governments and Decision Makers, and how should they apply that knowledge to manage risks differently in the future?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#54 In your opinion, which facts caused the global crise situation?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#57 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#59 As bonuses...why breed greed, when others are in dire need?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#65 What can agencies such as the SEC do to insure us that something like Madoff's Ponzi scheme will never happen again?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#73 What can we learn from the meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#78 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#79 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#6 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#8 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#16 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#29 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#32 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#38 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#39 'WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLOBAL MELTDOWN'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#51 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#53 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#55 Who will give Citigroup the KNOCKOUT blow?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#61 Accounting for the "greed factor"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#67 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#0 PNC Financial to pay CEO $3 million stock bonus
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#7 Are Ctibank's services and products so vital to global economy than no other banks can substitute it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#16 The Formula That Killed Wall Street
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#18 HSBC is expected to announce a profit, which is good, what did they do differently?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#22 Is it time to put banking executives on trial?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#28 I need insight on the Stock Market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#37 NEW SEC (Enforcement) MANUAL, A welcome addition
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#42 Bernard Madoff Is Jailed After Pleading Guilty -- are there more "Madoff's" out there?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#46 Bernanke Says Regulators Must Protect Against Systemic Risks
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#64 Should AIG executives be allowed to keep the bonuses they were contractually obligated to be paid?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#74 Why is everyone talking about AIG bonuses of millions and keeping their mouth shut on billions sent to foreign banks?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#77 Who first mentioned Credit Crunch?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#0 What is swap in the financial market?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#30 Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#36 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#70 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#31 What is the real basis for business mess we are facing today?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#35 US banking Changes- TARP Proposl
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#38 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#41 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#43 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#49 Is the current downturn cyclic or systemic?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#56 What's your personal confidence level concerning financial market recovery?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#65 Just posted third article about toxic assets in a series on the current financial crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#1 Future of Financial Mathematics?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#27 Flawed Credit Ratings Reap Profits as Regulators Fail Investors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#31 OODA-loop obfuscation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#34 Board Visibility Into The Business
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#37 Future of Financial Mathematics?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#52 Future of Financial Mathematics?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#53 We Can't Subsidize the Banks Forever
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#61 Prosecute Bank Execs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#3 Consumer Credit Crunch and Banking Writeoffs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#10 China's yuan 'set to usurp US dollar' as world's reserve currency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#15 China's yuan 'set to usurp US dollar' as world's reserve currency
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#25 The Paradox of Economic Recovery
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#29 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#36 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#40 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#49 IBM to Build Europe, Asia 'Smart Infrastructure'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#1 IBM to Build Europe, Asia 'Smart Infrastructure'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#40 64 Cores -- IBM is showing a prototype already
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#49 What's your personal confidence level concerning financial market recovery?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#57 In the USA "financial regulator seeks power to curb excess speculation."
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#60 In the USA "financial regulator seeks power to curb excess speculation."
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#12 IBM identity manager goes big on role control
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#35 what is mortgage-backed securities?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#38 what is mortgage-backed securities?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#69 64 Cores -- IBM is showing a prototype already
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#13 UK issues Turning apology (and about time, too)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#17 UK issues Turning apology (and about time, too)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#20 UK issues Turning apology (and about time, too)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#47 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#49 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#56 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#58 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#62 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#68 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#21 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#23 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#23 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#25 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#37 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#61 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#64 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#48 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#4 alphas was: search engine history, was Happy DEC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#8 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#56 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#52 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#54 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#76 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#81 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#15 The Revolving Door and S.E.C. Enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#22 In the News: SEC storms the 'Castle'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#31 In the News: SEC storms the 'Castle'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#58 S.E.C. Moves to Tighten Rules on Bonds Backed by Consumer Loans
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#67 The Python and the Mongoose: it helps if you know the rules of engagement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#4 Goldman Sachs -- Post SEC complaint. What's next?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#7 The Enablers for this "Real Estate Crisis"- Willful Blindness, Greed or more?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#34 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#47 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#48 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#49 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#79 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#12 Warren Buffett faces hearing over ratings agencies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#6 taking down the machine - z9 series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#29 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#38 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#40 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#48 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#53 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#56 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#69 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#6 Five Theses on Security Protocols
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#8 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#9 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#72 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#29 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#33 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#35 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#36 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#40 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#50 TARP Bailout to Cost Less Than Once Anticipated
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#24 What Is MERS and What Role Does It Have in the Foreclosure Mess?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#37 WHAT, WHY AND HOW - FRAUD, IMPACT OF AUDIT
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#6 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#7 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#17 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#69 Moody's hints at move that could be catastrophic for US debt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#40 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#49 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#53 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#75 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#80 Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America's Lunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#84 The Imaginot Line
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#94 The Curly Factor -- Prologue
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#22 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#27 The Zippo Lighter theory of the financial crisis (or, who do we want to blame?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#42 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#43 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#45 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#46 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#23 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#25 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#28 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#30 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#7 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#36 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#41 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#48 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#60 In your opinon, what is the highest risk of financial fraud for a corporation ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#74 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#43 Massive Fraud, Common Crime, No Prosecutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#30 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#47 Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#55 Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#71 Pressing Obama, House Bars Rise for Debt Ceiling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#5 Home prices may drop another 25%, Shiller predicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#7 Home prices may drop another 25%, Shiller predicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#22 Is BitCoin a triple entry system?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#24 US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#25 US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#29 Obama: "We don't have enough engineers"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#2 'Megalomania, Insanity' Fueled Bubble: Munger
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#13 'Megalomania, Insanity' Fueled Bubble: Munger
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#16 'Megalomania, Insanity' Fueled Bubble: Munger
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#19 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!

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

Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:16:27 -0400

greymaus <greymausg@mail.com> writes:
few points I would see in the matter. "Cloud computing", as in the mainframe world. as in Lynns post.

As in Stephenson's `Cryptonomicon', somewhere that your data can reside outside any government, or revenue, oversight.

Iceland had such an idea some years ago, massive hydroelectric generation, with search for a use, dunno what happened after.

9/11 (11/9), the story of data from one location being backed up in another location, which was also taken out.

Companies looking to cut back on business IT expenses, outsource the whole lot to outside enteties (which, as Lynn points out) may use other OSs (OSsen?)).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#23 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

then there is sealand ... there were pictures posted today on google+

reference
http://www.sealandgov.org/
http://www.sealandgov.org/history.html and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
and
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html

series here on the fire:
http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000808.html
http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000762.html
http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000768.html

when we were doing ha/cmp ... in the early 90s ... we had some dealings with entities in the twin towers ... there was a backup service on lower floor that was taken out by the incident in the garage. somewhat later a major east coast ATM transaction center (across the river) had its roof collapse from snow ... and their backup was the still defunct center.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

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

Linguistic loggerheads

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Linguistic loggerheads
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:41:17 -0400

Charles Richmond <frizzle@tx.rr.com> writes:
In California, the handicapped parking spaces are labeled "Physically Limited". Now who among us is *not* physically limited??? Superman comes to mind, but I can't think of anyone else.

most jurisdictions i've observed seem to have a thriving business in handicapped placards for the physical able.

i've periodically suggested a large blue super-sticky, decale ... say 2ftx2ft, for applying to the driver-side windshield ... with a circle&slash across a picture of a head.

i've actually heard comments from people (who apparently haven't been able to buy their own handicap parking placard) say that any ticket is minor nuisance (presumably some of the same people that drive alone in HOV lanes).

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

Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:50:44 -0400

re: re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#23 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#25 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

for little other drift ... cluster-scale-up for ha/cmp ... precursor to grid ... old email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

past posts mentioning cloud:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#39 New, 40+ yr old, direction in operating systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008l.html#43 recent mentions of 40+ yr old technology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#94 How important, or not, is virtualization to cloud computing?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#38 Welcome to Rain Matrix: The Cloud Computing Network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#42 Welcome to Rain Matrix: The Cloud Computing Network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#23 NPR Asks: Will Cloud Computing Work in the White House?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#24 A New Web of Trust
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#27 NPR Asks: Will Cloud Computing Work in the White House?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#4 Cost of CPU Time
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#30 Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#70 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#2 z/Journal Does it Again
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#35 Computer virus strikes US Marshals, FBI affected
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#3 The computer did it
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#11 A Complete History Of Mainframe Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009m.html#81 A Faster Way to the Cloud
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#39 Disaster recovery is dead; long live continuous business operations
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#8 Is Cloud Computing Old Hat?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#16 'cloud computing' and 'SAAS'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#21 Is Cloud Computing Old Hat?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#36 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#80 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#4 alphas was: search engine history, was Happy DEC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#48 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#55 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#78 Entry point for a Mainframe?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#74 Is Security a Curse for the Cloud Computing Industry?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#75 Is Security a Curse for the Cloud Computing Industry?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#13 An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 6: The IBM 360
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#57 An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 6: The IBM 360
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#35 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#66 Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#17 Personal use z/OS machines was Re: Multiprise 3k for personal Use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#14 Age
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#25 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#43 IBM 3883 Manuals
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#42 Really dumb IPL question
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#26 Global Sourcing with Cloud Computing and Virtualization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#41 The Varieties of Virtualization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#35 VMSHARE Archives
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#45 Is email dead? What do you think?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#51 Is email dead? What do you think?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#66 Boeing Plant 2 ... End of an Era
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#80 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#88 Would mainframe technology be relevant in the age of cloud computing?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#41 CPU utilization/forecasting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#57 Are Tablets a Passing Fad?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#8 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#1 Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation

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

Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:16:55 -0400

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#23 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#25 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#27 Cloud computing - is it a financial con trick?

Amazon opens cloud computing contest
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218775/Amazon_opens_cloud_computing_contest

and then there is:

Is Amazon Hiding A Tipping Point In Its New Tablet?
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-cuts-cloud-prices-again/240158040

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

DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: DG Fountainhead vs IBM Future Systems
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:23:59 -0400

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
When I was working, I could login in the morning; using the feature of type-ahead, I would type in a series of commands which would take a while to execute, pick up my coffee cup and get a cup of coffee. By the time I came back the set of commnands were done and I could do the next set of type-aheads.

I had brought in a couple personal/unique coffee cups to the office ... until I found that they disappeared

a few past posts about going for cup of coffee while large number of URLs were loaded into tabs ... back when browser support was quite bloated ... and especially in period when I was using dialup
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#54 Is there a way to configure your web browser to use multiple
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#48 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#50 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#55 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#60 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#66 Mozilla v Firefox
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#51 Intel abandons USEnet news

my broadband is much faster, my machine is much faster, and browsers have gotten more efficient supporting large number of tabs.

