Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:
Circa 1971, Amdahl gave talk in large MIT auditorium and somebody in the >audience asked him what justifications he used to attract investors and
he replied that even if IBM were to completely walk away from 370, there
was hundreds of billions in customer written 370 code that could keep
him in business through the end of the century.

And that was probably an understatement. Legacy software is keeping
Unisys in business to this day, and the software ecosystem and
customer base of S/360 was larger in 1971 than the Burroughs large
systems and Univac lines that Unisys is still working with AFAIK.

OTOH, Amdahl corporation did not make it until the end of the century
(at least not on its own; it became a subsidiary of Fujitsu), for two
reasons having to do with IBM not walking away from the S/360 family:

1) IBM made the switch to CMOS and benefitted from the extremely fast
speedups in CMOS speed in the 1990s, while Amdahl failed to take that
step.

2) IBM extended the 32-bit s390 to the 64-bit s390x in 2000.
Fujitsu/Amdahl did not want to follow and essentially gave up that
market.

At the time, IBM had the "Future System" project that was planning on
doing just that ... and I assumed that was what he was referring to
... however in later years he claimed that he never had any knowledge
about "FS" (and had left IBM before it started).

trivia: during FS, internal politics was killing off 370 projects and
claims are the lack of new 370 products in the period is what gave the
clone 370 makers (including Amdahl) their market foothold. some more
info
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm
when FS finally imploded, there was mad rush to get stuff back into the
370 product pipelines, including kicking off the quick&dirty 3033&3081 >efforts.

OTOH, FS eventually led to S/38 and the System i, which IBM sold
rather than introducing low-end S/370 (and later s390 and s390x)
members. The way that Heinz Zemanek (head of IBM's Vienna Lab until
1976) told the story was that IBM was preparing to be divided up if
they lost the anti-trust action, and introduced S/38 and one other
line (that I don't remember) in addition to S/370 for that.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:
Circa 1971, Amdahl gave talk in large MIT auditorium and somebody in the >>audience asked him what justifications he used to attract investors and
he replied that even if IBM were to completely walk away from 370, there >>was hundreds of billions in customer written 370 code that could keep
him in business through the end of the century.

And that was probably an understatement. Legacy software is keeping
Unisys in business to this day, and the software ecosystem and
customer base of S/360 was larger in 1971 than the Burroughs large
systems and Univac lines that Unisys is still working with AFAIK.

I think the bulk of Unisys business, such as it is, is now consulting, rather than
the legacy clearpath lines.

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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

OTOH, Amdahl corporation did not make it until the end of the century
(at least not on its own; it became a subsidiary of Fujitsu), for two
reasons having to do with IBM not walking away from the S/360 family:

a little history drift ... IBM communication group had corporate
strategic ownership of everything that crossed the datacenter walls and
was fiercely fighting off client/server and distributed computing
(trying to preserve its dumb terminal paradigm). Late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at a world-wide, internal, annual
communication group conference supposedly on 3174 performance but opened
the talk with statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division; the disk division was
seeing data fleeing datacenter to more distributed computing friendly
platforms with drops in disk sales. The disk division had tried to come
up with a number of solutions, but they were constantly being vetoed by
the communication group.

One of the disk division executive's (partial) countermeasure was
investing in distributed computing startups that would use IBM disks
(and would periodically ask us to drop in on investments to see if we
could help).

It wasn't just disks but whole mainframe industry and a couple years
later IBM had one of the largest losses in the history of US
corporations and was being reorged into the 13 "baby blues" (a take-off
on the AT&T baby blues and its breakup a decade early) in preparation
for breaking up the company. https://web.archive.org/web/20101120231857/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977353,00.html
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,977353-1,00.html
We had already left IBM but get a call from the bowels of Armonk
(corporate hdqtrs) asking if we could help with the breakup. Before we
get started, the board brings in the former AMEX president as CEO to try
and save the company, who (somewhat) reverses the breakup.

note AMEX had been in competition with KKR for LBO (private-equity)
take-over of RJR and KKR wins, it then runs into some difficulties and
hires away AMEX president to help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fall_of_RJR_Nabisco later as IBM CEO, uses some of the same methods used at RJR: https://web.archive.org/web/20181019074906/http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

In the 80s, IBM mainframe hardware was majority of IBM revenue but by
the turn of the century it was a few percent of revenue and dropping.
Around 2010-2013, mainframe hardware was a couple percent of IBM revenue
and still dropping, although the mainframe group was 25% of revenue (and
40% of profit) ... aka software and services.

