IBM 3090 and VPS
William D. Leara
When I was in school, we at one time used a system called "VPS". I
believe it ran on an IBM 3090 and we accessed it via 3270 terminals.
Could someone shed some light on what exactly this was? I was not so
computer savvy at the time, and I'd like to know now what I was
dealing with. Was VPS an operating system? Was it popular? How did
it compare to other systems, say a VAX running VMS, for example.
Any help would be appreciated!
William
Bruce Crabill
VPS is the VTAM Printer Support program by Levi, Ray, & Shoup, Inc
(www.lrs.com). VPS is basically started out as a mechanism to
interface VTAM printers with JES. It has been enhanced over the years
and now includes the ability to talk to TCP/IP printers. I believe it
is a MVS subsystem like JES or VTAM (but I'm not a MVS expert). It was
popular and continues to be popular. Check out their web page for more
information.
Bruce
William D. Leara
Tom Harrington
Bruce Crabill (BR...@UMDD.UMD.EDU) wrote:
: In article <3362844d...@news.comland.com>, ore...@comland.com wrote:
: > When I was in school, we at one time used a system called "VPS". I
Did you go to Boston University?
: VPS is the VTAM Printer Support program by Levi, Ray, & Shoup, Inc
: (www.lrs.com). VPS is basically started out as a mechanism to
: interface VTAM printers with JES.
I could be wrong, but I'd bet that this is not what he was asking about.
In any case I know that I used something called VPS in school which fits
the above description, and it was nothing like LRS' printer support
program.
Memory is at this point rather fuzzy, but I recall the following:
It was actually known as VM/VPS, where VPS stood for Vector Processing
System. It ran on the school's IBM 3090 (S/370, I think). I don't
recall if it was actually an operating system, or something different;
MVS also ran on this machine, and I don't remember the details of
the MVS to VPS relationship. The name derived from the vector processing
capabilities of the mainframe (which may have been added to the
system as a separate module). I believe that VPS was a local Boston
U. hack of some sort. It may also have spread to the University of
Waterloo in Ontario. VPS ran on the main student computer at BU
at the time; it was the only system on which any student could have
an account just for asking (there were various and sundry departmental
systems with more restricted access). This was rather unfortunate,
as VPS made Unix look user-friendly in comparison. The main computer
center had a roomful of the old extremely heavy IBM 3270 terminals,
although VT100 and VT220 access was available at various locations
around the campus. (There were also a few DECWriters, but these
disappeared after my freshman year). I worked as a student consultant,
primarily responsible for VPS support, for about a year and a half.
The VPS mainframe a variety of compilers (Pascal was standard for
engineering undergrads at the time), statistical packages (SPSS
and SAS), a text-formatting package (WSCRIPT, which was sort of
like Unix nroff, only not really), simulation packages (SPICE,
probably others), and a godawful database program whose name I
have mercifully forgotten. The filesystem allowed only two
"directories": one with the same name as the user account, and
a global one called "userlib". An interesting feature was that
if you moved a program to userlib, and made it world-executable,
it immediately became part of every user's search path (such as
it was).
I graduated in 1990; as of '92 or '93 VPS was gone from BU. I
don't know if it still exists anywhere else.
--
Tom Harrington ------- t...@rmii.com ------- http://rainbow.rmii.com/~tph
"I'm stranded all alone, in the gas station of love, and I have to use
the self-service pumps." -Weird Al Yankovic, "One More Minute"
-> Fractal Kit: http://rainbow.rmii.com/~tph/fractalkit/fractal.html <-
phs3
In article <5k5f97$f...@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>, t...@rmii.com wrote:
>Memory is at this point rather fuzzy, but I recall the following:
>It was actually known as VM/VPS, where VPS stood for Vector Processing
>System. It ran on the school's IBM 3090 (S/370, I think). I don't
>recall if it was actually an operating system, or something different;
>MVS also ran on this machine, and I don't remember the details of
>the MVS to VPS relationship. The name derived from the vector processing
>capabilities of the mainframe (which may have been added to the
>system as a separate module). I believe that VPS was a local Boston
>U. hack of some sort. It may also have spread to the University of
>Waterloo in Ontario. VPS ran on the main student computer at BU
>at the time; it was the only system on which any student could have
>an account just for asking (there were various and sundry departmental
>systems with more restricted access). This was rather unfortunate,
>as VPS made Unix look user-friendly in comparison. The main computer
>center had a roomful of the old extremely heavy IBM 3270 terminals,
>although VT100 and VT220 access was available at various locations
>around the campus. (There were also a few DECWriters, but these
>disappeared after my freshman year). I worked as a student consultant,
>primarily responsible for VPS support, for about a year and a half.
