IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 783

they had 360-67 with dat ... and cp67 for time-sharing. melinda gives some of the history

i've commented before that the 360-67 dat & time-sharing was actually more succesful than possibly many time-sharing systems that might be better known in some of the literature ... number of systems and number of users ... but that the dominance of the corporation's batch customers vastly overshadowed the dat & time-sharing work.

it was a period of rapid growth and getting payroll out and processing financial transactions, checks, etc .. on the batch systems had a much bigger bank for the buck than a lot of the time-sharing stuff. however, eventually reached some saturation point on all the really important work that needs to be done ... and then along comes more entry level computing that can be used for the less important computing.

while the corporations batch market was much larger than the corporations time-sharing market ... that time-sharing market was still larger than some number of the compebreastor's time-sharing market (it just that the magnitude of the batch market dwarfed both for quite some time).

some of the smooth progression was interrupted with the side-track into future system

which was canceled before it was ever announced.

note however, the internal corporate infrastructure was one of the major world-wide users of its own time-sharing product ... and the buttociated networking infrastructure (built on and in conjunction with that time-sharing product) was larger than the whole arpanet-internet from just about the beginning until around the summer of '85.

I've butterted that one of the reasons that the internal network was larger than the arpanet-internet from just about the start ... was that every node in the internal network had a flavor of gateway functionality from the start ... which the arpanet-internet didn't get until the great switch-over on 1-1-83. At the time of the switchover arpanet-internet had approx 250 nodes

which was much smaller than the internal network ... which pbutted the 1000 node mark a little later in 83

for a time even bitnet-earn ... educational network using the internal network technology ... but distinct from the internal network (and not including in size comparisons of the internal network to internet size)

there were some number of commercial time-sharing offerings built on the technology ... but possibly dwarfing all of them was the internal HONE system ... which was online support for world-wide field, sales, and marketing people

at the time of the consolidation of all the US HONE datacenters to cal. in the late 70s ... it was starting to push 40k userids ... and the HONE offering was replicated in numerous countries around the world.

--