From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Subject: [COFF] In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2019 09:42:47 +1100 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1911160930080.408@aneurin.horsfall.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <99f46273-e2a4-4a82-f827-8c00fb48f633@kilonet.net>
On Fri, 15 Nov 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> How did Amdahl get away with making 360 clones? I would have thought
> that IBM would have crushed his bones into dust.
Clones in the way that they were able to run OS/360; that's about all that
I can remember. Hitachi also came out with a clone, as did no doubt many
other manufacturers; after all, the instruction set was public
knowledge...
I dimly recall that some opcodes had undocumented side-effects, so in
theory (and likely in practice) OS/360 could detect whether it was running
on a clone, and "fail to proceed" (in Rolls Royce terms).
My favourite /360 instruction on our customised system was "SVC 254" which
got you supervisor mode (long story, depending upon the statute of
limitations). The operators and I had a love-hate relationship i.e. they
loved to hate me :-) Soon after I got a job with them i.e. better to keep
me inside the tent than out...
-- Dave
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-15 22:42 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-15 21:54 dave
2019-11-15 22:26 ` krewat
2019-11-15 22:42 ` dave [this message]
2019-11-16 7:23 ` peter
2019-11-16 16:25 ` clemc
2019-11-17 5:14 ` dave
2019-11-18 16:42 ` clemc
2019-11-18 18:45 ` bakul
2019-11-18 19:19 ` clemc
2019-11-19 20:21 ` peter
2019-11-19 23:17 ` cym224
2019-11-21 19:48 ` dave
2019-11-15 23:19 ` clemc
2019-11-15 23:47 ` krewat
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2018-11-15 22:33 dave
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