[rescue] San Antonio, TX area rescue

[Stephen D. B. Wolthusen]

Hi,

On 02-Dec-2002 Dave McGuire wrote:

>> IBM hasn't always been an first or most successful to innovate. In 
>> some cases they had to be dragged along kicking and screaming by their
>> customers.
> 
>    I believe you've misinterpreted me; perhaps I wasn't clear.  I never 
> intended to state that IBM made these innovations...only that IBM's 
> mainframes are just about the only current designs that make use of 
> them.

True (although yes, we can quibble about the larger-scale systems e.g. from Sun
and Fujitsu - these are fairly balanced if you configure them correctly, and
fault isolation and tolerance is also quite good). 

>    This is a topic of intense personal interest to me, that I've studied 
> at length...so please share any thoughts you may have, if you're so 
> inclined.

Don't have that much time though I'd love to - but the essential insight here
is that IBM is exactly what its acronym stands for - *business* machines.
Their engineering exists to serve business, period. 

They had and still have lots of talent in the enterprise systems division and
folks at the pickle factory like Guru Rao (and heck, yes, also management:
Michael Desens and before him Kevin Carswell) have done a remarkable job over
the past few years to not only keep mainframes alive but actually increase the
installed base by some metrics.

A number of links that might be of interest, though, can be found at:

 - http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/hist.html

This site has, among others Bell et al.'s ``Computer Engineering''. It has
been out of print for a *long* time and my copy will never leave my house.
Unfortunately, Bell had a humongous ax to grind at the time, so some of the more
fascinating stuff on the PDP-10 got short shrift (a bunch of documentation and
link farm is maintained by Joe Smith at http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/). That page
also has a copy of Thornton's book on the CDC6600.

Also, I'm sure you're aware of the books put out by IBM's corporate history
group (mostly Emerson Pugh) on a number of aspects of mostly early systems up
to the 360s heyday. 

-- 

        later,
        Stephen

Stephen Wolthusen (stephen at wolthusen.com)