[rescue] Interesting bit on Multics

[vance at neurotica.com]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Mike Meredith wrote:

> > I have a whole bunch of friends who have firsthand experience with IBM
> > management trying to kill off VM.  I live in Poughkeepsie, so I know a
> > lot of longtime IBM mainframe OS people.
>
> He's worked electronically in Poughkeepsie (he's said that the great
> thing about networks is that he could work all over the world without
> leaving his desk in Hursley). For a couple of years in the 1970's he
> worked at Yorktown Heights which is pretty close (at least from this
> distance).

Yorktown Heights isn't that far from here by any stretch of the
imagination.  It's about a 45 minute drive.

> > Indeed.  It's useful for any kind of IBM mainframe development.  You
> > get your own machine.  You can do whatever you want to it.
>
> It's shame that the equivalent of VM didn't spread ... it'd be useful on
> all sorts of machines.

I've used partitioning and virtualization on other platforms.  It's more
useful on mainframes.

> > > (I'm excluding the 6 months he was with the OS/2 PM group, learning
> > > C and hating it)
> >
> > Does he hate OS/2?  Or just PM?
>
> C .. he says it compares unfavourably with PL/1 (actually one of the IBM
> internal-only PL/1 varients). He didn't mind OS/2 too much except he
> wasn't best pleased when they took away his 3279(?) terminal and
> replaced it with an OS/2 machine.

He could've put a 3270-layout keyboard on it and run fullscreen tn3270,
but I guess that just wouldn't be the same.  8-)

Peace...  Sridhar