On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 7:11 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

Tom,

Thanks.

AIX/370 existed and I *think* would boot on bare metal instead of running
on top of VM. I don't know what, if any, relationship it had to the
Locus work. (In the late '80s I worked at a university computing center
with VMS, Suns, and IBM gear; so I'm recalling what I heard. I never
actually saw AIX/370 running.)

AIX/370 and AIX/386 were done for IBM under contract by Locus Computing Corporation (a.k.a. LCC) . And yes, most customers that I knew ran it bare metal.

Because of TCF (Transparent Computing Facility), PS/2 based PC were clustered with the 370s, under a single system image (i.e. up to 32 processors of any time, looked to the world like a single processor). The OS looked at the binary and found a properly provisioned system in the cluster to execute it. So you could have require option hardware that only one node might have, and the process would be migrated to that node. It also meant nodes could and be added and removed dynamically.

The ideas were recreated as 14 different technologies called Transparent Network Computing (TNC) that would end up in the FOSS community and added to Linux 2x kernel as: OpenSSI