I doubt very much that VPS had anything to do with U of Waterloo; I was a VM
sysprog there from 1980-1986, still had an account there until last year, and
there was nothing called "VPS" there. Various other things that might fit the
description, but nothing remotely called "VPS".
But this is an interesting thread; hopefully eventually someone can shed some
light...
..phsiii
Tom Harrington
phs3 (ph...@watdcs.uwaterloo.ca) wrote:
: I doubt very much that VPS had anything to do with U of Waterloo; I was a VM
: sysprog there from 1980-1986, still had an account there until last year, and
: there was nothing called "VPS" there. Various other things that might fit the
: description, but nothing remotely called "VPS".
I know that BU had some MVS software that came from U of Waterloo;
Watfiv and (I think) WScript. Someone once told me that this had
been some sort of exchange, where Waterloo got VPS in return (leading
us to speculate on which school had screwed the other worse). But
I guess if Waterloo ever got VPS, they decided not to use it.
: But this is an interesting thread; hopefully eventually someone can shed some
: light...
I managed to track down someone with a better memory on this than me.
Here's what he had to say about it (posted with permission):
Message-Id: <1997042918...@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: VPS
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 14:57:48 -0400
From: jim frost <ji...@world.std.com>
I used VM/VPS from 1985 (when it was a mere 3081) to 1988. I was a
student, not an administrator, so much of what I know about it was
learned from programming on it.
Anyway, VM/VPS was a bit of a hack that BU did to get timesharing.
They created a single-user environment and then hacked VM to run many
of them at once and provide some interactivity between them.
Inside of this single-user VM they put an MVS emulation environment so
they could run some popular MVS packages (like xedit and miscellaneous
compilers).
That was pretty much it. While they liked to think of it as high
technology I tended to think of it as a kind of clever hack to VM; it
sure did take the work out of writing a multiuser OS. Trouble was
that VM was not designed to run hundreds of VMs at a time and it
really didn't work that well. Plus they had to have the sources to
VM, which IBM got kind of tightfisted with when they came out with
VM/XA.
jim frost
ji...@world.std.com
--
Tom Harrington ------- t...@rmii.com ------- http://rainbow.rmii.com/~tph
"Fight like a brave! Don't be a slave! No one can tell you you've
got to be afraid!" -Red Hot Chili Peppers
Julian Thomas
In <5kaibb$sf...@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>, on 05/01/97
at 05:02 PM, t...@longhorn.uucp (Tom Harrington) said:
::Inside of this single-user VM they put an MVS emulation environment so
::they could run some popular MVS packages (like xedit and miscellaneous
::compilers).
But - but! xedit is a popular VM editor!
--
Julian Thomas (and/or if appropriate, Mary Jane Thomas)
j...@epix.net
In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State!
--------------------------------------------------
My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.
William D. Leara
: In article <3362844d...@news.comland.com>, Tom Harrington wrote:
> Did you go to Boston University?
> Memory is at this point rather fuzzy, but I recall the following:
> It was actually known as VM/VPS, where VPS stood for Vector Processing
> System. It ran on the school's IBM 3090 (S/370, I think).
Yes, Tom, I did go to BU, and this is exactly what I was talking
about. Like everyone else, I used the "VM/VPS" system from 1989 until
about 1992. They officially tore down all the 3270 terminals in 111
Cummington and replaced them with X terms in 1993, the year I
graduated. I was very sad.
For those of you who didn't experience it, there's probably no way to
describe the awkwardness of the system. Like sending that wonderful
BITNET email. As I recall, the mail editor didn't have luxuries such
as "backspace" in case you made a mistake. I wish I still had one of
the 3270 keyboards. They must still be around, because they could
have easily withstood nuclear war, they were so big and heavy. I
remember they had all these crazy keys that made no sense, and the
"enter" key was placed in a very unusual location--in the lower left
corner, where the "ctrl" key is placed on PCs today.
The system had one neat feature: you could type in a certain command
which would draw a picture of the terminal room on the screen. It
would draw the locations of all the terminals on each table, and then
show you the user names of the people logged into each terminal. So,
if you saw a pretty girl at the other end of the room, and you didn't
know who she was, you could find her user name, and then send her
real-time messages (like "write" in Unix) and say hello. (As if
pretty girls were ever caught playing on the IBM mainframe . . .)
When I was deemed worthy of receiving a Unix account, (it was on
"bucsf" for you BU people out there) it felt like I was moving head 25
years in computing technology.
William
ore...@comland.com
"smgi0dc" on BUACCA ;)
Tom Harrington
William D. Leara (ore...@comland.com) wrote:
: For those of you who didn't experience it, there's probably no way to
: describe the awkwardness of the system. Like sending that wonderful
: BITNET email. As I recall, the mail editor didn't have luxuries such
: as "backspace" in case you made a mistake.
