[TUHS] Unix, IBM, 370

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Thaks Clem.

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 7:11 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> > Tom,
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > AIX/370 existed and I *think* would boot on bare metal instead of running
> > on top of VM.  I don't know what, if any, relationship it had to the
> > Locus work. (In the late '80s I worked at a university computing center
> > with VMS, Suns, and IBM gear; so I'm recalling what I heard. I never
> > actually saw AIX/370 running.)
> >
> AIX/370 and AIX/386 were done for IBM under contract by Locus Computing
> Corporation (a.k.a. LCC)
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Computing_Corporation> .  And yes,
> most customers that I knew ran it bare metal.

Glad to know that I remembered correctly.

In the early 90s I worked teaching multi-vendor Unix courses. One
frustration was that AIX on the 370 and AIX on the PS/2 were essentially
the same as each other but very different from AIX on the RS/6000
machines.  A co-worker and I wrote a short essay about if IBM made
cooking equipment:

	The IBM Industrial Furnace and the IBM camping stove
	would be almost, but not quite entirely, totally different
	from the IBM Home Oven.

Or something like that. I can't find the original.

> Because of TCF (Transparent Computing Facility), PS/2 based PC were
> clustered with the 370s, under a single system image (i.e. up to 32
> processors of any time, looked to the world like a single processor).   The
> OS looked at the binary and found a properly provisioned system in the
> cluster to execute it.  So you could have require option hardware that only
> one node might have, and the process would be migrated to that node.  It
> also meant nodes could and be added and removed dynamically.

Very cool.

> The ideas were recreated as 14 different technologies called Transparent
> Network Computing (TNC) that would end up in the FOSS community and added
> to Linux 2x kernel as: OpenSSI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSI>

Am I wrong, or does nobody actually use this today? The opessi.org
home page link from Wikipedia just seems to hang. And the files on the
SourceForge page are 5 years old.

Thanks,

Arnold