[inforoots] Re: The IBM 7090 & Yacht Handicapping

[Tom Van Vleck]

John C Green Jr wrote in inforoots Digest, Vol 24, Issue 3

> Don't forget that IBM's reaction to Project MAC choosing a GE 645
> (an enhanced GE 635 with the enhancements specified by MIT) ...
> It included designing the System/360 Model 67 that added paging
> to the Model 65 and writing CP67/CMS in MIT's Tech Square building.
>
> That's not what I would describe as "relations cooled."

MIT Comp Center continued to be a high spending IBM customer,
running a big 360/65/40 ASP batch mainframe as MIT's primary
computing resource.  But there were fewer visits from IBM
executives proposing research work on operating systems with MIT.
That's all I meant by "cooler relations."

According to Melinda's wonderful history of VM, the IBM Cambridge
Scientific Center folks, some of them former CTSS designers,
had been hoping to work with MIT on the next generation system,
one reason the CSC was located in Tech Square.  When IBM didn't
get the bid, they had to find other things to do, and went on
to create CP/CMS starting in the fall of 1964.

The design of the 360/67 included memory organization very
similar to that proposed in the ten Multics hardware design
memos.  So similar that IBM later paid MIT a big hunk of
money to settle patent infringement claims.  One of the
senior designers of the 645 told me that the 360/67 was
missing a few crucial concepts from the Multics design, as
if the IBM team had only seen nine of the ten memos; one
important difference was that the 645 had access control
in the segment descriptor, while the 67 had it on the
physical page's storage key, which made memory sharing
difficult.

In those days, when IBM announced a new machine, customers
like MIT would order one on the first day, in order to
be first in line.  Sometimes later these orders would be
cancelled or traded to other customers.  MIT ordered a
360/67 as soon as it was announced, and took delivery of
it even though TSS was not ready, and ran CP/CMS on it in
the late 60s.  For the first year of the system's life it
was operated by the MIT Urban Systems Laboratory, and they
then transferred it to the Comp Center and continued to be
the largest user of the machine.  I moved over to Comp Center
from Project MAC and managed system programmers for CP/CMS,
CTSS, and the new Multics service on the 645.  Our relations
with the IBM developers in Tech Square were cordial.

I don't know where the yacht handicapping job was run
during the late sixties: not at MIT, far as I know.