From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4ACF7834.80009@conducive.org> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:51:48 +0800 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090823 SeaMonkey/1.1.18 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> References: <<4ACED151.8060901@conducive.org>> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] /sys/include/ip.h 5c(1) LONG POST Topicbox-Message-UUID: 84350d38-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 erik quanstrom wrote: >> lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote: >>>>> but by 1990 with microchannel &c. things were much more closed off. >>>> i thought only one company ever really made microchannel, >>>> and even they weren't terribly in earnest in the end, >>>> except on non-PC things like RS6000. >>> IBM tried to recover control over the PC market by introducing MCA, >>> bargaining that public sentiment would swing in their favour. >> They might have had that in mind as a secondary reason - but I doubt even that. >> > > wikipedia agrees with lucio on this point > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture#Marketshare_issues 'Wikipedia' does not always compute. That article ass u me s that the MCA was needed ONLY for PC's. Wrong answer as far as IBM goes. > >> The majority within IBM never wanted into that part of the market in the first >> place, as it was seen as cannibalizing not only 3XXX terminal sales, but the >> entire, highly profitable, big-iron+interface+network+services infrastructure >> behind said terminals. > > do you have a reference for this? Probably an hpfs-386 disk or three full - but half a century on [1] from my first IBM 701 run, and with Irish Alzheimer's and senile dementia don't expect me to *find* them. > i worked at a company around 1990 > that was heavily into ibm mainframes. (so much so, that they > sold PROFS to ibm.) we all had 3270 terminals, and if you were lucky, > you had a pc. email, calandaring, all that great stuff was done centrally > 1500 miles away on ibm mainframes. the pc could do none of the > criticial functions that the mainframe system could perform. we didn't > have networking for the pc. heck, there was only one machine fat enough > to run windows 3.1, which didn't even do networking. You waz bein' robbed. The secret to high 'PC" peformance as at 1990-94? Fast private network for the WAN. No 'Weendows' 100 MBps TCNS for the LAN. No 'Weendows' Hercules monochrome graphics and DRDOS, else ATI SVGA and OS/2 2.11. No 'Weendows' Did I forget anything? Oh .. ** NO effing 'Weendows' ** No way. No how. No where. > > so even 3 years after the release of microchannel, we would never > have considered pcs as 3270 replacements. i don't remember any > machines that could have even run 3270 emulators, if they existed. A year-one IBM 'PC-1' 8-bit ISA could run 3270 emu just fine - part of what it needed was in the BIOS, and the onboard 64K RAM was enough for block-mode buffers. Just needed a NIC appropriate to the local concentrator, optionally a keyboard swap. Ditto OS/2. 3270 emulation only got 'difficult' if you wanted to run it on *Windows*. > perhaps we were the wiredest ibm site ever, but i think not. and > judging from what i saw, the mca guys would have wasted time > thinking about 3270 emulators. > They didn't have to. MCA-bus machines could emulate the central 370 itself - and anything earlier - that those terminals once connected to. 308X and newer mainframes were another matter. > ah, the summer of broken arrows. good times. > > - erik > Yah - well... I can't edit plaintext files remotely any faster today (Joe, Pico, Nano, Mined) over cable modem ssh internet than I could (BRIEF) over dedicated 56 Kbps fifteen years ago, so 'progress' has been eaten by TCP/IP overhead, Ethernet overhead (world's second worst protocol), congestion, throttling, packet-loss ..and .... GUI's. Died in the wool Plan 9 guys are no doubt ROFL by now at that last part... ;-) Bill [1] In order of first use, IBM 701, WECO M33, Burroughs AN/GSA-51, IBM/MIT Whirlwind II, (AKA MITRE AN/FSQ-7) ....