[TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

[TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Jason Stevens <
jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

> Slightly off or on topic, but since you seem to know, and I've never seen
> aix 370 in the eild, did it require VM?
>
It could boot on raw HW.​




> Did it take advantage of SNA, and allow front ends, along with SNA
> gateways and 3270's?
>
​Not sure how to answer this.​  It was an IBM product and could be used
with a lot of other IBM's products.  Generally speaking it was aimed at the
Educational market, although there were some commercial customers, for
instance Intel was reputed to do a lot of the 486 simulation on a TCF
cluster (I don't know that for sure, that was before I worked for Intel).





>
> Or was it more of a hosted TCP/IP accessable system?
>
​Clearly, if you had a PS/2 in the cluster, that was your access point.   I
think it was all mixed up in the politics of the day at IBM between
Enterprise, Workstations, and Entry systems.  TCP/IP and Ethernets were not
something IBM wanted to use naturally.    But the Educational market did
use it and certainly some folks at IBM saw the value.

UNIX was needed for the Education market as was TCP/IP so that going to be
the pointed head of the stick.
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[TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

[jsteve]

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I’ve actually loaded AIX 1.3 for the PS/2 on a model 80 decked out with 16MB of RAM, and an Ethernet board, and honestly It was ‘yet another SYSV’ and it didn’t feel like it had much in common with AIX 3.1 on the RS/6000.  As always by the time I had gotten all the needed bits, Linux was a thing, running Unix on a 386 with ESDI disks felt horribly slow, and Linux had much better support for stuff.  Although if I had the machine when it was the thing to do it’d have been awesome.  Not that I’d probably ever get access to a 370, let alone AIX for the 370 + those i860 boards.

The 80 was a great machine, just too bad that I’m sure they called it the model 80 as it must have weighed 80Kg, and I couldn’t take it with me when I left North America.

Back when I used to work for a certain bank that loved mainframes, they would always harp on about how Unix & C were not only untested, but simply not ready for an environment like the S/390.  As far as they were concerned if it didn’t boot on a mainframe it wasn’t “production grade”.  Oddly enough we also ran things like Novel Netware for VMS (Wish I could have imaged those tapes...), although they were kind of OK with AIX on the RS/6000, but never for anything ‘real’.  It wasn’t until after I had left that I found out that there actually was mainframe UNIX, and if it would work with our ‘awesome’ global SNA network and zillions of terminals it would have been all the better.


Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Clem Cole
Sent: Thursday, 2 March 2017 11:16 AM
To: Jason Stevens
Cc: TUHS main list; Ronald Natalie
Subject: Re: [TUHS] AIX/370 Questions



On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Jason Stevens <jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
Slightly off or on topic, but since you seem to know, and I've never seen aix 370 in the eild, did it require VM?
It could boot on raw HW.​


 
Did it take advantage of SNA, and allow front ends, along with SNA gateways and 3270's?
​Not sure how to answer this.​  It was an IBM product and could be used with a lot of other IBM's products.  Generally speaking it was aimed at the Educational market, although there were some commercial customers, for instance Intel was reputed to do a lot of the 486 simulation on a TCF cluster (I don't know that for sure, that was before I worked for Intel).



 

Or was it more of a hosted TCP/IP accessable system?
​Clearly, if you had a PS/2 in the cluster, that was your access point.   I think it was all mixed up in the politics of the day at IBM between Enterprise, Workstations, and Entry systems.  TCP/IP and Ethernets were not something IBM wanted to use naturally.    But the Educational market did use it and certainly some folks at IBM saw the value.

UNIX was needed for the Education market as was TCP/IP so that going to be the pointed head of the stick.

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[TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

[Ronald Natalie]

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I’m not sure I’d characturize AIX as “just another system V”.   TCF was pretty darned slick and it had most of the contemporary 4BSD features at the time.   It really didn’t have 3270 or other traditional IBM support on the 370 side.    That was the major reason for the TCF.    The normal way you worked on the 370 side was to sit at a AIX PS/2 system and either go in on TCP/IP  or X or just run the 370 programs on the PS/2 via TCF.

[TUHS] AIX/370 Questions

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 10:51 PM, <jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

> I’ve actually loaded AIX 1.3 for the PS/2 on a model 80 decked out with
> 16MB of RAM, and an Ethernet board, and honestly It was ‘yet another SYSV’
>
​Interesting characterization....   It had all of the primary BSDism in
there.  As I said it was intended for the Education market., and it would
have been lost without it.   I never saw anything from a BSD that did not
pretty much just recompile on AIX/386 - but I admit I never pushed it very
hard, since it was not a primary system for me.




> and it didn’t feel like it had much in common with AIX 3.1 on the
> RS/6000.  As always by the time I had gotten all the needed bits, Linux was
> a thing, running Unix on a 386 with ESDI disks felt horribly slow, and
> Linux had much better support for stuff.  Although if I had the machine
> when it was the thing to do it’d have been awesome.  Not that I’d probably
> ever get access to a 370, let alone AIX for the 370 + those i860 boards.
>

​It's too bad you missed one of the coolest tricks that TCF would allow you
to do​.   If you had a running TCF node (370 or 386) with a full install on
it, all you needed to install another node was the boot floppy.    The OS
would load into memory from the boot floppy, send out a couple of packets
on the network (never touching its disk) and the node would join the
cluster and immediately be a part of the system.  If the was disk was
empty, it would start to be populated in the background using replication,
if it had data, then the rebuild protocol started -- al behind the scene.
It meant a node boot was really the time to perform the cluster management
join protocol, which on TCF was fairly fast because it was bounded to 32
nodes.   Later TNC clusters the CMS was a lot more complicated.

All very, very cool.  I do miss some of those ideas.

Clem
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