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

The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:28:32 -0400

The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-cyber-crimes-common-costly.html

lots of related past posts on the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

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

The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:51:14 -0400

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#30 The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

also article here:

Did Ken, Dennis, and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings?
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365

I've noted that the I did the RFC1044 enhancements for mainframe TCP/IP stack and in some testing at cray research in the late 80s ... showed possibly 500 times improvement (in bytes transferred per instruction executed). The stack was implemented in vs/pascal (which didn't use the null terminated convention) and as far as I know never had a length exploit ... misc. past posts mentioning RFC1044 support:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

the referenced article also mentions the Kildall/Gates choice, recent article:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#22 MS-DOS is 30 years old today

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

The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:54:34 -0400

despen writes:
OS/360 deals with I/O when it sets up the CCW with a length or hard codes a length in the DCB. If you wanted to do something in a device driver, you'd first need to read the first 2 bytes then check the length to read the rest of the record, but here we're talking about field lengths not record lengths or block lengths.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#30 The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#31 The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

360 channel programs have two byte lengths ... buffers are set up to correspond to specified lengths ... record may be greater or less than specified ... channel program can end with residual length read/(writteN) and "incorrect length" indicator ... if it is less than specified, then residual length also indicates "incorrect length" ... but if more than specified, then residual length is zero ... but still have indication that actual length is greater than specified length.

recent discussion in ibm-main mailing list discusses priority of values used (for filling in channel program length) ... from DCB specification, from DD (JCL) specification, and from DSCB (from open reading control information from disk).

CCW will be "block" (or disk record) length (since DASD can have format of disk to specified length ... although all DASD have actually been simulated on real fixed-block disks for a couple decades). os/360 filesystems support variable record files ... where there is header record length field included as part of the data ... and the filesystem API manages the length stuff.

another part of the overflow vulnerability ... is that string buffers tend to be handled as character arrays ... and common programming convention of copying from one location to another. The source field sort of has an implicit length via the null termination convention (but isn't known ahead of time w/o scanning the source) and it is up to the programmer to remember what the maximum length was allocated for the target location.

in other environments (not just os360 ... but pascal & PLI languages running in os360 environments as well as non-os360 environments) ... buffer metadata is maintained regarding both the physical space allocated as well as the current length. Then whole infrastructure is oriented towards *always* checking source length against target maximum length ... and it is frequently as difficult to have a buffer overrun in such environments ... as it is to not have buffer overruns in typical C environments.

In past sporadic buffer overrun discussions here in a.f.c. over the years, there has been assertions that there is nothing in C that prevents programmers from implementing/using an explicit length oriented paradigm for C ... and therefor it is not C's fault ... but the programmers fault. The counter is analogy with highway safety engineering ... where there is great deal of effort to track common accident characteristics and work on eliminating and/or compensating for such characteristics (otherwise nearly everything is the operator's fault).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow

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

China Builds Fleet of Small Warships While U.S. Drifts

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 5 Aug, 2011
Subject: China Builds Fleet of Small Warships While U.S. Drifts
Blog: LinkedIn

China Builds Fleet of Small Warships While U.S. Drifts
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/china-builds-warships/all/1

more Success of Failure culture

All the characteristics have been there. Boyd told story of evaluating airforce air-to-air missile (before it went into production) and telling them all the reasons it wouldn't be effective; they went ahead anyway and during vietnam it lived up to Boyd's expectations. Also at one point the airforce general in vietnam switched all the airforce figthers to navy sidewider (which was much more effective). after 3months, the general was recalled for violating prime principle of the pentagon, "budget share" (reducing airforce budget share by not using airforce missile and loosing fewer fighters; increasing navy budget share by using sidewinder).

recent recommendation from Steele & Spinney
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/01/when_did_the_american_empire_start_to_decline

a little more:
http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney06222011.html
and
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/08/chuck-spinney-madness-in-white-house-k-street-thrives/

misc. past posts &/or URLs mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

misc. recent posts mentioning Success of Failure
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#0 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#45 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#32 Congratulations, where was my invite?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#34 Congratulations, where was my invite?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#72 77,000 federal workers paid more than governors
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#36 Having left IBM, seem to be reminded that IBM is not the same IBM I had joined
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#79 Innovation and iconoclasm

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

Boyd's Reading List Revisited

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 05 Aug, 2011
Subject: Boyd's Reading List Revisited
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/cdv7NA

I was having some equipment built in japan in the mid-80s and would visit the vendor. One of the trips, the vendor demonstrated some LAN technology they were working on for Toyoto to replace wiring harness (major failure in autos and hard to diagnose, and hard to repair) with counter-rotating ring (no single point of failure and able to diagnose/isolate where failure occurs and significantly easier to repair). In the very late 80s, worked on some analogous technology that Navy was looking at for ship fire control systems.

In the early 90s, US auto industry had "C4 taskforce" that was looking at how to completely remake themselves ... in large part, heavy leveraging technology ... and so some number of technology vendors were included in the meetings (I got to attend some of the meetings). They were able to articulate the advantages of the foreign competition (including had cut time-to-market in half and were in process of cutting it in half again) and what the US needed to do in order to change. However, there was so much vested interest in the status quo ... that they weren't able to change.

In the 80s .... there was an (washington post) article about the foreign auto import quota that had been put in place a couple years earlier. The commentary was that the congressional justification was that the quotas would allow the US auto industry to have profit (because of the reduced competition) and use it to completely remake themselves. The observation was that the US auto industry instead blew the profit on executives bonuses and stock dividends ... since the profit (as a result of the reduced competition from the import quotas) wasn't being used for the intended purpose (completely remake themselves), recommendation was that congress should introduce a 100% unearned profit tax for the us auto industry (somewhat in boyd's patterns of conflict ... besides squandering the money ... they squandered the time).

auto foreign competition from the eastern side of the pacific was entry-level, low-price cars; that put a lot of downward price pressure on us-made autos. quotas was to limit the number of such cars in the market ... reduced competition allowing us makers to significantly increase price (and use the profit to remake the US industry). However, there is the law of unintended consequences. Foreign competition realize that at the quota set, they can sell that many high-price, high-quality cars. This results in a program to rapidly create new high-end, high-quality, high-price product lines ... with a side-effect of producing significantly higher profit margin (besides motivation to radically decrease time-to-market). The change in foreign competition from entry, low-price to high-end, high-quality, high-price has larger impact on US automakers ability to increase their prices and profit on their low-quality product lines (than the actual quota, also contributing to the call for 100% unearned profit tax). The other side-effect is US individuals can skim off huge increase in profit, not actually having to change the US industry for at least another three decades (effectively sacrificing their industry for personal profit; this was repeated on much larger scale in the last decade with real-estate industry).

misc. posts &/or URLs mentioning Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

misc. past posts mentioning C4 taskforce:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#31 IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#31 IBM announced z10 ..why so fast...any problem on z 9
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#2 China-US Insights on the Future of the Auto Industry
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#3 IBM interprets Lean development's Kaizen with new MCIF product
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#31 Why are z/OS people reluctant to use z/OS UNIX?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#14 360 programs on a z/10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#47 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#55 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#70 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#8 Far and near pointers on the 80286 and later
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#75 Favourite computer history books?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010k.html#0 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#22 60 Minutes News Report:Unemployed for over 99 weeks!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#59 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#90 PDCA vs. OODA
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#2 Car models and corporate culture: It's all lies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#35 Having left IBM, seem to be reminded that IBM is not the same IBM I had joined

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 06 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

there have been studies of decision making ... major part of population conforming to social conventions and past experience (dogma). Myers-Briggs personality tests group this as personality types with only very small percentage of population that prefer to figure things out themselves.

one argument is that in a stable, static environment ... automatically doing what has worked in the past ... possibly for generations and codified as social mores
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mores

... is more efficient and uses less energy (compared to constantly discovering why something is being done). however, an orientation to constantly try and understand "why", would be more useful and adaptable in a dynamically changing environment.

this was used as explanation for some part of the S&L crisis ... that in static heavily regulated environment ... there is tendency to select executives that looked good and follow the conventions (since no other characteristic provided any benefit). When there was radical change with elimination of lots of the regulations and cutting reserves in half ... large number of these S&L executives were at a loss as to what to do (there were some number of characterizations that were significantly more derogatory ... including being sitting ducks for the investment bankers that swooped in).

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

First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:19:35 -0400

First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/08/06/first-website-launched-20-years-ago/
also:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1748628/First-Website-Launched-20-Years-Ago-Today

and then at CERN sister institution, SLAC on (virtual machine based) vm370 system:
https://ahro.slac.stanford.edu/wwwslac-exhibit

GML was invented at the science center in 1969 and decade later morphs into SGML ... and then another decade morphs into HTML
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/

misc past posts mentioning gml, sgml, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml

misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

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

First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:30:00 -0400

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#36 First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today

CTSS runoff
http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/CC-244.html

some number of the CTSS people go to the science center on 4th floor 545 tech sq (and do virtual machine cp40/cms which then morphs into cp67/cms) ... while others go to the 5th floor and do multics.

Madnick does runoff-like clone as (cp40/cp67) CMS SCRIPT in 67 at the science center

GML then invented 1969 at the science center. generallized markup language) acronym chosen because "G", "M" and "L" are initials of the 3 inventors
https://web.archive.org/web/20001201190700/http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm

support for GML tags is then added to CMS SCRIPT (in addition to runoff "dot" formatting)

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 06 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Charles R. Morris)
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers-ebook/dp/B0097DE7DM/

mentions the name of the regulator that went along with the executive wishes to deregulate the industry ... replacing the one that was asked to resign ... who wouldn't comply with the wishes ... although you won't see the references to individuals that were at a loss as to what to do in transition to free-for-all. Most of the above is about the another class of executives ... that moved in to take over institutions after deregulation and used them for their own private piggy banks. The ones that were at a loss as to what to do ... saw large amount of money disappear into wallstreet (some of it shows up in legal action with regard to junk bonds being sold to absorb all the money freed up with reserves being cut in half).

California energy crisis was part of energy deregulation and ENRON. ENRON eventually resulted in Sarbanes-Oxley which included (at least) 1) significantly increased audits of public company financial filings (although required SEC to followup), 2) whistle-blowers, and 3) SEC doing something about rating agencies.

When I inquired about #2, I was told the explanation was one of the people involved had been a FBI field agent and was acquainted with FBI only broke organized crime in the 60s via informants.

Turns out the rating agencies were selling triple-A ratings on the estimated $27trillion in toxic-CDO transactions that played pivotal role in recent economic bubble/burst. In the fall 2008 congressional hearings, news commentators observed that the rating agencies will be able to avoid gov. prosecution with the blackmail threat of downgrade federal gov.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

It appeared that GAO also thought that SEC wasn't doing anything ... even for the regulations that remained ... and were doing reports of public company fraudulent financial filings ... which have seen uptic even after Sarbanes-Oxley (somewhat making a mockery of all the additional audit requirements).

