High performance coprocessor boards of the 80s and 90s - was Re: SGI ONYX

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-04-21 7:29 PM, Dave Wade wrote:
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy
>> Sotomayor
>> Sent: 21 April 2016 22:39
>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Subject: Re: High performance coprocessor boards of the 80s and 90s - was Re:
>> SGI ONYX
>>
>>
>>> On Apr 21, 2016, at 2:35 PM, Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Actually, the first one was called XT/370 because it plugged into an
>>>>> XT!
>>>>> Then came AT/370.  Those were obviously ISA boards.  Then came some
>>>>> variants that were microchannel.  The final iterations were PCI based.
>>>>>
>>>> Guy,
>>>>
>>>> I am not sure about the other systems but my understanding of the
>>>> XT/370 and AT/370 was that they were glorified terminals i.e. instead
>>>> of having a terminal and a PC on your desk you could have it all in one. Is
>> this wrong?
>>> I think you're thinking of the 3270 PC  and 3270 AT, which was pretty
>>> much what you described here…
>> The XT/370 and AT/370 had coprocessor boards that allowed 370 code (and a
>> heavily modified version of VM/370) to be run on the machine itself.  They
>> were
> I don't think the CMS was "heavily" modified, modified certainly, but heavily modified I don't think so...
>
>
>> *not* just glorified terminals.  ;-)
>>
>> TTFN - Guy
>
The CMS probably was not modified much but the VM underneath it was.  
CMS is just the single user client OS that is commonly what people see 
when they log onto "VM".  But VM is really a virtualisation manager  
that can run a number of guest operating systems, but in the case of the 
XT and AT 370 it seems to me it only supported  a single CMS session.

Paul.