Mainframe Linux Mythbusting Was: Using Java in batch on zOS 3816

Ed Gould

we did a lot of work for vm originally on 138-148 .... besides ecps

there was a lot of investigation trying to make it almost as transparently part of the machine as current day LPAR. ... basically pre-installed with lots of useability stuff on every machine that went out the door

however this was back in the days when corporate still thot they had a chance to kill vm ... and while they allowed endicott to ship ecps support, the idea that every machine that went out the door had it pre-installed was blocked (along with the lots of the usability stuff)

POK had the vm development group in burlington mall shutdown and all the people were told they had to move to POK to work on the (internal only) VMTOOL supporting mvs-xa development (justification was that mvs-xa development couldn't meet schedule unless they had all the vm developers working on it also) ... and there would be no more vm products for customers. endicott managed to pickup some of the vm370 mission and rescue some of the people from having to move to POK (although quite a few stayed in the boston area and went to places like DEC to work on what was to became VMS).

however, this (138-148) was the leading edge of some companies starting to order the boxes in large numbers. this really accelerated in the 4331-4341 time-frame where it wasn't unusual to have customers ordering the boxes in a couple hundred at a time. old reference to one such situation

the issue started becoming if the number of machines increase by two orders of magnitude (100 times) ... where does the two orders of magnitude increase in the number of support people come from?

this period also saw a big explosion in the number of vm-4341s on the internal network

which was nearly almost all vm machines already. at the time the arpanet cutover to internetworking protocol on 1-1-83, there was possibly 100 arpanet nodes with somewhere between 100 and 255 connected system hosts

however the internal network was almost 1000 nodes by that time ... almost all vm (and non-sna) machines. a recent thread

vax was also selling into that same mid-range market (as 4331 and 4341). there was some study that 4341 was better price-performance and a claim that something like 11,000 vax sales should have been 4341s ... recent post mentioning the