On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 9:13 PM, Jason Stevens <jsteve@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.