IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 782

ibm would frequently get the science and engineering of manufactoring production extremely optimized (lots of studies of the manufactoring process, yields, quality, optimizations, etc) ... so the truth might just be the opposite; processors at the knee of the technology curve were the most amenable mbutt production technology. the high end tended to have much higher upfront R&E costs (pushing the technology) and techniques frequently were much less adaptable to really high volume manufactoring techniques.

The high-end tended to have lower volumes that the mid-range (which almost by definition tended to be at the knee of the price-performance curve) ... and so it was much more difficult to recover the larger upfront R&E costs and-or justify upfront costs of developing extremely high volume manufactoring techniques.

this gets more complicated later in large single chip VLSI designs ... where the complexity and performance of large chips can go up ... but if they manage to capture sufficient market volume ... it can justify huge upfront R&E (both chip design and manufactoring efficiencies) ... and the market volume then can actually result in lower per item price.

the clone market was somewhat different ... he was coming into a market that had large install base of MVS & virtual memory at the high-end. in that period, there was a joke that an avg. MVS shop required an avg. 20 IBMers as part of the care & feeding.

while unbundling had started seperate pricing for application and services ... kernel software was nominally free (modulo the number of vendor staff needed to keep in running well). amdahl first big uptake was in the technical MTS market.

there were two non-strategic virtual memory systems developed for 360-67 ... one was cp67 at the cambridge science center and the other was MTS at UofMich. MTS was ported to 370 virtual memory and was installed at some number of univ. Going after the MTS accounts, Amdahl didn't have to fight customer problems with the large vendor MVS staff not being around any longer. cp67 had morphed into vm370 ... for virtual memory 370s ... and was offered by IBM ... there were large number of places in marketing where it was viewed as non-strategic and customers provided the majority of their own support ... w-o a lot of vendor hand-holding.

the penetration of amdahl into "true blue" accounts was yet to happen when i was getting ready to release the resource manager. one of ibm's premier, extremely large, true blue accounts was considering an amdahl order. This sort of prompted the whole transition to also charging for kernel software and the resource manager and I got picked to be the guinea pig.

note ... this customer had so many real true-blue MVS systems in the datacenter (in addition to vm) ... I don't think that the customer figured that if one of the machines was a different color ... it would drastically reduce the number of vendor people helping with the care and feeding of MVS. i got to be pretty good friends with customer people at the account ... i was being encouraged to drop by and talk to them as frequently as possible, i think somebody was hoping that if the customer got to really like me, they might cancel the amdahl order (staving off amdahl being able to break out of the fringe techy market into the real true-blue world).

recent past posts about unbundling announcement on 6-23-68 plus 1 ... but charging for kernel software didn't start to happen until the resource manager.

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