IBM Future Systems project
The Future Systems project (FS) was a research and development project undertaken in IBM in the early 1970s, aiming to develop a revolutionary line of computer products, including new software models which would simplify software development by exploiting modern powerful hardware.
History
Background
Until the end of the 1960s, IBM had been making most of its profit on hardware, bundling support software and services along with its systems to make them more attractive. Only hardware carried a price tag, but those prices included an allocation for software and services.
Other manufacturers had started to market compatible hardware, mainly peripherals such as tape and
Another strategic issue was that the cost of computing was steadily going down while the costs of programming and operations, being made of personnel costs, were steadily going up. Therefore, the part of the customer's IT budget available for hardware vendors would be significantly reduced in the coming years, and with it the base for IBM revenue. It was imperative that IBM, by addressing the cost of application development and operations in its future products, would at the same time reduce the total cost of IT to the customers and capture a larger portion of that cost.
At the same time, IBM was under legal attack for its dominant position and its policy of bundling software and services in the hardware price, so that any attempt at "re-bundling" part of its offerings had to be firmly justified on a purely technical basis, so as to withstand any legal challenge.[1]
Future Systems
In May–June 1971, an international task force convened in
The major objectives of the FS project were consequently stated as follows:
- make obsolete all existing computing equipment, including IBM's, by fully exploiting the newest technologies,
- diminish greatly the costs and efforts involved in application development and operations,
- provide a technically sound basis for re-bundling as much as possible of IBM's offerings (hardware, software and services)
It was hoped that a new architecture making heavier use of hardware resources, the cost of which was going down, could significantly simplify software development and reduce costs for both IBM and customers.
Technology
Data access
One design principle of FS was a "
Another emerging technology at the time was the concept of virtual memory. In early systems, the amount of memory available to a program to allocate for data was limited by the amount of
A single-level store is essentially an expansion of virtual memory to all memory, internal or external. VM systems invisibly write memory to a disk, which is the same task as the file system, so there is no reason it cannot be used as the file system. Instead of programs allocating memory from "main memory" which is then perhaps sent to some other
This concept had been explored in the
Future Systems planned on making the single-level store the key concept in its new operating systems. Instead of having a separate database engine that programmers would call, there would simply be calls in the system's
Processor
Another principle was the use of very high-level complex instructions to be implemented in
Another way of presenting the same concept was that the entire collection of functions previously implemented as hardware,
The overall design also called for a "universal controller" to handle primarily input-output operations outside of the main processor. That universal controller would have a very limited instruction set, restricted to those operations required for I/O, pioneering the concept of a reduced instruction set computer (RISC).
Meanwhile,
Development
Project start
The IBM Future Systems project (FS) was officially started In September 1971, following the recommendations of a special task force assembled in the second quarter of 1971. In the course of time, several other research projects in various IBM locations merged into the FS project or became associated with it.
Project management
During its entire life, the FS project was conducted under tight security provisions. The project was broken down into many subprojects assigned to different teams. The documentation was similarly broken down into many pieces, and access to each document was subject to verification of the need-to-know by the project office. Documents were tracked and could be called back at any time.
In Sowa's memo (see External Links, below) he noted The avowed aim of all this red tape is to prevent anyone from understanding the whole system; this goal has certainly been achieved.
As a consequence, most people working on the project had an extremely limited view of it, restricted to what they needed to know in order to produce their expected contribution. Some teams were even working on FS without knowing. This explains why, when asked to define FS, most people give a very partial answer, limited to the intersection of FS with their field of competence.
Planned product lines
Three implementations of the FS architecture were planned: the top-of-line model was being designed in
A continuous range of performance could be offered by varying the number of processors in a system at each of the three implementation levels.
Early 1973, overall project management and the teams responsible for the more "outside" layers common to all implementations were consolidated in the Mohansic ASDD laboratory (halfway between the Armonk/White Plains headquarters and Poughkeepsie).
Project end
The FS project was killed in 1975. The reasons given for killing the project depend on the person asked, each of whom puts forward the issues related to the domain with which they were familiar. In reality, the success of the project was dependent on a large number of breakthroughs in all areas from circuit design and manufacturing to marketing and maintenance. Although each single issue, taken in isolation, might have been resolved, the probability that they could all be resolved in time and in mutually compatible ways was practically zero.
One symptom was the poor performance of its largest implementation, but the project was also marred by protracted internal arguments about various technical aspects, including internal IBM debates about the merits of RISC vs. CISC designs. The complexity of the instruction set was another obstacle; it was considered "incomprehensible" by IBM's own engineers and there were strong indications that the system wide single-level store could not be backed up in part,[
The FS project was finally terminated when IBM realized that customer acceptance would be much more limited than originally predicted because there was no reasonable application migration path for 360 architecture customers. In order to leave maximum freedom to design a truly revolutionary system, ease of application migration was not one of the primary design goals for the FS project, but was to be addressed by software migration aids taking the new architecture as a given. In the end, it appeared that the cost of migrating the mass of user investments in COBOL and assembly language based applications to FS was in many cases likely to be greater than the cost of acquiring a new system.
Results
Although the FS project as a whole was killed, a simplified version of the architecture for the smallest of the three machines continued to be developed in Rochester. It was finally released as the IBM
Besides System/38 and the AS/400, which inherited much of the FS architecture, bits and pieces of Future Systems technology were incorporated in the following parts of IBM's product line:
- the IBM 3081mainframe computer, which was essentially the System/370 emulator designed in Poughkeepsie, but with the FS microcode removed
- the 3800 GDDM
- the IBM 3850 automatic magnetic tape library
- the IBM 8100 mid-range computer, which was based on a CPU called the Universal Controller, which had been intended for FS input/output processing
- network enhancements concerning VTAM and NCP
Sources
- Pugh, Emerson W. (1995). Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-16147-8.
- Pugh, Emerson W.; et al. (1991). IBM'S 360 and Early 370 Systems. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-16123-0.
References
- ^ a b c d Hansen, Bill (11 March 2019). "Fifty Years of Operating Systems". TFH. Vol. 29, no. 15.
- ^ Gillis, Alexander. "virtual memory". TechTarget.
- ^ AS/400 Disk Storage Topics and Tools. IBM. April 2000. SG24-5693-00.
- ^ "The Library for Systems Solutions Computing Technology Reference" (PDF). IBM. pp. 24–25. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-17. Retrieved 2010-09-05.
External links
- A review of a book about "what went wrong at IBM", discussing in particular the relation of the Future Systems project to the overall history of IBM at the Wayback Machine (archived June 29, 2016)
- An internal memo by John F. Sowa. This outlines the technical and organizational problems of the FS project in late 1974.
- Overview of IBM Future Systems