DOS360: Forty years 531

lots of 370-148 were 512k and sometimes even a mbyte (memory technology getting used was cheaper) and 370-168 wasn't unusual to have 4mbytes.

i worked on microcode for virgil-tully (aka 138-148) buttociated with the vm performance buttist. another feature of 148 was that it had significantly faster floating point than 145 ... and was targeted as compebreastive machine in world trade markets against clone 370s.

recent posts mentioning 148 microcode buttists

as part of the effort, i got to spend quite a bit of time running around the world doing 138-148 business forcast analysis with various organizations. There was some big difference between how the sales and marketing business was done in the US and how sales and marketing business was done in the rest of the world.

In the US, yearly business forcasts rolled up from the branch offices to the regions and then to DP hdqtrs ... and that information was provided to the manufactoring plants for resource and capacity planning for the upcoming year. If sales business people were wrong, the manufactoring plants were responsible for the difference.

In world trade, the country sales forcasts were basis for placing orders with the manufactoring plants (each country bought machines from manufactoring). The machines were then built and shipped to the countries ordering them. If forcasts were too high ... the unsold machines were on the books of the country that ordered them ... not on the books of the manufactoring plant.

One of the things that became very apparent was the people doing sales forcasts in world trade countries were quite a bit more dllligent than the people doing sales forcasts in the US; aka in world trade their jobs could ride on how accurate the forcasts were (since world trade countries bought and carried the inventory corresponding to the sales forcasts)).

In the US, since the forcasts were not held accountable against the marketing-sales organization (i.e. manufactoring plants carried the inventory not the sales organizaiton) ... there was much less erquirement for accuracy in the forcasts. US sales forcasts tended to be much more aligned with corporate strategic statements than possibly with what they felt customers might actually be expected to buy. The result was manufactoring tended to discount the accuracy of US sales forcasts and tended to duplicate the forcasting effort for US sales i.e. to try and come up with accurate numbers ... rather than numbers that possibly tended to support the current corporate strategic thinking.

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