3 ms·

> Amdahl also benefited from antitrust settlements between IBM and the Justice Department, which required IBM to make its mainframe software available to compet

• simonh 11y ago
  It meant that Amdahl's (and other manufacturer's) customers could buy IBM software and run it on non-IBM hardware.
  • acqq 11y ago
    I still don't know the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust... "After the unbundling, IBM software was divided into two main categories: System Control Programming (SCP), which remained free to customers, and Program Products (PP), which were charged for." So what were Amdahl's customers able to get? Didn't they get System Control Software from IBM (1)? Was it free for them? 1) I've found the Computerworld 1 Nov 1976 article mentioning IBM's MVT 21.8 running on Amdahl's 470.
    • simonh 11y ago
      SCP remained bundled with the hardware, so you only got it if you bought the hardware, but if you bought the software it belonged to you so you could run it on whatever hardware you liked. I suppose if you bought both an IBM and a non-IBM mainframe you could take the SCP from IBM and run it on a non-IBM box, but I'm not sure if that was addressed in the ruling. The point was to decouple software sales from hardware sales when it came to commercial (sold) software.
• rodgerd 11y ago
  Very old versions of IBM OSes (including MVS and VM) are available for free, much like Sun would subsequently give away SunOS.