The midseventies SHARE survey 79
the comments in the buffer overrun thread about patches take me back in time. around 1970, the programmers where i worked got Sunday evening hands-on time (during the week, testing was...
amdahl gave a talk at mit in the early 70s and was asked a number of questions about the justification he used with VCs for funding his new company to make mainframe clones. he had some comment about that there was something like $100billion already invested on ibm mainframe software applications and that even if ibm walked away from 360-370 tomorrow ... that there would be enuf software applications continued to exist to keep his company in business until the year 2000.
so with a little hind-sight ... one might conjecture with regard to comment about ibm walking away from 360-370 was in reference to the future system project:
which was going to completely replace 360-370 with something that was more radical and different than 360-370 than the introduction of 360. possibly, in fact, amdahl motivation for forming a 360 clone company possibly was some disagreement over the future system strategy (i.e. future system strategy may be considered one of the main motivations for the formation of the mainframe clone business).
now there have been some references that the motivation for the future system strategy was the clone controller business (plug compatible controller, pcm) ... a couple specific refs:
... which in the past, i've gotten blame for helping spawn:
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