Note that SEC also didn't catch Madoff ... he turned himself in. In Madoff congressional hearings ... the person that had tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get SEC to do something about Madoff was asked if new regulations were needed. His response was that while new regulations might be needed, much more important was transparency and visibility.

I somewhat saw this at the end of last century ... when asked by NSCC to look at improving the integrity of exchange trading transactions ... before NSCC merged with DTC to become DTCC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_Corporation

after putting in some amount of work ... it was suspended with observation that side-effect of the increased integrity would be significant increase in transparency and visibility (apparently an anathema to wallstreet culture). The illegal naked short sales mentioned in the DTCC wiki is just one of the scenarios.

Note that one of the supposed attractions of wallstreet is trust compared to some places in the rest of the world ... this typically requires both transparency and visibility as well as regulations.

past reference that illegal naked short selling may be widespread
http://nypost.com/2007/03/20/cramer-reveals-a-bit-too-much/

recent posts mentioning GAO reports of fraudulent financial filings:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#23 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#52 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#5 How they failed to catch Madoff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#47 Lords: Auditors guilty of 'dereliction of duty'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#66 Senate Democrats Ask House to Boost SEC Funding
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#19 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 06 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#35 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#38 Advice from Richard P. Feynman

This is really long-winded post from early 1999 that touches on some of the S&L issues
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#riskm

Above also goes into Citicorp realizing in 1989 that their ARM mortgage portfolio could take down their institution. They unloaded the portfolio and got out of the business (requiring a private bail-out to stay in business).

A decade later, a new executive team, which were instrumental in repeal of Glass-Steagall ... had investment banking and other business combined with regulated FDIC-insured depository institution. The investment banking side was buying up these triple-A rated toxic CDOs ... which were primarily composed of ARM mortgages (the institutional knowledge regarding the risk appeared to have evaporated). A primary attraction in the triple-A rated toxic CDOs was the fees and commissions to the individuals involved in the estimated $27 trillion in transactions (as opposed to the toxic CDOs themselves). At the end of 2008, just the four largest too-big-to-fail institutions (including Citi) were holding $5.2T offbook in triple-A rated toxic CDOs (the individuals having already largely milked them in transaction fees & commissions). A large amount of the $16T in federal reserve backroom deals have involved trying to clear these toxic assets (aka original TARP was intended to purchase these assets ... but that was before it was realized that funds appropriated for TARP wouldn't come close to even making a small dent in the problem).
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/21/audit-fed-gave-16-trillion-in-emergency-loans/
the earlier story was just $9T (instead of $16T) ... after a year of legal action attempting to get the information released:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1201/Federal-Reserve-s-astounding-report-We-loaned-banks-trillions

In the TARP time-frame, some tens of billions in these (trillions of) triple-A rated toxic-CDOs had been sold for 22cents on the dollar. If all the holdings of triple-A rated toxic CDOs had to be liquidated, the too-big-to-fail FDIC-insured depository institutions would be declared insolvent (because of the operations of their investment banking arms ... courtesy of the repeal of Glass-Steagall)

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 06 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

the financial meltdown reads like the defense meltdown .... so there is the revolving door for ... MICC (military industrial congressional complex), PRCC (pharmaceutical regulatory congressional complex, 18 people retired/resigned after passing medicare part-d, including inserting one liner at last hr inflating prices by 300%; going to work for pharmaceutical industry) and the FRCC (financial regulatory congressional complex).

Part of regulatory has validating that business conform to financial audits ... for things that aren't readily publicly visible (aka transparency). However, as been shown by GAO reports ... even with the increased audit requirements required by Sarbanes-Oxley ... there continues to be increase in fraudulent filings ... w/o somebody like SEC requiring them to actually correspond with reality. The analogy is the military contracting officers responsible for defense contracts.

America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Defense-Meltdown-President-ebook/dp/B001TKD4SA

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
https://www.amazon.com/13-Bankers-Takeover-Financial-ebook/dp/B0036S4EIW

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
https://www.amazon.com/Griftopia-Machines-Vampire-Breaking-ebook/dp/B003F3FJS2

misc past posts mentioning griftopia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#59 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#6 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#7 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#53 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#55 America's Defense Meltdown
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#59 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#21 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#90 CFTC Limits on Commodity Speculation May Wait Until Early 2012
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#17 Hey all you Old Geeks (and younger ones too), with gas heading towards $6.00/gal, remote support, satellite offices and home office will become more cost effective

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 07 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#35 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#38 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#39 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#40 Advice from Richard P. Feynman

re: revolving door; S&L regulator (mentioned in 2 trillion dollar meltdown) leaves and takes a top, high-paying job at one of the leading firms on wallstreet.

Corrupt Bank Oversight Is Creating New Immoral Hazard
http://blogs.forbes.com/neilweinberg/2011/04/14/corrupt-bank-oversight-is-creating-new-immoral-hazard/
In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/business/14prosecute.html?_r=2&hp

related to "corrupt bank oversight":

The Real Housewives of Wall Street; Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

Phil Gramm's Enron Favor
https://web.archive.org/web/20080711114839/http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-01-15/news/phil-gramm-s-enron-favor/

from above:
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees,

... snip ...

People to Blame for the Financial Crisis; Phil Gramm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

from above:
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

... snip ...

Gramm and the 'Enron Loophole'
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/17grammside.html

from above:
Enron was a major contributor to Mr. Gramm's political campaigns, and Mr. Gramm's wife, Wendy, served on the Enron board, which she joined after stepping down as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

... snip ...

Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=aYJZOB_gZi0I

from above:
That same year Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt opposed an attempt by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. In 2000, Congress passed a law keeping them unregulated.

... snip ...

Born must have been fairly quickly replaced by Gramm's wife, before she then left to join Enron (and the Enron audit committee) Gramm's wife apparently was put in as Born's replacement as a temporary stop-gap until Gramm got law passed that exempted regulation.

and recent quote seen on the web: Enron was a dry run and it worked so well it has become institutionalized

Citicorp plays major role in repeal of Glass-Steagall
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/
as does Rubin, who then leaves and joins Citi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin

Phil Gramm is now vice chairman of UBS investment bank division
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm

Enron got exemption for their derivatives trading ... but the same exemption played major role in the AIG CDS ... which, along with the triple-A ratings from the rating agencies, played pivotal role in the $27T in toxic CDO transactions.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

Enron also made extensive use of off-shore (tax haven) subsidiaries to launder transactions. More recent reference .. Banks top list of tax haven users:
http://www.dailyfinance.co.uk/2011/06/16/banks-top-list-of-tax-haven-users/

misc. past posts mentioning the Gramm connections
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#46 independent appraisers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#38 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#48 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#53 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#55 Who will give Citigroup the KNOCKOUT blow?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#10 Who will Survive AIG or Derivative Counterparty Risk?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#28 I need insight on the Stock Market
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#61 Quiz: Evaluate your level of Spreadsheet risk
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#62 Is Wall Street World's Largest Ponzi Scheme where Madoff is Just a Poster Child?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#63 Do bonuses foster unethical conduct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#73 Should Glass-Steagall be reinstated?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#0 What is swap in the financial market?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#8 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#13 Should we fear and hate derivatives?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#23 Should FDIC or the Federal Reserve Bank have the authority to shut down and take over non-bank financial institutions like AIG?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#35 Architectural Diversity
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#29 What is the real basis for business mess we are facing today?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#38 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#51 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#53 What every taxpayer should know about what caused the current Financial Crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#5 Do the current Banking Results in the US hide a grim truth?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#7 Just posted third article about toxic assets in a series on the current financial crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#33 Treating the Web As an Archive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#76 Undoing 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#17 REGULATOR ROLE IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT FINANCIAL SCANDALS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#54 64 Cores -- IBM is showing a prototype already
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#60 In the USA "financial regulator seeks power to curb excess speculation."
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#74 Administration calls for financial system overhaul
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#77 Financial Regulatory Reform - elimination of loophole allowing special purpose institutions outside Bank Holding Company (BHC) oversigh
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#21 The Big Takeover
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#30 An Amazing Document On Madoff Said To Have Been Sent To SEC In 2005
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009j.html#35 what is mortgage-backed securities?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#56 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#84 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#51 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#77 Now is time for banks to replace core system according to Accenture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#82 Oldest Instruction Set still in daily use?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#92 Who's to Blame for the Meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#54 The 2010 Census
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#28 Our Pecora Moment
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010h.html#67 The Python and the Mongoose: it helps if you know the rules of engagement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010l.html#38 Who is Really to Blame for the Financial Crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#36 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#29 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#9 I actually miss working at IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#36 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#38 On Protectionism
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#52 Are Americans serious about dealing with money laundering and the drug cartels?

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

assembler help!

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From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: assembler help!
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 7 Aug 2011 08:17:09 -0700

Peter.Farley@BROADRIDGE.COM (Farley, Peter x23353) writes:
ITYM RL/S (Rand Language for Systems). I was at the SHARE in NY that year and managed to score a copy of the RL/S manual, but I never had my hands on a tape. Still have the manual around here somewhere though.

If I remember the scuttlebutt correctly, Rand said that they wrote it in PL/1 and reverse engineered the syntax and semantics from studying IBM microfiche listings.

I don't think that any of us have ever understood IBM's paranoia about PL/S or its successors being in the hands of users. It's just a language, after all. The only reason anyone I spoke with back then could imagine was that IBM didn't want PL/S (or any clones) cannibalizing the use of PL/1, which they were pushing hard, IIRC.

It would be enlightening if an IBMer of that time at a high enough pay grade to have participated in those internal discussions would reveal the real reasons in their autobiography.

PL/S was one of the casualties of the FS effort in the 70s ... then when FS was killed off and 370 was being resurrected ... PL/S was slow to get going. This contributed to difficulty getting relational implementation on MVS ... that and EAGLE was the official grand strategic database for MVS ... and so there wasn't a lot of interest for relational (aka DB2) on MVS until after EAGLE had failed.

Some of this is mentioned in MIPENVY, copy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#email800920
in this past post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing

and from ibm definitions:
[MIP envy] n. The term, coined by Jim Gray in 1980, that began the Tandem Memos (q.v.). MIP envy is the coveting of other's facilities - not just the CPU power available to them, but also the languages, editors, debuggers, mail systems and networks. MIP envy is a term every programmer will understand, being another expression of the proverb The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

[Tandem Memos] n. Something constructive but hard to control; a fresh of breath air (sic). "That's another Tandem Memos." A phrase to worry middle management. It refers to the computer-based conference (widely distributed in 1981) in which many technical personnel expressed dissatisfaction with the tools available to them at that time, and also constructively criticized the way products were [are] developed. The memos are required reading for anyone with a serious interest in quality products. If you have not seen the memos, try reading the November 1981 Datamation summary.

