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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: third system syndrome, interactive use, The Design of Design
Date: Wed, 8 May 2024 02:56:15 -0000 (UTC)
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According to MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com>:
>> TSS was a disaster due to an extreme case of second system syndrome,
>> but Michigan's MTS and IBM skunkworks CP/67 worked great.
>
>TSS at CMU was extensively rewritten in assembly and became quite
>tolerable--hosting 30+ interactive jobs along with a background
>batch processing system. When I arrived in Sept 1975 it was quite 
>unstable with up times less than 1 hour. 2 years later it would run
>for weeks at a time without going down.

For reasons I do not want to try to guess, AT&T did the software
development for the 5ESS phone switches in a Unix system that sat on
top of TSS. After IBM cancelled TSS, AT&T continued to use it as some
sort of special order thing. At IBM there were only a handful of
programmers working on it, by that time all quite experienced, and I
hear that they also got rid of a lot of cruft and made it much faster
and more reliable.

At the same time, IBM turned the skunkworks CP/67 into VM/370 with a
much larger staff, leading to predictable consequences.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly