I was waiting for Clem to weigh in on this, since I assume he knows more about it than I
do.
I wasn’t paying much attention to Unix on 370, but my impression has always been that
there were multiple 370 ports. The only ones that were completed, to my knowledge, were
the ESS one and AIX/370. I don’t know of the ESS one being available outside of AT&T.
I don’t know anything about the compilers used, would assume they were PCC-based, even if
provided by IBM.
In 1989, when I left IBM, there were certainly plenty of 370 people inside IBM that would
have understood 370 channels. I would have thought that to still be true in 1991, even
with the buyout packages that encouraged people to retire. (It wasn’t until Gerstner
became CEO in April 1993 that IBM abandoned the “full employment” traditions.)
What Clem says about the smaller footprint of devices rings true. There were also likely
customers that wanted to run AIX alongside other VMs, just as there were customers who
wanted to run MVS alongside other VMs.
Charlie
From: Clem Cole
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2017 10:37 AM
To: Noel Chiappa
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX on S/370
On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 11:05 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
Maybe this is my lack of knowledge of VM showing, but how did having VM help
you over running on the bare hardware?
As an IBM person, I would ask Charlie to answer here, but I believe the answer from the
Locus side was tools primarily and I also think they did not have to support as much
specific HW (i.e. smaller foot print of devices).