19 Oct
2011
19 Oct
'11
5:54 p.m.
From: Cameron Kaiser
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 1:50 PM
>> When people wanted to port the IBM OS family
to x86 they wrote
>> Hercules to emulate the hardware. The OS doesn't make sense on
>> anything but System/360, 370, 390, Z, etc. It was easier to port
>> the hardware than the software.
> When IBM wanted to port the IBM OS family to
POWER, they did the
> same thing. (Z, in your list above.)
I argue this a little. Even though eClipz ostensibly
"unified" the
architectures with the POWER6 generation, z10 is descended from POWER6
but is definitely not POWER. It still implements the z ISA and is still
fully compatible with S/360.
See my long response to Dave McGuire on this topic.
I'm not sure that what you say here really challenges my base assumption,
since an emulator can be fully compatible with the hardware it replaces.
I'm not stating that z/OS is running native on a POWER architecture, and
I'm willing to be shown that it's not running on top of a hardware
emulation layer, but nothing I've heard about it makes that any less
probable.
Oh, and to answer your later comment, no, I'm not thinking only of the
iSeries. ;-)
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/