The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3868

My interviews with old officemate from Livermore continue. We have been talking about early OSes: they hate the world for destroying their perfect computing environment.

Octopus and Gob, what hacks.....

The only reason why you want the illusion of a dedicated machine is because machines were expensive.

JCL is merely a command or control language. The idea is a scheduling problem.

The problem with your ideals is that the amount of work (or memory or other resource) has not grown what what you can do in what you call a quanta. The world has moved on.

So when, for instance, when we had the Cray 2 with a large amount of memory, we had competing 51% of memory programs. But we also had a 10 min. interactive program limit for smaller processes. So what do users do? Their write their programs to run 9 min. 59 seconds and then checkpoint themselves and then restart.

Helped with graphics and debugging.

Too clean. Has not taken into account messy aspects of code development like programs which fail late in a running cycle and still requie full resources.

3-4 firms had architects who knew they could not design a machine as well as Cray could. So they tried a scaled version of this tact, speed and memory: it was a stupid idea. CRI even bought 1 (Supertek), no 2 or maybe 3 depending how you count.

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