intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general 1671

so if you want something of the historical evoluation ... cp-40 was done for a 360-40 with custom modified virtual memory hardware. when the standard virtual memory processor came out, the 360-67 ... cp-40 was retargeted to 360-67 (even tho the virtual memory architecture was somewhat different). bunch of science center stuff

the big monolithic operating systems were sometimes having trouble focusing on specific issues ... in some respects because there is no clearly deliniated architecture and feature-function requirements between the various components.

cp-67 and virtual machine architecture ... provided a microkernel architecture ... with relatively clearly deliniated areas of responsibility for various components. because cp67 had clearly delineated interfaces, responsibilities and duties ... it provided quite stringent security parbreastioning ... something as a side-effect.

in the late 60s, you started seeing cp67 based time-sharing service bureaus ... deliverying online personal computing in highly secure manner to places like the financial and gov. market segments. this continued with the morphing of cp67 to vm370 supporting the 370 computer line. virtual machine parbreastioning providing security parbreastioing for personal computing delivery platform (that was hard to find in other infrastructures).

the other thing that i buttert was that because you could run your environment on the bare metal and under cp67 ... focus was naturally drawn to cp67 pathlengths (how many operating systems do the users focus on the performance difference between running their application with and w-o the operating system ... the traditional answer has been that is just part of the cost of having an operating system).

anyway as a result ... i got to rewrite large portions of the (micro-)kernel code ... in some cases improving pathlength performance by a factor of 100. somewhat enabling this ... was the microkernel implementation made it a lot easier to be able to go thru every line of code and decide what needed rewriting and what didn't. I also got to invent fair share scheduling, new page replacement algorithms, disk arm scheduling stuff ... and all sorts of other interesting stuff ... and it would get picked up and shipped in the standard product.

the personal computing paradigm provided by the virtual machine metaphor also heavily contributed to the invention of various kinds of interactive related stuff. GML (precursor to sgml, html, xml, and the markup language genre) was invented in that environment at the science center in 1968 plus 1.

the internal network technology was also developed for this platform at the science center; the internal network for almost the whole period until sometime mid-85 was larger than arpanet-internet

possible one of the largest time-sharing service delivery operations was also based on this platform was an internal operation called HONE ... it supported world-wide sales, marketing and filed people. In the early days as HONE was preducing clones around the world ... I got to hand deliver some number of the installations ... and supporting hone was one of my hobbies for something like 15 years

the original sql-rdbms (system-r) database was developed at sjr on this platform ... and then there was technology transfer from sjr to endicott for product sql-ds (also on this platform)

later as you go into the 80s, you start seeing mainframes incorporating more and more virtualization related function as part of the native hardware until you eventually arrive with the whole LPAR paradigm ... it is possible to do a subset of virtual machine function ... and split the machine into maybe 10-15 parbreastions. It uses dedicated real storage ... and base-bound technology for real machine storage addresses ... but otherwise allows shared used of processor resources (including options like dedicated specific processors to specific LPARs). Part of this is allowed the same real hardware to support production machine operations concurrent with test operations. Another part was allowing a business operation to parbreastion things into smaller dedicated pieces for more focused manageability.

Note that within an LPAR, it was still possible to run the virtual machine operating system ... which in turn allowed much finer grain parbreastioning. one such example was that a couple years ago ... on a small, resource restricted LPAR they ran a test with the virtual machine operation system ... where they in turn created 42,000 separate LINUX virtual machines.

a couple relatively recent postings mentioning LPAR:

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