3 ms·

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

by 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.