... IBM was turning into a financial engineering company

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit
claims. Lawsuit accuses Big Blue of cheating investors by shifting
systems revenue to trendy cloud, mobile tech https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsuit/
IBM has been sued by investors who claim the company under former CEO
Ginni Rometty propped up its stock price and deceived shareholders by misclassifying revenues from its non-strategic mainframe business - and
moving said sales to its strategic business segments - in violation of securities regulations.

flash-back: mid-80s, the communication group had been blocking release
of mainframe TCP/IP ... but when that was reversed, it changed its
tactic and said that since they had strategic ownership of everything
that crossed datacenter walls, it had to be released through them; what
shipped got aggregate of 44kbut/sec using nearly whole 3090 processor. I
then add support for RFC1044 and in some tuning tests at Cray Research
between Cray and 4341, got sustained 4341 channel media throughput using
only modest amount of 4341 processor (something like 500 times
improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 07:22:28 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

Legacy software is keeping Unisys in business to this day ...

Remember where Unisys came from: it’s the merger of two separate mainframe companies, Burroughs and Sperry.

The fact that they had to merge showed that they had ceased being viable
as separate businesses.

So what of the “legacy software” from either Burroughs or Sperry (or both) is contributing to the bottom line of present-day Unisys?

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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

OTOH, FS eventually led to S/38 and the System i, which IBM sold
rather than introducing low-end S/370 (and later s390 and s390x)
members. The way that Heinz Zemanek (head of IBM's Vienna Lab until
1976) told the story was that IBM was preparing to be divided up if
they lost the anti-trust action, and introduced S/38 and one other
line (that I don't remember) in addition to S/370 for that.

one of the last nails in the future system coffin was study by the IBM
Houston Scientific Center that if 370/195 applications were rewritten
for Future System machine made out of the fastest available technology,
it would have throughput of 370/145 (about factor of 30 times slowdown).

After graduating and joining IBM, one of my hobbies was enhanced
production operating systems for IBM internal datacenters ... and was
ask to visit lots of locations in US, world trade, europe, asia, etc
(one of my 1st and long time customers was the world-wide, branch
office, online sales&marketing support HONE systems). I continued to
work on 360/370 all through FS, even periodically ridiculing what they
were doing (it seemed as if the people were so dazzled by the blue sky technologies, they had no sense of speeds&feeds).

I had done a paged mapped filesystem for CMS and claimed I learned what
not to do from TSS/360 single level store. FS single-level store was
even slower than TSS/360 and S/38 was simplified and slower yet ... aka
for S/38 low-end/entry market there was plenty of head room between
their throughput requirements and the available hardware technology,
processing power, disk speed, etc. S/38 had lots of canned applications
for its market and very high-level, very simplified system and
programming environment (very much RPG oriented).

Early/mid 80s, my brother was regional Apple marketing manager and when
he came into town, I could be invited to business dinners ... including
arguing MAC design with developers (before announce). He had stories
about figuring out how to remotely dial into the S/38 running Apple to
track manufacturing and delivery schedules.

other trivia: late 70s, IBM had effort to move the large variety of
internal custom CISC microprocessors (s/38, low&mid range 370s,
controllers, etc) to 801/risc chips (with common programming
environment). First half 80s, for various reasons, those 801/RISC
efforts floundered (returning to doing custom CISC) and found some of
the 801/RISC chip engineers leaving IBM for other vendors.

1996 MIT Sloan The Decline and Rise of IBM https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-decline-and-rise-of-ibm/?switch_view=PDF
1995 l'Ecole de Paris The rise and fall of IBM https://www.ecole.org/en/session/49-the-rise-and-fall-of-ibm
1993 Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Wars-The-Post-IBM-World/dp/1587981394/

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:

Apples and oranges. IBM had fewer but much larger customer
organisations, and could not afford to upset them much.

IBM had legendary market power, all the way up to monopoly status.
Whatever it decreed, its market had to follow.

Only up to a point. It was quite a challenge for IBM to get their 70xx and 14xx customers to switch to S/360. That's why most 360 models had emulator firmware that would make them behave like faster versions of the earlier machines.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 07:22:28 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

Legacy software is keeping Unisys in business to this day ...

Remember where Unisys came from: it’s the merger of two separate mainframe >companies, Burroughs and Sperry.

A bit condescending - technically Burroughs purchased Sperry. Eventually.
The first attempt failed.

The fact that they had to merge showed that they had ceased being viable
as separate businesses.

As someone who was there at the time, that was not actually the case. It
was more about the Burroughs CEO at the time (former Treasury Secretary Blumenthal) and his ego.

