IBM Engineers

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Thu Apr 8 11:26:23 2004

>>>>> "William" == William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org> writes:

>> As a former DEC guy, I certainly know the power of marketing, and
>> the damage a CEO can do to a company if he claims that marketing
>> doesn't matter. But I wouldn't confuse marketing excellence with
>> engineering excellence. CDC and IBM had one each -- opposite
>> ones.

 William> My point was not really the marketing aspect (although it is
 William> probably the biggest aspect), but the engineering aspect. As
 William> someone pointed out, the CDC 6600 does one thing well -
 William> speed. The same is true for just about any CDC
 William> mainframe. The things, however, were crap in most other
 William> aspects. They were not as reliable as IBMs, the operating
 William> systems were nothing to brag about, ...
 William> IBM did things fairly properly, even if it did take an army
 William> of people.

Well, that's one point of view.

The Cybers weren't just the world's best compute engines by a large
margin. They also have excellent I/O performance. Show me another
1965 vintage computer that can support timesharing with 600 active
users and excellent interactive response time... (I'm talking about
the PLATO system here -- which ran 600 users on a 6400, not even a
6600, though the I/O is the same for either.)

As for the OS, personally I prefer clean and straighforward over
baroque and insecure. Certainly IBM offered the latter. The OS/360
manual clearly showed a nice security hole (simple user application
access to supervisor mode) which still worked quite nicely in OS-VS2
on the 370 in 1977 when I tried it at the U of I. (Hint: EXCP SIO
appendage.) Perhaps MS learned about OS security from IBM?

            paul
Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 11:26:23 BST