Re: Cynicism was LMT and Siebel/Peoplesoft?

Ed Stevens doodled thusly:

>
>Actually, I once worked in a shop that had both IBM and UNIVAC. We IBM'ers
>referred to that other machine as a 'Uni-whack' and the programmers that worked
>with it as 'Uniwhackers.'

hehehe! you shoulda heard what the uniwhackers called the IBMers.... ;-)

>
>Interestingly, a Yahoo search on 'univac' turns up not only computer references
>(spelled both 'Univac' and 'UNIVAC' but also a 'Canine 7-way vaccine for the

that's a new one. Last google search I made a while ago turned up some very interesting stuff about the history of computing. it also appears the 1100 series Univac is still sold by Unisys (with a completely different name).

allow me some nostalgia:

Univac had some *seriously* advanced systems: they were doing true SMP boxes with segmented VM back in the mid-late 60's. They threw out punched cards and went video (Uniscope 100) back in the early 70's. They invented or introduced print spoolers and compression s/w (Lempel-Ziv, used in gif files), general purpose real-time OS's, dll's, parallel execution pipelines and quite a few other innovations. Way too expensive, even for those times of mad mainframe spending. Hence their demise.

They provided the main Navy and Nasa processing capacity during the heavy days of the cold war. And also made one of the first telecommunications dedicated computer, the Univac 494. These handled most comms (including voice switching) between the US and many European countries for most of the 60's and 70's decades.

Univac also had what I still consider the best OS ever: VS/9. Granted, it was "borrowed" from RCA when Sperry bought their entire IT. There were "economies of scale" even back then. This OS did 15 years earlier what MVS/XA did later. With a lot more thrown in. Like p-code execution, completely unlimited VM addressing per process or per partition, memory-mapped disk AND tape file access, dynamic runtime library linking and updating, etc etc. Mind-blowing! Only worked with it for about 8 months, but they were by far the most productive months of my career, back in the mainframe days. It had a JCL language that looked exactly like DEC's VMS DCL. Except this was 10 years before VMS existed. All with video terminals, of course. Not a card in sight. What a drag it was to go back to IBM 360/370 sites and their punched-card-driven demented JCL.

Just goes to prove once again advanced technology means exactly squat, when it comes to market share and profitability.

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Fri Jan 25 2002 - 08:56:24 CST