Wang VS systems around?

Jim Battle wrote: Hi Jim, and thanks! The story is close enough for gummint work. The New VS, also called the VS22000 family, is running happily at about 60 sites in 10 countries, and steadily growing. It usually runs in the Dell PowerEdge 2900, although it can also run in the smaller 2950 and even the 1950. The high end is exactly twice the peformance of the top-of-the-line legacy VS18950, and on the newer PowerEdge 29xx III, 220% of the fastest legacy performance. The current VS OS, 7.54.12, handles up to 1,000 devices/users, and the soon to be released 7.54.20 will handle up to 2,000. Current virtual VS disk sizes supported range up to and including 34 GB. In the VS world, where the first VS supported 32 users in 512 KB (yes, KB) of memory, a 34 GB drive is huge. We virtualized not only the VS machine but the principal I/O Coprocessors as well -- SCSI, of course, Resource Sharing Facility (RSF), the VS clustering technology, the "serial" IOC that used to handle coax/twisted-pair workstations and printers, now providing TCP connections to virtualized workstations, telecommunications, virtual Printer Interface Box and other devices. We even built a PCI Universal Serial IOC to actually run legacy Wang coax, twisted pair and fiber links. The latest virtualizations have been a virtual device that provides high-capacity pipes to and from Linux, such as for access to an Oracle database, and an Integrated Virtual Tape, which allows the VS to seamlessy work with image files of tapes instead of physical tapes. Our goal from the beginning was to make the New VS 100% seamlessly compatible with the legacy VS for all VS software from the OS to languages to utilities and applications. We have done that. A New VS is loaded from legacy VS backup tapes or disk drives. No program or data conversion is needed. The New VS runs the unmodified VS Operating System and all other VS software. And yes, we signed a multiyear contract with Getronics (the succesor to Wang) in early 2005 to work together to bring the new generation of Wang VS to market. So it's all legal. Both Getronics and we sell the New VS worldwide. Your correspondent wrote that the VS appears to have been a pretty fair midrange system. It was and continues to be much more than that: The VS is the easiest and most efficient mainframe to program, operate and use that has ever existed. It supports about a dozen languages and is now in its 31st year, with full object code compatibility throughout, something I don't think any other computer company has ever achieved. And, yes, it is a mainframe, distinguished by all the same characteristics that caused the term to be coined to describe the IBM 360 -- decimal arithmetic at the machine level, an instruction set that makes COBOL almost an assembler for the machine, intelligent I/O "channels", huge connectivity for block-mode workstations, disk drives, tape drives, printers and telecommunications devices. The VS has an instruction set and memory architecture almost identical to the IBM 370. Regards, Thomas Junker tjunker )at( tjunker.com +1 281-890-5312 The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center http://www.tjunker.com/ Vice President TransVirtual Systems tjunker !-at-! transvirtualsystems.com www.transvirtualsystems.com +1 832-615-6050 voice +1 832-553-7863 fax 888-796-0601 (toll free, U.S. and Canada)