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From: Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IBM and Amdahl history (Re: What is an N-bit machine?)
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2024 11:51:07 -1000
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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
> OTOH, FS eventually led to S/38 and the System i, which IBM sold
> rather than introducing low-end S/370 (and later s390 and s390x)
> members.  The way that Heinz Zemanek (head of IBM's Vienna Lab until
> 1976) told the story was that IBM was preparing to be divided up if
> they lost the anti-trust action, and introduced S/38 and one other
> line (that I don't remember) in addition to S/370 for that.

one of the last nails in the future system coffin was study by the IBM
Houston Scientific Center that if 370/195 applications were rewritten
for Future System machine made out of the fastest available technology,
it would have throughput of 370/145 (about factor of 30 times slowdown).

After graduating and joining IBM, one of my hobbies was enhanced
production operating systems for IBM internal datacenters ... and was
ask to visit lots of locations in US, world trade, europe, asia, etc
(one of my 1st and long time customers was the world-wide, branch
office, online sales&marketing support HONE systems). I continued to
work on 360/370 all through FS, even periodically ridiculing what they
were doing (it seemed as if the people were so dazzled by the blue sky
technologies, they had no sense of speeds&feeds).

I had done a paged mapped filesystem for CMS and claimed I learned what
not to do from TSS/360 single level store. FS single-level store was
even slower than TSS/360 and S/38 was simplified and slower yet ... aka
for S/38 low-end/entry market there was plenty of head room between
their throughput requirements and the available hardware technology,
processing power, disk speed, etc. S/38 had lots of canned applications
for its market and very high-level, very simplified system and
programming environment (very much RPG oriented).

Early/mid 80s, my brother was regional Apple marketing manager and when
he came into town, I could be invited to business dinners ... including
arguing MAC design with developers (before announce). He had stories
about figuring out how to remotely dial into the S/38 running Apple to
track manufacturing and delivery schedules.

other trivia: late 70s, IBM had effort to move the large variety of
internal custom CISC microprocessors (s/38, low&mid range 370s,
controllers, etc) to 801/risc chips (with common programming
environment). First half 80s, for various reasons, those 801/RISC
efforts floundered (returning to doing custom CISC) and found some of
the 801/RISC chip engineers leaving IBM for other vendors.

1996 MIT Sloan The Decline and Rise of IBM
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-decline-and-rise-of-ibm/?switch_view=PDF
1995 l'Ecole de Paris The rise and fall of IBM
https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm
1993 Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Wars-The-Post-IBM-World/dp/1587981394/

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