[TUHS] one element of one of M factions of N companies [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

[Charles H Sauer <sauer@technologists.com>]

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@gmail.com 
> <mailto:gregg.drwho8@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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