5 ms·
This is intriguing! What was the market for this machine? The PC and mainframe seem so different in their likely users.
by klelatti 5y ago
This is intriguing! What was the market for this machine? The PC and mainframe seem so different in their likely users.
- r2sk5t 5y agoMainframes are expensive and busy running production workloads. Offloading development and test to franken-PC's running 370 emulation had large cost saving potential. Plus, back in those days the IBM sales organization had a ton of power and could sell anything, the margins were always fantastic, and large numbers of sales reps earned more than the IBM CEO.
- klelatti 5y agoThanks! This makes a lot of sense. I worked for an IBM marketing unit in the 1980s so saw some of this up close!
- rbanffy 5y agoWhy suffer with MS-DOS when you could run VM/370 on your PC? IBM still sells emulators, now software-based, for companies that do mainframe software development. And they are freakishly expensive.
- Koshkin 5y agoFor the rest of us, there is Hercules! http://www.hercules-390.org/ http://www.hercules-390.org/
- rbanffy 5y agoTrue, but there's no legal way to run z/OS on it.
- klelatti 5y agoI used to be involved in Mini sales (System 36). Selling DOS based PCs was a doddle compared to these singularly sluggish and ridiculously heavy machines.
- anyfoo 5y agoI'm not sure VM/370 is less suffering. For example, I run MVS in the typical old 3.8j version (the last public domain one, from I think 1981) as an enthusiast, and it's just amazing how little abstraction there was. MS-DOS practically cuddles you, having an actual file system!
- PhantomGremlin 5y agoit's just amazing how little abstraction there was That was deliberate and made a lot of sense. The functionality was split between two programs. The VM/370 part emulates the raw machine. CMS is the "operating system" on top of the VM "hardware". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversational_Monitor_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversational_Monitor_System