... snip ...

I had been blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s. "Tandem Memos" were actually kicked off with report that i wrote after a visit to Jim at Tandem (after he had left IBM).

MIPENVY mentions that PLS3 (by the POK tools group) wasn't available on vm370 and dos. Part of this was that in the mad rush to get stuff back in 370 product pipelines (after failure of FS), the head of POK convinced corporate to kill-off vm370, shutdown the vm370 development group, and move all the people to POK (or otherwise they would miss MVS/XA ship date ... nearly 8yrs in the future). As it turned out, Endicott managed to save the vm370 product mission, but had to recreate a development group from scratch.

It turns out the plans for the vm370 shutdown was to only give them something like month notice (to minimize potential that they could find alternatives). As it turned out the information was leaked several months early (which kicked off witch hunt to find who leaked the info). Somewhat as a result, several found jobs at DEC working on VAX/VMS (joke that head of POK was a major contributor to early VAX/VMS development)

misc. past posts mentioning original relation/sql
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

misc. past posts mentioning FS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. past posts mentioning eagle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#42 Mainframe Hall of Frame. List of influential mainframers thoughout history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#52 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#54 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#55 Maybe off topic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011e.html#16 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#8 New job for mainframes: Cloud platform
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#78 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#32 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened

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

First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 07 Aug, 2011
Subject: First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
Blog: Old Geek Registry

re:
http://lnkd.in/8VWQc9

and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#36 First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#37 First Website Launched 20 Years Ago Today

some of the virtual-machine based online commercial timesharing service bureaus are the precursor of cloud computing. one of them provided their computer conferencing facility for free to the (ibm user group) SHARE starting in aug76 ... archive here:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

I was blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s ... the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late '85 or early '86 ... misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

old post mentioning the internal network getting a csnet/phonenet email relay in oct '82
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0

tcp/ip is the technology basis for the modern internet, NSFNET backbone was the operational basis for the modern internet and CIX was the business basis for the modern internet. misc. old email about working with director of NSF on what was to become NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

when it came time to bid on the actual RFP ... internal politics prevented us bidding ... even when the director of NSF wrote the corporation a letter copying the chairman ... there were references to things like what we already had running was at least five years ahead of all the NSFNET backbone RFP bid responses. misc. past posts mentioning NSFNET backbone
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet

At the univ. in the 60s, as an undergraduate I was also os/360 system support. Along the way the univ. library got an ONR grant to do a online catalog. They used some of the money to get a 2321 datacell. The project was also selected as betatest for the original CICS product ... and I got tasked to support/debug the deployment. One bug was in CICS startup, file open ... CICS had been originally developed at customer site with specific kind of BDAM file ... and the library was using different BDAM specification (which was resulting in CICS OPEN failures). Misc. past posts mentioning BDAM &/or CICS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics

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

S&P Downgrades USA; Time to Downgrade S&P?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 08 Aug, 2011
Subject: S&P Downgrades USA; Time to Downgrade S&P?
Blog: Google+

S&P Downgrades USA; Time to Downgrade S&P?
http://www.americanbanker.com/bulletins/-1019771-1.html

remember that the rating agencies sold triple-A ratings for some $27 trillion in toxic CDO (mostly mortgage back securities) transactions ... which played pivotal role in the financial mess. During the fall 2008 congressional hearings into the rating agencies, the news commentators were saying that the rating agencies would avoid fed. gov. prosecutions with blackmail threat of gov. credit rating downgrade. Always getting triple-A rating, loan originators no longer had to care about loan quality or borrowers qualifications ... they were only limited by how fast, how big, how many. The part about writing no-documentation loans has come back to roost ... 60mins last night was about the big banks hiring company to create forged loan documents ... individuals claiming to doing 4000 forged documents/day and being paid $10/hr.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-20087011-10391709.html

no-documentation, no-down, 1% interest-only ARMs became favorite of speculators ... potentially seeing 2000% ROI in parts of the country with 20-30% real-estate inflation (speculation further fueling inflation) & planning on flipping before rate adjusted. This was approx. equivalence to the Brokers' Loans that fueled the '29 stock market crash.

A difference between '29 & '08 ... was the investment banking arms of too-big-to-fail regulated institutions were buying enormous amounts of triple-A rated toxic CDOs (individuals making enormous commissions and bonuses w/o regard to the risk created for the institution). At the end of 2008, just four of the too-big-to-fail institutions were holding $5.2T in these triple-A rated toxic CDOs offbook (courtesy of the repeal of Glass-Steagall). At the time, sales of several tens of billions of these triple-A rated toxic CDOs went for 22cents on the dollar; if the institutions were forced to correctly value ... they would have been declared insolvent and liquidated. Majority of the assistance has gone to bailing out these too-big-to-fail institutions (including the reported $16T in loans from federal reserve).

there was an "aha" moment when investors realized that the rating agencies had been selling triple-A ratings (on $27T in toxic CDO transactions) resulting in fear-uncertainty-doubt about all ratings. The rating F-U-D caused the muni-bond market to freeze (until Warren Buffett unfroze it by selling muni-bond insurance).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

past posts mentioning rating agency blackmail threat:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#8 Global Melt Down
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#40 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#69 Moody's hints at move that could be catastrophic for US debt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#21 Ernst & Young called to account -- should Audit firms be investigated for their role in the crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#40 Ernst & Young sued for fraud over Lehman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#53 Programmer Charged with thieft (maybe off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#46 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#48 What do you think about fraud prevention in the governments?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#43 Massive Fraud, Common Crime, No Prosecutions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011f.html#66 Bank email archives thrown open in financial crash report
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011g.html#55 Mobius Says Financial Crisis 'Around the Corner'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#67 U.S. can't account for $8.7 billion of Iraq's money: audit
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#24 rating agencies
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#38 Advice from Richard P. Feynman

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

S&P's History of Relentless Political Advocacy

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 08 Aug, 2011
Subject: S&P's History of Relentless Political Advocacy
Blog: Google+

S&P's History of Relentless Political Advocacy
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/08/08/sps-history-of-relentless-political-advocacy/

IDC ... started out as virtual machine cp67 time-sharing online service bureau ... and then moved upstream into online financial information, bought their "pricing services" division in 1972. during the fall 2008 hearings into the rating agencies, this is when the claim was that the rating agency business model changed and became misaligned increasing the potential for conflict of interest (including the selling of triple-A ratings on toxic CDOs during the last decade). News commentators, during the hearings said that the rating agencies would be able to avoid federal prosecution with the threat of blackmail downgrading the US credit rating.

in dec2008/early-jan2009 time-frame there were a few references to treasury using IDC for helping value bank's toxic assets (presumably the pricing services division that they had bought in 1972) ... this was when treasury believed that the appropriated TARP funds would be used in buying these toxic assets; however, they relatively quickly found out that the amount of triple-A rated toxic CDOs was so huge (just 4 largest too-big-to-fail institutions were carrying $5.2T offbook) ... that the TARP funds couldn't make a dent. It was then quickly decided to figure out some other way for using TARP funds. There have been subsequent references that the Federal Reserve has bought trillions of triple-A rated toxic CDOs at 98cents on the dollar (even tho the going rate seems to have been 22cents on the dollar).

misc. past posts mentioning sale of "pricing services" division:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#21 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#31 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#32 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#42 Lets play Blame Game...?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#52 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#77 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#79 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#38 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#78 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#15 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#70 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#41 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#49 Is the current downturn cyclic or systemic?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#40 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#20 UK issues Turning apology (and about time, too)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#68 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#47 Is C close to the machine?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#48 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#4 alphas was: search engine history, was Happy DEC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#52 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#49 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#25 The first personal computer (PC)

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

Suffix of 64 bit instructions

From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Suffix of 64 bit instructions
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 8 Aug 2011 20:28:04 -0700

shmuel+ibm-main@PATRIOT.NET (Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.) writes:
The B2 opcodes came later. Some of the emulator features on the S/360 had longer opcodes.

diagnose (x'83') is supervisor instruction defined as model specific. common mechanism was the displacement field was used as "extended op-code" ... selecting specific/specialized microcode functions.

one use was invoking microcode emulators (available on various 360 processors)

diagnose displacement x"3cc" selects emulator function, turning on/off special emulator instructions (x'99' opcode) ... page 64.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/1401_emulator/GC27-6940-4_360_1401emul.pdf

and then more/other diagnose variations on page 72.

recent post (in afc) discussing above
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#16 Is the magic and romance killed by Windows (and Linux)?

as undergraduate in the 60s ... i made a whole bunch of enhancements to cp67. one was special fast dasd ccw for cms file i/o. the guys at the science center slammed me for violating 360 principles of operations ... since such a mechanism wasn't defined for real hardware.

they came up with definition that all such special (virtual machine) processing had to be done via "diagnose" instruction using the "fiction" that it virtual machines running under cp67 qualified as a special model (aka conforming to 360 principles of operation as implementation being model specific, in this case, the virtual machine model).

this kicked off a whole slew of special virtual machine functions (aka "instructions") all selected via the diagnose instruction displacement field.

cp67 cms (cambridge monitor system) would run on real 360 ... and as some of the specifial virtual machine features were added, at startup, cms would check for running on real machine or virtual machine (setting switch for using straight real machine processing or optional virtual machine processing).

in the morph to vm370, cms was renamed to conversational monitor system and the ability to run on real hardware was crippled.

misc. past posts mentioning cambridge science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:59:41 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Average is tough, for example wasn't the PC introduced about '97? Even if we exclude those, IBM systems span a big range from a System/3 to a 370/195. You would have to say that the mainframes usually had large amounts of disk storage, at that time meaning maybe terabytes?

in the 70s, large "dasd" farms might run 300 3330-11 disk drives at 200mbyte per ... say 60gbytes
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3330.html

the above has picture of typical 8drive configuration; say 40 such for 320 drives or 64gbytes. Lockheed's online DIALOG about 1980 was on this order.
http://www.dialog.com/about/
and
http://www.blueroom.com/dialog/dialog-intro-history.htm

you could simulate more with 3850 "mass store", tape robot that staged data to 3330 drives ... 3850 containing up to 472gbytes
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850.html

a big problem was maximum aggregate ("daisy chained") channel cable distance at 200ft (from the processor connecting some number of disk controllers), you position the processor in the center of the area and arrange all the units radiating in circle out from the middle. some installations resorting to running channel cables to different floors ... getting a little of 3D sphere as opposed to 200ft radius 2D circle.

