paul c <toledobythesea (AT) oohay (DOT) ac> writes:
clone controllers were supposedly primary motivation for future system
project ... an extrodinary complex machine with complex instructions.
future system was targeted at completely replacing 360/370 and as
different from 360 as 360 had been different from prior computer
generations. future system was canceled w/o ever being announced
.... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

Amdahl gave a talk in large MIT auditorium in the early 70s about
leaving ibm and starting his own clone processor company. he was asked
what justification he used with investors regarding his company. he
replied that that ibm mainframe customers had already invested $200B in
developing mainframe software ... and even if ibm were to completely
walk away from 360 (which might be construed as veiled reference to
future system project), that would be enough software to keep him in
business through the end of the century.

it has been claimed that the pre-occupation with future system (going to
completely replacing 360/370) allowed the 370 product pipeline to go
dray. with the demise of the future system effort, there was mad rush to
get products back into the 370 hardware and software pipeline. However,
the lack of 370 products is claimed to have contributed to allowing
clone processors (like amdahl's) to gain a foothold in the market.

I've also claimed that big motivation for John doing 801/risc was to go
in the opposite extreme from what was going on with future system. lots
of past posts mentioning 801, risc, iliad, romp, rios, power, power/pc,
etc http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

this is old email mentioning the mip lisp machine group trying to get
801/risc chips
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#email790711

for other drift ... this talks about shootout between QBE & system/r
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_...-Shoot-ou.html

original relational/sql was done on vm370 ... and compare&swap was part
of the 370 instruction set. The discussion regarding compare&swap (in the
above) strayed a bit (& got the details wrong).

charlie had invented compare&swap instruction doing parallel, fine-grain
multiprocessor locking work on cp67 (360/67 virtual machine precursor to
vm370) at the science center ... misc. past posts mentioning the science
center (note compare&swap name was chosen because CAS are charlie's
initials)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

initial attempts to get compare&swap into 370 architecture were
rebuffed. the favorite son operating system claiming that test&set
instruction was more than adequate for multiprocessor operation. the
challenge was that to get compare&swap instruction into 370
architecture, a non-multiprocessor specific use needed to be
created. Thus was born the example use for application use ... still
included in current principles of operation.
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-b...20040504121320

since then many hardware architectures have implemented comapre&swap (or
very similar instructions) and have been widely adapted by multithreaded
applications (including most DBMS implementations) ... regardless of
whether running in single processor or multiprocessor environment. misc
past posts mentioning multiprocessor work and/or compare&swap
instruction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

misc. past posts mentioning original relational/sql implementation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
....
One of his long-time associates told me that a big part of the early
purpose was to build the then big expensive processors and peripherals
much cheaper by eliminating most micro-code then selling them for 10%
less than IBM which was a significant savings for customers and still a
nice mark-up for Amdahl.

paul c <toledobythesea (AT) oohay (DOT) ac> writes:
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#82 What would be a truly relational operating system ?

i handled some amount of the tech transfer from sjr (system/r) to
endicott for sql/ds

one of the people listed as being at jan92 meeting in ellison's
conference room ... mentioned here
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

claimed to have handled the tech transfer from endicott back to STL for
(mainframe) DB2. There are two different DB2s ... the original mainframe
DB2 and the one running on other platforms. this is thread discussing
some recent news item about the non-mainframe DB2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#43 From The Annals of Release No Sfotware Before Its Time
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#46 From The Annals of Release No Sfotware Before Its Time

the non-mainframe DB2 started out as RDBMS for OS2 ... it took quite a
bit of work to get much further than that.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#35 DB2 announces technology that trumps Oracle RAC and Exadata

--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970

On 13 nov, 23:39, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <l... (AT) garlic (DOT) com> wrote:
Thank you for this.

Cimode wrote:
If I understand what you mean, I have to say that it would be a mug's
game to try that because you'd have to interface to the many arcane
aspects of the typical OS's internal interfaces. Maybe I have
mis-interpreted but if not, I'd say that it is more important to map to
various typical filesystem interfaces. I realize this is another layer,
but to me that's really the name of the game. One of the Xerox Parc
notables remarked something to do with recursion in programming concepts
being omni-present and I think similar is true of indirection.

On Nov 13, 10:51*pm, paul c <toledobythe... (AT) oohay (DOT) ac> wrote:
This is an interesting idea.
I don't know about making an os really relational.
However, it can still be a databased oriented or driven os.
For example, registry from windows, configuration files, and other os
files, could be xml.
I really mean a xml database oriented and driven operating system.
Xml files can store encrypted or ciphered data without problems (this
data is most of the time passwords).
Xml databases can look like tree structures, so since current registry
is a tree structure, it can be made a xml database.
Part of my point is that a xml database oriented os can be queries
with current and future implementations of xpath, sqlxml, and other
xml query languages.
These queries are faster (sometimes) than parsing text files, binary
files, or querying relational databases.
In a way, it is like having all info about an os, plus its file
system, in xml databases.
It resembles having a hirerchical database in several points.
Still, making a file system of an os based on relational databases
(which still hold a lot of xml data), is a very interesting idea.

Best regards,

Tonci Korsano
"What you think doesn't matter! What matters is evidence..."