Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
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 08:24:46 -1000
Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler
Lines: 72
Message-ID: <87iks5j3td.fsf@localhost>
References: <viao3r$na9e$4@dont-email.me>
	<memo.20241128220827.12904a@jgd.cix.co.uk> <87frnbyo54.fsf@localhost>
	<2024Nov29.082228@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Injection-Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2024 19:24:49 +0100 (CET)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="5ef39dc664705ac529c6d4a101cd012c";
	logging-data="1260864"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1834rmXxvlfuLFDtagVW+MpDorIMouBZQg="
User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:9cXLtY1d1ap1NzJjLF1VaFEb9jA=
	sha1:f8gwCivQclZ77oA21bto2uId32k=
Bytes: 5160

anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
> OTOH, Amdahl corporation did not make it until the end of the century
> (at least not on its own; it became a subsidiary of Fujitsu), for two
> reasons having to do with IBM not walking away from the S/360 family:

a little history drift ... IBM communication group had corporate
strategic ownership of everything that crossed the datacenter walls and
was fiercely fighting off client/server and distributed computing
(trying to preserve its dumb terminal paradigm). Late 80s, a senior disk
engineer got a talk scheduled at a world-wide, internal, annual
communication group conference supposedly on 3174 performance but opened
the talk with statement that the communication group was going to be
responsible for the demise of the disk division; the disk division was
seeing data fleeing datacenter to more distributed computing friendly
platforms with drops in disk sales. The disk division had tried to come
up with a number of solutions, but they were constantly being vetoed by
the communication group.

One of the disk division executive's (partial) countermeasure was
investing in distributed computing startups that would use IBM disks
(and would periodically ask us to drop in on investments to see if we
could help).

It wasn't just disks but whole mainframe industry and a couple years
later IBM had one of the largest losses in the history of US
corporations and was being reorged into the 13 "baby blues" (a take-off
on the AT&T baby blues and its breakup a decade early) in preparation
for breaking up the company.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101120231857/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977353,00.html
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,977353-1,00.html
We had already left IBM but get a call from the bowels of Armonk
(corporate hdqtrs) asking if we could help with the breakup. Before we
get started, the board brings in the former AMEX president as CEO to try
and save the company, who (somewhat) reverses the breakup.

note AMEX had been in competition with KKR for LBO (private-equity)
take-over of RJR and KKR wins, it then runs into some difficulties and
hires away AMEX president to help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fall_of_RJR_Nabisco
later as IBM CEO, uses some of the same methods used at RJR:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181019074906/http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

In the 80s, IBM mainframe hardware was majority of IBM revenue but by
the turn of the century it was a few percent of revenue and dropping.
Around 2010-2013, mainframe hardware was a couple percent of IBM revenue
and still dropping, although the mainframe group was 25% of revenue (and
40% of profit) ... aka software and services.

.... IBM was turning into a financial engineering company

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit
claims. Lawsuit accuses Big Blue of cheating investors by shifting
systems revenue to trendy cloud, mobile tech
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsuit/
IBM has been sued by investors who claim the company under former CEO
Ginni Rometty propped up its stock price and deceived shareholders by
misclassifying revenues from its non-strategic mainframe business - and
moving said sales to its strategic business segments - in violation of
securities regulations.

flash-back: mid-80s, the communication group had been blocking release
of mainframe TCP/IP ... but when that was reversed, it changed its
tactic and said that since they had strategic ownership of everything
that crossed datacenter walls, it had to be released through them; what
shipped got aggregate of 44kbut/sec using nearly whole 3090 processor. I
then add support for RFC1044 and in some tuning tests at Cray Research
between Cray and 4341, got sustained 4341 channel media throughput using
only modest amount of 4341 processor (something like 500 times
improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed).

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