360/370 had maximum of 15 channels for disks, with up to 256 disks addressable per channel, theoretically max. 3840 3330 addressable (ignoring the physical cabling issues) ... which is still less than terabyte.

in the 80s, 3380s were introduced with 2.5gbyte (better than 10 times 3330) and "data streaming" channels that doubled aggregate channel cable distances to 400ft
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html

400 3380s to make a terabyte at around $100k per or $40m

'85 double density 3380s were introduced (5gbyte) ... cut the inter-track separation from 20 track widths to 10 track widths, doubling the number of tracks.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380b.html

old post disk capacity/density technology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#30 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ?
with these emails
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email871122
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email871230

past posts about getting to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

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

Opcode X'A0'

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From: lynn@GARLIC.COM (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Opcode X'A0'
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: 9 Aug 2011 06:31:39 -0700

hfdtechs@COMPORIUM.NET (John Baker) writes:
The X'A0' opcode provided various VS APL Assist functions.

this was done at palo alto science center for 370/145. 370/145 had loadable microcode from floppy disk ... and would start to take away high real storage (from processor memory) for microcode.

cambridge science center had taken apl\360 ... removing the monitor and other stuff ... for running in cms virtual machine ... as cms\apl (also had to redo how apl managed storage for large virtual memory paged environment ... the mechanism from apl\360 was guaranteed to page thrash). misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
misc. past posts mentioning APL (&/or HONE a major internal APL-based world-wide online sales&marketing support service)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

palo alto science center then did apl\cms for vm370/cms ... as well as the 145 microcode.

the person that did the apl microcode for 370/145 ... also did a microcode hot-spot monitor as part of ECPS development. It created a table of 32byte kernel storage locations and periodic sample the PSW address ... incrementing the corresponding storage counter ... past reference to work on deciding parts of kernel to drop in to 138/148 microcode:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#28 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

palo alto science center also did SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable) and ibm/pc ("portable computer") 5100
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html

5150 was 1975 precursor to ibm/pc ("personal computer") 5150
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_1.html

5100 ran "modified" version of (370) apl/sv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100

cp67/cms cms\apl had also provided an API to system services ... which the APL purists claimed violated the purity of the APL design. However, it got a whole lot of usage for doing real-world problems (like being able to read/write files).

apl/360 typically ran with 16kbyte (or 32kbyte) workspaces ... where everything resided in the workspace (and apl\360 monitor would swap whole workspace as integral unit).

cms\apl opened workspace size to large virtual memory as well as adding API to access system services ... and cambridge science center made it available on its cp67 service. One of the earliest users of this APL on cambridge service were the business planners in Armonk ... they loaded the most valuable of corporate assets on the cambridge system (detailed customer details) and did business modeling in APL. This required some pretty good security since the cambridge system was also available to various students&staff from univ. in the boston/cambridge area.

The APL purists eventually responded to the (cms\apl) system services API with "shared variables" (that appears in apl/sv)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_Shared_Variables

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

"How do you feel about 'gotos'"

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 09 Aug, 2011
Subject: "How do you feel about 'gotos'"
Blog: Old Geek Registry

re:
http://lnkd.in/w2HzCg

in the early 70s, I wrote a PLI program to analyze 360 assembler listings; all machine language was branches ... effectively the hardware GOTO. I was interested in finding possible anomolous code paths that resulted in registers that were being used w/o initialization (common failure mode was invalid register contents ... either not having been initialized and/or a "dangling" pointer to some storage that had been released).

I created a abstract representation of the assembler code along with dividing into sequential code blocks with branch-out into other code-blocks and/or branch-in from other code-blocks. I also used the abstract representation to generate psuedo-pascal kind of representation of the original assembler program ... including things like if/then/else, while-looping, etc.

In some of the most highly optimized parts of kernel code ... I found some code segments that were relatively clear and simple code-flows when represented with branches(/goto) but become really, really ugly when represented with if/then/else.

It was about the time that I attended an annual corporate symposium (held at the old Marriott motel off 14th st bridge in wash. dc) which had guys talking about structured programming as well as "super programmer".

part of the issue was that 360/370 instructions could have 4-state results (not simply true/false, two-bits) ... highly optimized (frequently high frequency kernel) code would attempt to perform maximize state determination in fewest possible instructions ... conditional branches used four-bits to cover all possible combination of 4-states. possible to have some condition setting instruction followed by three conditional branches for each of three possible states with the fourth possible state not-branching (fall-thru). with four bits, conditional branch could be on any combination of four possible states (unconditional branch was when all four bits were set ... aka branch whatever the condition condition state is).

It wasn't unusual to have state testing for combination of specific bits and at least 3-way logic ... all ones, all zeros, or some mix of ones&zeros.

for some topic drift ... long ago and far away I got to work on the original relational/sql implementation ... system/r ... some past posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

concurrently I also worked on another kind of "relational" implementation that had different structure and different tri-state paradigm ... old post discussing pitfalls of tri-state (nulls) in sql (compared to this different implementation) ... "How to cope with missing values - NULLS?"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#40
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#41

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

How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 10 Aug, 2011
Subject: How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?
Blog: Fear, Honor, and Interest

re:
http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/how-many-divisions-does-standard-and-poors-have/

Maybe not the division you were thinking of (which they sold in 1972) ... in the fall2008 congressional hearings into the rating agencies, there were statements that the rating agencies (changed) "misaligned" their business process in the early 70s opening it up for conflict of interest. During the hearings, news commentators were saying that the rating agencies would avoid federal prosecution (for selling triple-A ratings on estimated $27T in toxic CDO transactions) with blackmail downgrading gov. credit.
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-10-27/evil-wall-street-exports-boomed-with-fools-born-to-buy-debt

There were virtual-machine based online commercial computer service bureaus formed in the 60s. One of them quickly moved up the value chain to provide online financial information (like 100yrs of stock prices) and in 1972 bought the "pricing services" division (possibly be construed as no longer needing to know value of what was being rating). This company is still around providing online financial information over the internet.

In dec2008/jan2009 there were a couple references to the treasury using this company (presumably its pricing service division that was purchased in 1972) to value bank toxic assets for purchase (original purpose of the TARP funds). This was before they realized how huge the amount of toxic assets (just four largest too-big-to-fail institutions were carrying $5.2T offbook) and the appropriate TARP funds wouldn't have dented the problem ... so they quickly came up with alternative use of the TARP funds (and there was no more mention of 'toxic asset' relief program or purchase of toxic assets). In the late 2008 time-frame there had been tens of billions of triple-A rated toxic CDOs that sold for 22cents on the dollar. If the too-big-to-fail institutions had been forced to bring the toxic assets back on book and value at the market price, they would have been declared insolvent and forced to liquidate.

Disclaimer: I knew a lot of the people that founded the company and they attempted to hire me when I graduated.

past post mentioning "price service" division
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#21 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#31 Banks to embrace virtualisation in 2009: survey
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#32 What are the challenges in risk analytics post financial crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#42 Lets play Blame Game...?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#52 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#77 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#79 The Credit Crunch: Why it happened?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#38 A great article was posted in another BI group: "To H*** with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#49 US disaster, debts and bad financial management
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#78 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#1 Audit II: Two more scary words: Sarbanes-Oxley
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#15 The background reasons of Credit Crunch
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#53 Are the "brightest minds in finance" finally onto something?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009e.html#70 When did "client server" become part of the language?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#41 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#49 Is the current downturn cyclic or systemic?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#40 Analysing risk, especially credit risk in Banks, which was a major reason for the current crisis
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#20 UK issues Turning apology (and about time, too)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#68 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009q.html#47 Is C close to the machine?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#48 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010d.html#4 alphas was: search engine history, was Happy DEC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#52 LPARs: More or Less?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#49 "Fraud & Stupidity Look a Lot Alike"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#25 The first personal computer (PC)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#45 S&P's History of Relentless Political Advocacy

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

Advice from Richard P. Feynman

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 10 Aug, 2011
Subject: Advice from Richard P. Feynman
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

current watching "Inside JOB"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)

which i've never watched before. they mention some of the above (although not all) ... but are giving much more background and goes some into explaining some of the operation (just now explaining the triple-A rating by the rating agencies). Just had author of "two million meltdown".
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers-ebook/dp/B0097DE7DM/

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

How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 10 Aug, 2011
Subject: How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?
Blog: Facebook

re:
http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/how-many-divisions-does-standard-and-poors-have/
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#50 How Many Divisions Does Standard and Poors Have?

i added my two bits, at least one less than one might think ... possibly construed as responsible for the recent $2T error in calculations???

the other analogy is that there were numerous hotbeds of greed and corruption that had been kept damped down ... removing the damping allowed the individual hotbeds to combined together into economic firestorm.

a similar but different analogy is that the whole infrastructure is thoroughly permeated with greed and corruption and it requires control rods to keep the whole thing from going critical and melting down. removing the control rods (like Glass-Steagall) allowed the system to go critical (currently watching rerun of "Inside Job" documentary on the bubble/crash)

misc. past post referencing economic firestorm
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#79 Bush - place in history
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#78 Who murdered the financial system?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#80 Can we blame one person for the financial meltdown?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008o.html#82 Greenspan testimony and securization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#60 Did sub-prime cause the financial mess we are in?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#20 How is Subprime crisis impacting other Industries?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#57 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008s.html#62 Garbage in, garbage out trampled by Moore's law
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009.html#71 CROOKS and NANNIES: what would Boyd do?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#1 Are Both The U.S. & UK on the brink of debt disaster?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#30 The recently revealed excesses of John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, while the firm was receiving $25 Billion in TARP funds makes me sick
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#53 Credit & Risk Management ... go Simple ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#79 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009b.html#80 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#32 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#39 'WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLOBAL MELTDOWN'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#51 How to defeat new telemarketing tactic
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#61 Accounting for the "greed factor"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009c.html#65 is it possible that ALL banks will be nationalized?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009f.html#43 On whom or what would you place the blame for the sub-prime crisis?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#46 What's your personal confidence level concerning financial market recovery?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#47 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#56 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#58 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#17 What banking is. (Essential for predicting the end of finance as we know it.)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#27 The Zippo Lighter theory of the financial crisis (or, who do we want to blame?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#45 Productivity And Bubbles
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#5 Home prices may drop another 25%, Shiller predicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#10 Home prices may drop another 25%, Shiller predicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#33 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#40 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#45 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#80 Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide

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

Steve Jobs, the Whole Earth Catalog, & The WELL

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Steve Jobs, the Whole Earth Catalog, & The WELL
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:53:47 -0400

re:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference

from above:
The first Hackers Conference was organized in 1984 in Marin County, California, by Stewart Brand and his associates at Whole Earth and The Point Foundation. It was conceived in response to Steven Levy's book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which inspired Brand to arrange a meeting between the individuals, or "hackers", the book named. The first conference was the subject of a PBS documentary, produced by KQED: Hackers - Wizards of the Electronic Age.

