history is hard

[Peter Coghlan]

On Sun, 24 May 2020 at 19:24:31 -0400, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>On 5/24/20 5:30 PM, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> CP/67 or something like that maybe?  I don't think there was a VM/360 either.
>> 
>
> There was VM/370 in 1980.  I worked under it from May to August.
> Hosted on a 4331 at Ft. Ben Harrison, IN.  The launch of the
> Mainframe and COBOL facet of my career and life.
>

A variant of VM/370 Release 6 is running here in front of me under
Hercules running on VMS on a DEC Alphaserver 800 from 20+ years ago.
I used to think that was a bit special but now one of the other guys
whose system is on an NJE network with mine is running VM/370 under
Hercules on a mobile phone.

Many of the source file dates in VM/370 Release 6 are in 1978.  Some
might say that Release 6 was the "last" VM/370 but that word is just
as difficult to pin down as "first" and the devil is in the detail.

Release 6 seems to be the last freely available release of VM/370
though.  There were one or two more updates for VM/370 but I think
those were charged-for software and just after that the name was
changed.  If I have the sequence right, it went through a succession,
of being called VM/SP, VM/XA, VM/ESA and is known today as z/VM.
Under the covers though, it's all the same stuff as VM/370 and it
looks like VM/370 wasn't even the original name for it.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.

>
> bill
>