[TUHS] one element of one of M factions of N companies [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA
Charles H Sauer
sauer at technologists.com
Wed Nov 6 08:11:11 AEST 2019
Clem says today "It was then I realized IBM was N different companies,
each competing with each other." He's said that to me before and I then
responded "Actually, it was more like M competing factions within N
competing companies."
It has been illuminating, surprising, but not shocking, the last week of
so, to learn from from posts here, that AIX/370 was hard to get and
mostly a university offering. What we (AIX people associated with RT/PC
and then RS/6000) were told was that "everybody", especially Federal
customers, wanted what became known as TCF (the original Locus work) for
370 and PS/2. I remember one Federal Systems Division person who seemed
especially effective as a Locus advocate. I'd always assumed AIX/370 and
AIX PS/2 became more available than reported here, but I left IBM before
they were released.
Enumerating factions/companies, just regarding AIX & Unix, there were
the Federal Systems faction/company, the academic factions/company
(primarily two factions, BSD & TCF, in Palo Alto), the PS/2
faction/company, the Rochester System/38->AS/400 faction/company, the
Austin development lab, several Research locations (primarily Yorktown), ...
And in LCC there were the firewalled TCF/TNC entities.
It would be interesting to know more from the TCF folks at LCC. With
Jerry's passing, if there is to be further clarity on what happened with
AIX/370, it would probably have to come from Bruce Walker or Greg Thiel.
I don't think I've had contact with either since I left IBM in 1989.
CHS
On 11/5/2019 11:30 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 10:40 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
> <mailto:gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I've been trying to track down a copy of AIX/370 for
> that emulator, especially since I do run VM/370 Release 6 on it. One
> of the people in the community indicated that it was a product
> I was also told, for an IBM customer to try to get the product was quite
> difficult. IBM sales basically tried really hard to not provide it and
> you had to know about it and know you to ask to get it. Charlie may
> know more, but he was working on AIX/RS-6000 which as has been pointed
> out was a separate code base.
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