... snip ...

there was also a 60mins segment from later event ... they promised beforehand not do a "hack" job.

before things got overly commercial in silicon valley ... people would bring unannounced products and could play with each others toys.

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:54:00 -0400

Tim Shoppa <shoppa@trailing-edge.com> writes:
In terms of estimating capacity... most medium sized shops had roughly 5 to 10 times as many 3330 packs as they did drives. If they had replaced the 3330's straight with 3380's they would see 5 or 10 times increase in capacity by drive, but no increase in total available disk storage (just that it would be all online at the same time).

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#47 Graph of total world disk space over time?

2311 were mount/unmount packs ... top loaded about 7mbytes
http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/c20-1684/fig011.jpg

2314 were mount/unmount packs ... front loaded drawers about 29mbytes (typically 9 drives with 8 usable at any one time)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2314.html

3330 were mount/unmount packs ... front loaded drawers 100mbytes and then 200mbytes (typically 8 drives all usuable)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3330.html

3340 were mount/unmount packs ... however, completely enclosed with the head mechanism as part of the pack 35 & 70 mbytes
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3340.html

3380 were totally enclosed and better than 10 times 3330-11 (2.5gbytes)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html

we had an internal application that could trace all access and then do a "profile" for different data on system. this was used to re-organize a system ... dump all 3330 data and then reload to different drives so as to load-balance the highest used data across all available drives ... with next lowest used data distributed across available drives ... to try and create evenly distribute overall accesses across all available drives.

this was also used to manage the movement of data from a 3330-based system to 3380-based system. while 3380 was faster than 3330, it wasn't ten times faster. It you arbitrarily took 12 3330-11 and loaded on single 3380 ... it was possible to have worst system performance because the contention for 3380 disk arm was increased by 12+ times (creating service time queuing). the model in the internal application profiler indicated that 3380 shouldn't be loaded more than 80% full (with 3330 data) w/o creating overall worse system performance. Since the price/bit had radically declined for 3380 (compared to 3330) ... it should have been a trivial economic justification (since overall thruput of the system would be degraded ... effectively sacrificing a percentage of several million dollar system to optimize a few thousand in bit storage).

It turns out that some number of computers installation lacked administrators that could understand such reasoning and could only see "wasted" 3380 space. There was proposal put forward at the (IBM user group) SHARE to offer a special higher-priced, higher-performance 3380 that had half the capacity of normal 3380 (done w/o any hardware changes, purely microcode load from the factory). Since only half the cylinders were being used ... the avg. arm seek distance was cut in half ... which would show less elapsed time per avg. access.

we did have recommendation that the "extra" cylinders could be used for (low-value) seldom used data w/o degrading overall system throughput ... but there were still administrators that didn't understand such trade-offs.

all of this technology has somewhat disappeared into the guts of modern large storage subsystems. there are enormous caching capability ... to help mask relative slow disk arm access ... and most large storage subsystems are extensively "virtualized" ... where logical record location on logical disk has possibly little relation to actual physical record location on real physical disk.

misc. past posts getting to play disk engineer in bldgs. 14&15
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

one of the downsides of the 3380 disks was the corresponding 3880 disk controller. The processor in the controller was enormously slower than the processor in the 3830 disk controller ... as a result there was quite a bit of work done to try and mask the worst of the degraded throughput. While 3380 disk arm access didn't significantly improved, disk transfer rate increased ten times, in order for 3880 controller to handle the ten times increase in transfer rate, there was special separate hardware path fro data transfers ... restricting the 3880 processor for just use in handling control processes (aka starting/ending operations).

I was providing a special enhancement operating system for development labs in bldgs. 14&15 ... which was used for testing development devices. They had been doing this "stand-alone" ... mainframe processor pre-scheduled for single-device, stand-alone testing ... pretty much 7x24 around the clock. At one time they had tried to use standard MVS operating system to allow multiple device, concurrent, on-demand testing ... but found standard MVS had 15min MTBF (requiring system reboot) even with single device testing. I offered to do a bullet-proof, never fail, i/o subsystem ... so that they could have concurrent, on-demand testing (significantly improving development productivity). Since, even multiple concurrent device testing would only use trivial couple percent of any processor ... they also started using the remaining of system resources for generalized online timesharing service.

Somewhat as a result of using my system for everything, they would start calling me first when they figured something wasn't working correctly ... and I would frequently have to diagnose some sort of hardware bug on one of their development devices. One monday morning, bldg. 15 called and said that their online service (on 3033 processor) had enormously degraded and wanted to know what I had done over the weekend (since they hadn't made any changes). They had two 8-drive 3330 strings for online service/use (with 3830 controller), separate from device testing. Over the weekend they had replaced the 3830 controller with 3880 controller (managing the same two 8-drive string of 3330s). It turns out with all the masking for slow 3880 processor (and only used with much slower 3330), aggregate thruput had been cut by better than half. It took some analysis to isolate to some very specific operations in the 3880 controller ... which were going to require significant work to improve. Fortunately this was still six months before "first customer ship" and there was time to fix some of the worst before customers saw the box.

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:01:52 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
Still is. no matter what the physical hardware these days, it all appears as 3390s.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#47 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#54 Graph of total world disk space over time?

not only that ... the CKD record characteristics are all being simulated on real FBA (fixed-block architecture) disks.

in late 70s, IBM disk division had introduced FBA devices (3310, & 3370) in parallel with newer CKD devices. However, the favorite son operating system MVS never was able to come out with FBA device support (and still hasn't).

One of the issues was that 3380 was the high-end disk ... but the only mid-range disk was the 3370. There was enormous explosion in the mid-range market with 4341s (also saw by DEC with vax'es) and the only mid-range disk was 3370 ... pretty much excluding MVS from the market (some trivial MVS 4341 where customer replace existing 370 and retained older CKD disks). Eventually the disk division was forced to come out with 3375 ... which was CKD simulation running on real 3370.

Since MVS operating system has had such an enormous, difficult time to adopting to new disk technologies ... it was eventually easier to just simulate the older, archaic, obsolete CKD technologies.

misc. past posts mentioning CKD, FBA, DASD, multi-track search, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

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

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:44:50 -0400

Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes:
This is a case of inadequate (=no) mudularity. Dependence on hardware characteristics has its tentacles interwoven throughout the system instead of layering higher-level abstractions on top of one subsystem that deals with physical disk characteristics. Considering the system is now 50 years old, I guess they didn't do too badly. Did they have any expectation at the time it would be around this long?

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#47 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#54 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#55 Graph of total world disk space over time?

MVS had table geometry for updating to new physical geometries ... size of track, number of tracks per cylinder, number of cylinders, etc.

the issue was that CKD included a trade-off with multi-track search capability to maintain filesystem metadata on disk ... and use I/O resources to "search" for the related object in the filesystem (as opposed to having real-storage taken up with the metadata information) ... aka trading off relatively abundant i/o capacity (in the mid-60s) against the much more constrained real storage resources.

By the mid-70s, this trade-off had inverted ... it was more optimal to have filesystem metadata cached in real storage ... rather than burning enormous amounts of i/o resources to "search" for the specific metadata.

This characteristic helped account the rude jokes about horrible (MVS) TSO online human factors (compared to vm370/cms).

An example was late 70s, IBM San Jose Research had a 370/168 for MVS operations and a 370/158 for VM370/CMS ... all the 3330/3830 in the room were physically connected to both mvs/168 channels as well as vm370/158 channels ... however there was a "rule" that 3830 controllers were logical segregated ... that MVS was never allowed to mount a 3330 pack on a logical VM370 controller string. One day, somebody made a mistake and mounted a MVS pack on logical VM370 3330 string.

It turns out that MVS makes extensive use of "multi-track" search to deal with on-disk metadata. 3330 has 19 tracks/cylinder. A multi-track search starts at first track and continues to the last track (or until data found) that locks out the corresponding channel, controller, and disk for any other purposes. At 3600RPM ... a full-cylinder MVS multi-track search takes approximately 1/3second elapsed time (during which time the corresponding disk, controller, and channel are all locked out). In this particular case, that results in vm370 was unable to access any of the other 15 3330 disks accessed by the same controller ... while the MVS multi-track search was in progress (1/3second at a time, and MVS was doing a whole lot of them).

Within a few minutes of the MVS pack being mounted on a VM370 string ... the datacenter was getting irate calls from users about how VM370 online response had drastically degraded. As an aside, vm370/cms had always treated CKD dasd ... as logical FBA ... and never had fallen into the multi-track search paradigm. The users started screaming that the MVS pack be moved. The datacenter tried to resist ... saying that they would do it at start of 2nd shift (so not to disrupt MVS operation, even tho most users felt that would make vm370 unusable for the rest of the day ... started mid-morning).

We had an special VS1 system tuned for running in a virtual machine (although it had FBA support, it still retained capability for operating with CKD and multi-track search). This was brought up on vm370 ... and VS1 pack mounted on (critical) MVS 3330 string ... and kicked off doing lots of multi-track search related operations. This brought the MVS system to its knees ... significantly interferring with the operation causing all the multi-track searches interferring with VM370 throughput (i.e. VS1 in virtual machine on loaded vm370/158 ... was much faster than MVS running on real hardware on real 168). The MVS operations quickly decided that they would move the MVS pack off the VM370 string, if we would shutdown the VS1 operation.

The MVS CKD multi-track search more throughly permeates the system than any specific physical geometry characteristics and ties it to archaic, obsolete CKD technology (that hasn't existed for decades, required to be simulated on FBA disks)

misc. past posts mentioning getting to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

misc. past posts mentioning DASD, CKD, FBA, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:01:43 -0400

there was some other issue involved.

I offered to provide the FBA support for MVS. I was told that even if I provided fully integrated, tested, and ready to ship support, it would still cost $26M to cover documentation changes, education, and training. I was told that I couldn't use life-cycle savings as justification (which were/are enormous) but could only show business case with ROI on profit from incremental new hardware sales (several hundred million) ... and customers were currently buying hardware as fast as it could be made ... so any FBA support would only change to FBA hardware from same amount of CKD hardware (no incremental new hardware sales).

past posts mentioning CKD, FBA, multi-track search, etc
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

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

Graph of total world disk space over time?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Graph of total world disk space over time?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:20:56 -0400

hancock4 writes:
Many years ago we application folks had to know the particular type of disk drive in order to calculate the most optimum blocking factor for our files. But at least 20 years ago MVS came out with the ability to calculate the optimum block size automatically (BLKSIZE=0 in the JCL), so now it's transparent to us. Indeed, lots of details about data files, even whether it should be tape (cart) or disk, are transparent to us; the system figures it all out for us. We use BCKUP as a file qualifier and the system puts it in the proper place.

