IBM Plugs Big Iron to the College Crowd 753

SAA in the late 80s and early 90s was still trying to put the client-server genie back in the bottle

along with pushing T-R configurations with 300 stations ... which help support the concept of just sufficient aggregate bandwidth for doing GUI to relatively thin clients.

this was also helping protect the established terminal emulation paradigm and installed market.

in the mid-80s one of the senior people from the disk division gave a presentation at an an annual, internal world-wide communication division conference ... where he made the claim that the head of the communication division was going to be responsible for the rest of the disk division.

the scenario was that terminal emulation provided an effective initial market penetration stategy for the original PCs ... but as PCs sophistication and PC applications matured ... the terminal emulation paradigm was becoming a boat anchor. lots of environments with evolving distributed applications were finding the terminal emulation spiggot way too restrictive and were starting to replicate data out in the distributed environment. this created a big explosion in the demand for disk drives out in the distributed environment and at the same time contributed to a flatning of glbutt house disk (and eventually application and other hardware) growth

the disk division created a number of products that would drastically improve the ability for distributed processing to access data in the glbutt house ... and nearly all of them were vetoed by the communication division .... the disk division having strategic responsibility for data within the glbutt house ... but the communication division had strategic responsibility for connectivity in excess of some distance, effectively anything leaving-entering the glbutt house.

collection of past postings on the terminal emulation subject

besides having proprietary protocols and terminal emulation install base to protect ... a contributing issue was some number of large establishments believed the official decrees by numerous world govs. that tcp-ip would be eliminated and replaced by osi.

we were inolved in trying to get HSP (high speed protocol) as a work iterm in x3s3.3 (iso chartered ansi organization responsible for protocols relating to osi layer 3 & 4). ISO (& ISO chartered organizations) had directive that standardization work couldn't be done on stuff that violated the OSI model. HSP violated and was turned down because (at least):

1) hsp would go directly from transport interface to the lan mac interface. the lan mac interface corresponded to somewhere in the middle of layer 3-networking. hsp bypbutted the layer3-layer4 interface and therefor violated osi.

2) hsp would support internetworking (aka IP). internetworking doesn't exist at all in the OSI model. supporting internetworking violates the OSI model.

3) hsp would go directly from the transport interface to the lan mac interface. the lan mac interface corresponds to approx. something in the middle of osi layer 3-networking. lan mac interfaces violate OSI model, therefor hsp supporting lan-mac interface also violated OSI model.

misc collected postings on hsp, osi, etc

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