IBM Plugs Big Iron to the College Crowd 755

there was the joke that (at one time) a significant percentage of ibm products originated at datacenters (both customer and internal) which were then handed over to "development" groups to maintain and support as products.

at various times during the late 70s and the 80s, there were studies of customer enhancements to VM (not in the product) compared to internal corporate enhancements to VM (also not in the product). the summary was that the KLOCs of internally distributed vm enhancements were about the same size as the KLOCs of customer distributed enhancements (on things like share tape).

over the years there were sometimes easier avenues for internally developed code to leak into the product (as opposed to customer developed enhancements leaking into the product). part of the context was that cp67 (and then vm) shipped as source and source maintained. it wasn't until the OCO (object code only) issues starting in the very late 70s that started to turn that around

the internal network was mostly VM-based machines and VM-based networking ... with the batch operating system machines (& their networking paradigm) mostly restricted to edge nodes. some mention of '83 and internal network hitting 1000th node:

other internal network posts

besides the huge proliferation of vm use inside the company ... there was also the custom tailored HONE system that provided worldwide support for field, sales, and marketing people (it quickly came to pbutt that mainframe orders couldn't even be submitted w-o having pbutted thru HONE). HONE was a large vm-based time-sharing service supporting sales and marketing world wide.

for over a decade, i had a hobby providing custom tailed operating system and other stuff for HONE. i also buttisted in the proliferation around the world. when EMEA hqtrs moved from the states to paris ... I handled much of the HONE cloning for the new hdqtrs in the new bldg. in La Defense. I got to work on the initial hone installation in Japan.

in the 80s, some new, incoming HONE executive ran across some reference to me ... and raised the issues about the worldwide HONE infrastructure having dependency on single person's hobby, who wasn't part of the organization and there were no MOUs between the different responsible organizational executives (between HONE and whoever my current chain of command might be at the time ... who possibly didn't even know what HONE was and-or that it existed).

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