Occasionally we come across some old program or JCL where the file blocking is artibrarily set, which today is very inefficient. But these files are usually rather small, so the impact is minimal. Certain old programs and processes do require a specific block size.

Today they use some sort of IBM "storage management" technology which does file tracking, backups, archiving, and compression. Given all that, I would presume MVS adapts pretty well to the various disk technologies.

What surprised me was when IBM sold off its disk business.

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#47 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#54 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#55 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#56 Graph of total world disk space over time?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#57 Graph of total world disk space over time?

since all MVS archaic, obsolete CKD DASD for decades has been purely simulated on FBA disks ... there is little justification for arbitrarily changing the simulated characteristics of the archaic obsoleted CKD DASD that is seen by MVS. The ibm-main mailing list periodically has discussions about "special" 3390 specifications where somebody tries to specify the total capacity of (archaic, obsolete) 3390 that is larger than any "real" 3390 (using MVS "tweaks").

I've periodically mentioned sequence in the late 80s when senior engineer from disk division got a talk scheduled at the annual, world-wide internal communication group conference and opened the talked that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division.

the scenario was that communication group was doing everything possible to preserve their terminal emulation install base ... at a time when PCs were becoming much more powerful and there was big rise in distributed computing.

The disk division had come up with several solutions to allow the mainframe datacenter to play in the distributed computing environment, but because the communication group had strategic ownership for everything that crossed the datacenters walls ... they were able to block introduction. As a result, data was fleeing the mainframe datacenters to much more distributed computing friendly platforms and disk division was starting to see double digit per annum drop in disk sales.

misc. past posts mentioning communication group and terminal emulation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation

my wife had been embroiled in similar battles much earlier ... when she had been con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of (mainframe) loosely-coupled (cluster) architecture. The communication group was constantly battling with her about using SNA/VTAM for loosely-coupled/cluster operation. There would then be temporary truces where she would be allowed to use whatever she wanted within the walls of the datacenter ... but the communication group "owned" everything that crossed the datacenter walls.

She didn't remain long in the position ... some of it was the ongoing battles with the communication group and some of it was little uptake of her architecture (except for IMS hot-standby) ... until the much later sysplex. misc. past posts mentioning her peer-coupled shared data architecture
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

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

Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 11 Aug, 2011
Subject: Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/NFGXAn

currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel (by Jared Diamond; I recently finished his later book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) which spends quite a bit of time why/who transitioned from hunter/gatherers to farming, domesticating animals, developed alphabet/writing, kinds of warfare, etc. It has similar feeling to why/who OODA-loop.

recently finished chapter 14, from "equalatarianism to kleptocracy" (aka larger groups evolve hierarchy where those at the top "steal" from the rest) ... aka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy

or MICC/PRCC/FRCC ... mentioned in Feynman thread.
http://lnkd.in/wQX4gZ

One scenario is uptake tends to be faster/more pervasive if there isn't strong/existing competition.

I have weak analogy example involving "electronic commerce". We had worked with two people at Oracle on HA/CMP. They left and joined a small client/server startup where they were responsible for something called "commerce server". We were brought in because the they wanted to do payment transactions on their server; the startup had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use; the result is frequently called "electronic commerce".

Somewhat as result of doing "electronic commerce", we were invited to participate in the X9A10 financial standard working group that had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for ALL retail payments (not just internet, but every possible kind of retail payment). We had a long laundry list of fraud and vulnerabilities not addressed by "SSL" ... and so drawing on experience, formulated a new payment standard that addressed everyone of the vulnerabilities ... besides having significantly higher integrity than "SSL", much simpler to implement than "SSL", and using significantly less network and computational resources than "SSL" (aka high enough integrity for several million/billion dollar transactions but could be performed in the power & elapsed time constraints of metro/transit turnstyle)

There were numerous issues (problems). one was by this time, "SSL" was widely deployed and people didn't understand a lot of the "SSL" shortcomings (trying to unseat incumbent). Another was that this new payment protocol scheme significantly simplified and leveled the payment transaction playing field. A lot of the current players earn huge income based on their privileged position; leveling the existing privileged status quo playing field would have enormous (income) impact on most of the existing players (disruptive change). "SSL" has been primarily used to "hide" transaction information when transmitted over the internet w/o changing/addressing any of the other fraud issues that can happen in payment transactions (little impact on existing status quo and players).

posts in feynman thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#35 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#38 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#39 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#40 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#41 Advice from Richard P. Feynman
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#51 Advice from Richard P. Feynman

misc posts &/or URLs mentioning Boyd and/or OODA-loop
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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

Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 11 Aug, 2011
Subject: Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
Blog: Greater IBM

There have been several accounts that with Future System failure in the early 70s that the old ("watson") culture significantly changed under Opel and Akers

Quotes from Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993:
Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

... snip ...

and another from the same source:
... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr of free and vigorous debate was replaced with sycophancy and make no waves under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in the shadow of defeat

... snip ...

During F/S, I would periodically ridicule their activity ... including drawing analogies with a cult film that had been playing nonstop for a few years down at central sq (in Cambridge) ... and pointing out a lot of the stuff was pure vaporware ... which possibly wasn't particularly career enhancing (in may exit interview with senior exec ... he made reference to they could have forgiven me for being wrong, but they were never going to forgive me for being right).

In the last half of the 80s, top executives were predicting that revenue would double from $60B to $120B primarily on mainframe sales ... and there was tremendous internal building program to double mainframe manufacturing capacity. This was at a time when mainframe sales were already starting to head in the opposite direction (apparently totally unnoticed by top management) ... culminating with the company going into the red in the early 90s.

This period also saw a big uptick in "fast track" executives ... lots of people being quickly rotated through different management positions ... possibly also looking to double the size of top management ranks to go along with the doubling in mainframe manufacturing. This had severe downside on some number of the organizations that were subject to frequent "fast track" rotations.

past posts mentioning "future system"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. past posts mentioning never forgive
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#16 cost of crossing kernel/user boundary
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#14 I am an ageing techy, expert on everything. Let me explain the
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#26 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#48 time spent/day on a computer
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#3 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#6 The history of Structure capabilities
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#34 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009g.html#56 Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#74 My Vintage Dream PC
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#73 And, 40 years of IBM midrange
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#34 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009r.html#6 Have you ever though about taking a sabbatical?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#20 Would you fight?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#58 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#47 origin of 'fields'?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#62 They always think we don't understand
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011c.html#20 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#3 If IBM Hadn't Bet the Company

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

Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 23 Jul, 2011
Subject: Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
Blog: Boyd Disciples

re:
http://lnkd.in/NFGXAn
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#8 Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#59 Why did the OODA-loop tactic grow into a strategy?

In 1990 "computer semiotics", one of the "fathers" of computer artificial intelligence claims that AI was done all wrong because it failed to take into account memory and context. I've frequently related "orient" with "context" .... i.e. person is positioned within their environment ... but individual also positions information and the results of "observation" for constantly updating their internal context.

OODA-loop can be be studied as a sign/code from the standpoint of semiotics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

One of the characteristics of OODA-loop is that it is an acronym with the first letter of each word. Recently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel ... it goes into some amount about alphabet as distinct invention from writing (not all writing has been done using alphabet).

past references to Boyd and/or OODA-loop
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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

"How do you feel about 'gotos'"

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 12 Aug, 2011
Subject: "How do you feel about 'gotos'"
Blog: Old Geek Registry

re:
http://lnkd.in/w2HzCg
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#49 "How do you feel about 'gotos'"

One of the issues with GOTOs is that at some failure point, the computer forensics attempts to backtrack to what was root cause of the failure. Having built debugging tools, failure analysis tools and code analysis tools ... arbitrary GOTOs can make it very difficult to reverse/reconstruct instruction path ("spaghetti code") ... without the addition of additional state information.

At a more global level ... we had worked with two people at Oracle on HA/CMP ... ref (jan92 meeting in ellison's conference room):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

They left and joined a small client/server startup for something called "commerce server". We were brought in because they wanted to do payment transactions on the server, the startup had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use (the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce").

Part of the effort was something called the "payment gateway" ... which sets on the internet and interfaces between internet commerce servers and the payment networks. For the "payment gateway" interaction ... I required that first level problem determination could be performed from trouble desk within five minutes. I did matrix with something like six states with 40 component and required that the implementation either be able to automatically be able to recover from any related problem ... and/or leave enough information that the problem could be localized.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway

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

Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 12 Aug, 2011
Subject: Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?
Blog: Google+

Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/11/cyberwar_fallacies_revealed/

after having been called into a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server; they had also invented this technology they called "SSL" they wanted to use; the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce" ... I coined the term "comfort certificates" referring to the comfort from the appearance of security (not necessarily actual security)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

and at least with respect to payments have used the "naked transaction" metaphor ... going around w/o any protection in an extremely hostile environment ... resulting in an enormous target rich environment for attackers. ... some past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments

we've also used "dual-use" metaphor ... account numbers are used in dozens of business processes at millions of locations around the world ... they are also frequently sufficient for performing fraudulent transactions ... so we've claimed that even if the planet was buried under miles of information hiding encryption, it still wouldn't stop leakage.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#harvest

another metaphor we've used is security proportional to risk; the account databases (frequent target of breaches); the value of the information for merchants is basically profit margin on transaction (possibly a couple dollars/account-transaction). the value of the information to attackers/crooks is the account balance/credit-limit ... frequently at least a couple hundred dollars. As a result, attackers may be able to outspend the defenders by factor of two orders of magnitude (100 times).