That said, it was clear internally by the time of the merger that the
days of the million dollar mainframe were at the end. That was one of the reasons
that Burroughs bought Convergent Technologies and invested BTOS/CTOS,
Unix and research into next generation architectures (such the scalable parallel processor called OPUS).

The day the merger closed, Unisys (which name even Johnny Carson joked about), had 120,000 employees.

By 1997, there were 20,000; after terminating four lines of legacy
mainframes, divesting the defense subsidiarys and site closures.

So what of the “legacy software” from either Burroughs or Sperry (or both) >is contributing to the bottom line of present-day Unisys?

The UIS 10-K is available from the SEC website. Feel free to look
it up.

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scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 07:22:28 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

Legacy software is keeping Unisys in business to this day ...

Remember where Unisys came from: it's the merger of two separate mainframe >>companies, Burroughs and Sperry.

...

So what of the "legacy software" from either Burroughs or Sperry (or both) >>is contributing to the bottom line of present-day Unisys?

The UIS 10-K is available from the SEC website. Feel free to look
it up.

https://ir.unisys.com/static-files/036649dc-6fad-467e-88e0-fa8c7e736b2e

Unfortunately (but as usual), the categories are such that I cannot
identify how much revenue (and profit) is based on legacy software and
how much is based on something else. The categories given on page 29
are:

|* Digital Workplace Solutions (DWS), which provides modern and
| traditional workplace solutions;
|
|* Cloud, Applications & Infrastructure Solutions (CA&I), which
| provides digital platform, applications and infrastructure
| solutions; and
|
|* Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS), which provides solutions that
| harness secure, continuous high-intensity computing and enable digital
| services through software-defined operating environments.

The third (revenue 648M in 2023, and 61.2% of gross profit) probably
includes the business based on legacy software; the traditional
workplace solutions of the DWS part may also have to do with legacy
software.

In any case, Unisys still offers Clearpath hardware and both OS2200
(Univac legacy) and MCP (Burroughs legacy), but the hardware is
AMD64-based and the old hardware is emulated. Fujitsu still offers
S390 hardware, but it's not clear if that is a descendent of Amdahl.

An overview of what is still going on in the mainframe business is <https://arcanesciences.com/os2200/app1.html>.

Another interesting comparison is VMS Software Inc. (VSI), which took
over the VMS legacy in 2015. They are "150+ collegues" and have "2K
clients"; Unisys have fewer MCP and OS2200 clients according to the
site above, but Unisys had 16300 employees in 2021. Maybe the
mainframe clients of Unisys need a bigger support force than the VSI
clients, or maybe the Unisys employees mostly work on other things.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

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In article <2024Nov30.191907@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>, anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

An overview of what is still going on in the mainframe business is <https://arcanesciences.com/os2200/app1.html>.

There's one bit that's puzzling:

| Hitachi, though they once had a thriving global business including
| North America, markets their systems exclusively in Japan. Until
| approximately 2020, they built custom CPUs, but in the latest
| generation - the AP10000 - they rebadge IBM Z running their own
| MVS-derived VOS3 operating system. I'd guess they have 200-300
| sites, almost all in Japan.

If Wikipedia is correct, Hitachi did not extend VOS3 to 64-bit: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#Closely_related_operating_systems>

Wikipedia also says that the 2015 models of IBM Z machines are the last
that can run 31-bit operating systems: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z13>

It seems like one of these must be wrong, but I don't know which.

Another interesting comparison is VMS Software Inc. (VSI), which
took over the VMS legacy in 2015. They are "150+ collegues" and
have "2K clients"; Unisys have fewer MCP and OS2200 clients
according to the site above, but Unisys had 16300 employees in
2021. Maybe the mainframe clients of Unisys need a bigger
support force than the VSI clients, or maybe the Unisys employees
mostly work on other things.

I've had a little contact with VSI. They /only/ do VMS, which isn't
terribly arcane: a 32/64-bit OS that uses ASCII on twos-complement little-endian hardware. It's been ported to x86-64, and that's being
adopted by customers.

Unisys staff do all kinds of things, and their mainframe OSes are much
less mainstream than VMS.

John

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On Sat, 30 Nov 2024 18:19:07 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

Unfortunately (but as usual), the categories are such that I cannot
identify how much revenue (and profit) is based on legacy software and
how much is based on something else.

This kind of thing is likely deliberate. If an underperforming division
were reported on its own, there would be pressure from shareholders, beancounters etc to do something like lay off staff or otherwise cut
resources, spin it off ... in short, disembowel it in some way.

So my guess is, what’s left of the legacy mainframe business is very
likely a minuscule, even negative contributor to overall profit.

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