I think that you could use XEDIT with the BITNET interface, which
made composing messages easier. But in any case, sending email
anywhere outside of the mainframe was significantly non-obvious,
and most users didn't even realize it was possible. Instead they'd
use "$msg", the local (VPS only, not even to the rest of BU) email
system. This system allowed you to choose a nickname for email,
which was kind of nice since login names were so strange.
Given your dates of attendance, you probably missed "$msg$", the
alternate email program written by a CS student. As I recall the
software really was an improvement over the official system, but
had the drawback that the author could read any messages sent through
the system (and routinely did), and would hit on anyone who used
the program with a female-sounding nickname.
Actually you can describe the awkwardness of the system to many
in this newsgroup. Just imagine IBM JCL as a command shell. It
was necessary to learn at least a little JCL for all but the most
basic of operations. Actually it was necessary for almost anything
("Why is the command to print '/bqc'?" "It just is, OK?").
: I wish I still had one of
: the 3270 keyboards. They must still be around, because they could
: have easily withstood nuclear war, they were so big and heavy. I
: remember they had all these crazy keys that made no sense,
I'm pretty sure that the weird keys were there for the benefit of
APL programmers.
: The system had one neat feature: you could type in a certain command
: which would draw a picture of the terminal room on the screen. It
: would draw the locations of all the terminals on each table, and then
: show you the user names of the people logged into each terminal. So,
: if you saw a pretty girl at the other end of the room, and you didn't
: know who she was, you could find her user name, and then send her
: real-time messages (like "write" in Unix) and say hello.
...and it is for this reason that the program was for a time banned
while I was there, after complaints from annoyed recipients of such
messages. Of course, those who knew what they were doing could
easily bypass the ban.
: (As if
: pretty girls were ever caught playing on the IBM mainframe . . .)
Given that this was the only system that most students could get an
account on, and given that many classes required such an account, it
happened a lot more often than you might guess. I base this observation
on the many long hours I spent working at the VPS help desk.
: When I was deemed worthy of receiving a Unix account, (it was on
: "bucsf" for you BU people out there) it felt like I was moving head 25
: years in computing technology.
I had a similar feeling when I got an account on bu-pub, which was
several Sun-3 workstations and a couple of Sun-4s. While I was there,
bucsf was a VAX of some flavor running BSD Unix, which was a lot
nicer than the VM/VPS interface.
: William
: ore...@comland.com
: "smgi0dc" on BUACCA ;)
Oh, so you were a management major, eh? That was another interesting
detail, the way you could determine someone's status at the university
just by knowing their login name. The first three letters denoted
your major; "SMG" for management, "ENG" for engineering, "CSC" for
computer science, "PHY" for physics, etc, etc. Once you got these
letters, you were stuck with 'em, even if you changed majors. The
next three characters were the PID, a pseudo-random string that was
the only unique part of the whole thing. When I was there they
ran out of PIDs and had to start recycling them. [There should have
been 36^3. or 46,656 possible PIDs. But not all were nominally
available; all PIDs that began with "9" or "8" were reserved for
professors, for example]. The last letter indicated the account
type; "c" for regular undergraduate accounts, "u" for undergrad
research accounts, "n" for professors and grad students, and
probably some others that I've forgotten. (So I was "engbozc",
incicating that I was an engineering undergrad).
--
Tom Harrington ------- t...@rmii.com ------- http://rainbow.rmii.com/~tph
"I do not endorse the use of ANYTHING for recreational use."
-John Grubor, drm...@pgh.nauticom.net
Lawrence Woods
My first computer course at BU, PL/1, was in early 1977, and we used the
predicessor to VPS. My memory has it named RAX, and coming from the
University of Michigan. The only student terminals were DEC LA36 printing
terminals (30 CPS and you could not see the characters just typed.)
VPS was introduced during my second course, S/360 Assembler, and the
teacher was a staff member of the computing center, who had worked on VPS.
As I recall, VPS was designed to be similar to RAX so people could
transition easily. I believe that BU developed VPS because RAX was no
longer supported, and the then-current IBM-supplied timeshare systems were
considered unsuitable for general use.
I recall that VPS was an improvement over RAX, but still horrible enough
on the printing terminals that when I had the opportunity to use TSO/SPF
on 3270 video terminals at work midway through the semester, I zipped out
of the computing center, and never went back.
Simultaneously, my friends over at Northeastern, which had a CDC batch-only
computer, used punched cards and learned Donald Knuth's MIX for their
introductory assembly-language course.