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

Silicon Valley's Undertaker: 'We're Anticipating a Major Fallout'

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 13 Aug, 2011
Subject: Silicon Valley's Undertaker: 'We're Anticipating a Major Fallout'
Blog: Google+

Silicon Valley's Undertaker: 'We're Anticipating a Major Fallout'
http://www.pehub.com/115158/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-undertaker-%E2%80%98we%E2%80%99re-anticipating-a-major-fallout%E2%80%99/
and
http://startups.alltop.com/

not sure if it was the same, tuned into middle of bloomberg interview last night and person was going on about residual value of current internet failed firms is drastically less than during the internet bubble (the cost of starting an internet firm has also dropped considerably; no capital assets, everything in the cloud, etc)

didn't mention that after last internet bubble, several investment bankers had several million dollar fines; invest 10s of millions in a firm they pretty much knew would fail, hype-it extensively and then walk away from IPO with couple billion. It would eventually fail in time to be replaced by their next IPO (resembling "pump & dump" on larger scale ... and similar to packaging CDOs to fail and taking out huge CDS bets ... form of stacking the deck).

misc. past posts mentioning "internet bubble"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005.html#20 I told you ... everybody is going to Dalian,China
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#37 The 8008 (was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR-71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#16 Is a Hurricane about to hit IBM ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006g.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#7 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#51 IBM Unionization
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007p.html#39 India is outsourcing jobs as well
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007r.html#36 Students mostly not ready for math, science college courses
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#37 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008e.html#51 was: 1975 movie "Three Days of the Condor" tech stuff
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008f.html#81 Is IT becoming extinct?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#65 How do you manage your value statement?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008n.html#27 VMware Chief Says the OS Is History
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008q.html#55 Can outsourcing be stopped?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009d.html#2 IBM 'pulls out of US'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009i.html#9 Why are z/OS people reluctant to use z/OS UNIX?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#18 A Complete History Of Mainframe Computing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#25 Opinions on the 'Unix Haters' Handbook'
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#37 Young Developers Get Old Mainframers' Jobs
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#63 U.S. students behind in math, science, analysis says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#67 I would like to understand the professional job market in US. Is it shrinking?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010b.html#20 Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#81 search engine history, was Happy DEC-10 Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#53 Of interest to the Independent Contractors on the list
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#84 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#36 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#38 Idiotic programming style edicts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#22 60 Minutes News Report:Unemployed for over 99 weeks!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#41 60 Minutes News Report:Unemployed for over 99 weeks!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#78 TCM's Moguls documentary series
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#59 SSL digital certificates
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011h.html#67 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#8 'Megalomania, Insanity' Fueled Bubble: Munger
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#9 At least two decades back, some gurus predicted that mainframes would disappear in future and it still has not happened
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#28 Happy 100th Birthday, IBM!

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virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 13 Aug, 2011
Subject: Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
Blog: Greater IBM

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#60 Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

I did stint at Boeing in the late 60s, being brought in to help set up some dataprocessing as part of the Boeing Computer Services formation (bringing majority of dataprocessing under independent business unit ... promoting more formal business relationship between dataprocessing operations and dataprocessing user). Both the local Boeing & IBM branch office people told folklore about the announce of 360. The day that 360 was announced, Boeing walked into the salesman's office with an extremely large detailed order (before the salesman even really knew what 360 was). They claimed that the commission on that order (larger than Watson's compensation) prompted Watson to change from commission to sales quota. The following year, another large order, and in the first month, the salesman exceeded quota for the whole year ... and quota adjustment was performed. The salesman then left and formed his own computer services company.

At the time, I thought Boeing Renton datacenter was possibly the largest 360 operation in the world. Later, I would sponsor Boyd's briefings at IBM ... and one of Boyd's biographies describes Boyd doing stint (about the same time I was at Boeing) in command of "spook base" ... described as a $2.5B (around $17B in today's dollars?) windfall for IBM (if it was pure 360 price, it would make spook base ten times larger than Renton). Also $2.5B would have gone a long way to covering the enormous funds pumped into the failed FS effort (there were claims that if any other company had a failure the magnitude of FS ... they couldn't have survived and would no longer be in business).

misc. posts mentioning FS
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. references/posts to Boyd
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Wondering if I am really eligible for this group

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From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 13 Aug, 2011
Subject: Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Blog: Old Geek Registry

re:
http://lnkd.in/CX7Tzf
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#39 Wondering if I am really eligible for this group. I learned my first programming language in 1975

I had done a lot of cp67 as undergraduate in the 60s (that ibm shipped). Then in the 70s, there was a lot of simplification in the cp67->vm370 morph and much of it was dropped.

All during the "future system" period ... I continued to do lots of 360/370 stuff (first cp67 and then converting it all to vm370) while the future system group was killing off 370 stuff (future system) was going to completely replace 370. past posts mentioning future system
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

misc. old email refs to converting my stuff 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

above mentions "csc/vm" ... one of my hobbies was providing production operating systems to internal datacenters ... including the virtual-machine based, world-wide online sales&marketing support HONE systems ... (early on, I was also asked to do some of the early HONE clones at various places around the world). misc past posts mentioning HONE
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

Because of dropping a lot of stuff in the cp67->vm370 morph (ibm user group) SHARE starting doing requirements to have the "wheeler scheduler" released for vm370.

In the wake of the failure of FS ... there was a mad rush to get products back into the 370 hardware & software pipelines ... which resulted in releasing a lot of stuff that I had been doing ... including some the stuff released as "Resource Manager" (aka wheeler scheduler).

Now, because of gov. litigation, there was the 23Jun1969 "unbundling" announcement that starts to charge for (application) software and other stuff; however they managed to make the case that kernel software should continue to be free. misc. past posts mentioning unbundling
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

Killing off stuff during the FS period, is then credited with allowing clone processors to gain market foothold. With the death of FS and mad rush resuming of 370 activity ... there was also decision to start charging for kernel software (as counter to clone processors) ... and my "resource manager" was selected to be initial guinea pig ... and I got to spend some amount of time with legal and business people about business practices/policies for kernel software charging.

There was transition period where different parts of the kernel was charged for and other parts (including those directly responsible for hardware support) was free. Eventually there was transition to charging for all kernel software along with renaming to vm/sp.

Part of the mad rush to recover from FS ... was 303x in parallel with trying to get out 370/xa. 303x channel director was the 370/158 running just the integrated channel microcode (and w/o 370 microcode), 3031 was 370/158 with just the 370 microcode and 2nd 370/158 with just the integrated channel microcode (channel director), 3032 was 370/168 reworked to to use channel director, 3033 started out being 370/168 wiring diagram with 20% faster chips (but with 10* circuits/chip that went unused). Eventually parts of 370/168 logic was redone to take advantage of additional circuits/chip getting 3033 to 50% faster.

Starting in late 70s, Endicott came out with 4341 ... which saw a big explosion with uptake as departmental computers (leading wave of distributed processing). The internal network had been larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until late '85 or early '86 (nearly all vm systems). A big part of that (internal network) the first part of the 80s were vm/4341 systems. misc. past posts mentioning internal network
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

4341 was big headache for POK (and 3033) ... cluster of 4341s had higher aggregate MIP rate, higher aggregate I/O, much larger aggregate memory, much smaller floor space and much lower cost. At one point, POK executives played internal politics cutting in half the allocation for critical 4341 manufacturing component

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virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Wondering if I am really eligible for this group

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 14 Aug, 2011
Subject: Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Blog: Old Geek Registry

re:
http://lnkd.in/CX7Tzf
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011i.html#39 Wondering if I am really eligible for this group. I learned my first programming language in 1975
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#66 Wondering if I am really eligible for this group

misc. ascii references:

EBCDIC and the P-Bit (The Biggest Computer Goof Ever)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM

Bob Bemer and Communication (ASCII)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/ASCII.HTM

That Troublesome "Father of"
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/FATHEROF.HTM

home page
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/index.htm

from above
helped create COBOL (as in "Grandfather of" [1])
coined the words COBOL [2] and CODASYL [3]
invented the ESCape sequence
created the PICTURE clause
helped create and standardize the ASCII character set (as in "Father of" [4])
put the backslash into the ASCII set
helped create the 8-bit per byte standard

... snip ...

re: cp/m & cp/67 .... reference to Kildall using cp/67 at Monterey NPG school in 1972 ... gone 404 but lives on at the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011100440/http://www.khet.net/gmc/docs/museum/en_cpmName.html

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

Wondering if I am really eligible for this group

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 14 Aug, 2011
Subject: Wondering if I am really eligible for this group
Blog: Old Geek Registry

original relational/sql implementation was done up the road from NPG at San Jose Research on vm/370 370/145 machine in the 70s (Codd was also at San Jose Research) misc. past posts about getting to work on System/R in the later 70s
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

with regard to cp/m and dec10 ... there is some influence with nearby MIT CTSS (IBM 7094) some reference here regarding
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/7094.html

Some of the CTSS people then went to the science center on the 4th floor of 545 tech sq (did cp40 on specially modified 360/40 with virtual memory, later morphs into cp67 when standard ibm product with virtual memory becomes available 360/67) ... others of the CTSS went to the 5th floor and did Multics. misc. past posts mentioning science center
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

GML was also invented at the science center in 1969 ... and GML tag processing was added to CMS script document formatingcommand (which traces back to CTSS RUNOFF). GML was chosen because the letters are (also) the first letter of the last names of the inventors. Decade later GML morphs into SGML ... and a decade after that morphs into HTML ... for more, see "first web sever" discussion
http://lnkd.in/8VWQc9
and
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#36 First Website Launced 20 Years Ago Today
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#37 First Website Launced 20 Years Ago Today
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#43 First Website Launced 20 Years Ago Today

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virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

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

From: lynn@garlic.com (Lynn Wheeler)
Date: 11 Aug, 2011
Subject: Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
Blog: Greater IBM

re:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#60 Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011j.html#65 Who was the Greatest IBM President and CEO of the last century?

As mentioned upthread, I sponsored Boyd's briefings at IBM ... large part was in competitive environment, agility and adaptability helps prevail over opponent. Part of the discussion was that American corporate culture was starting to suffer from former Army officers moving up the executive ranks ... having learned their management techniques in WW2.

At the start of WW2, Army was faced with fielding huge numbers with little or no training and needing to leverage few experienced skilled resources. To do this, they created a rigid, top-down, command&control structure, relying on overwhelming resources to prevail (only the few at the very top were assumed to know what they were doing). The ideal objective was to push decisions to the lowest possible level ... as opposed to the claims about sycophancy and make no waves change to corporate culture that happened after FS failure. Also characteristic of American corporate culture has been used to explain recent reports that the ratio of executive to worker compensation had exploded to 400:1 after being 20:1 for a long time (and 10:1 in most of the rest of the world); aka nobody but the top executives know what they are doing.

During early years at IBM, I was told some folklore by somebody familiar with the gov. antitrust litigation. Supposedly one of the other vendor corporate executives testified in the trial, that by the late 50s, every vendor knew that the single most important requirement to be successful in the computer industry was to have a compatible dataprocessing line. However, Watson was the only executive that was able to enforce the requirement; at every other vendor, the executives were not able to force the individual plant managers to toe the compatibility line with regard to their product (instead making optimizations that took advantage of model specific technologies resulting in incompatibilities with other models).

The point was supposedly IBM being the only vendor that was able to achieve the single, most important requirement, that IBM potentially was able to get nearly everything else wrong (like learson & ebcdic/ascii) ... and still prevail.

misc. Boyd references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

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

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