What is IBM OS/360?
IBM OS/360
The longest line of operating-system development is undoubtedly that of IBM computers. The early IBM computers, such as the IBM 7090 and the IBM 7094, are prime examples of the development of common I/O subroutines, followed by development of a resident monitor, privileged instructions, memory protection, and simple batch processing. These systems were developed separately, often by each site independently. As a result, IBM was faced with many different computers, with different languages and different system software.
The IBM/360 was designed to alter this situation. The IBM/360 was designed as a family of computers spanning the complete range from small business machines to large scientific machines. Only one set of software would be needed for these systems, which all used the same operating system: OS/360 (Mealy et al. [1966]). This arrangement was intended to reduce maintenance problems for IBM and to allow users to move programs and applications freely from one IBM system to another.
Unfortunately, OS/360 tried to be all things for all people. As a result, it did none of its tasks especially well. The file system included a type field that defined the type of each file, and different file types were defined for fixed-length and variable-length records and for blocked and unblocked files. Contiguous allocation was used, so the user had to guess the size of each output file. The Job Control Language (JCL) added parameters for every possible option, making it incomprehensible to the average user. The memory-management routines were hampered by the architecture.
Although a base-register addressing mode was used, the program could access and modify the base register, so that absolute addresses were generated by the CPU. This arrangement prevented dynamic relocation; the program was bound to physical memory at load time. Two separate versions of the operating system were produced: OS/MPT used fixed regions and OS/MVT used variable regions.
The system was written in assembly language by thousands of programmers, resulting in millions of lines of code. The operating system itself required large amounts of memory for its code and tables. Operating-system overhead often consumed one-half of the total CPU cycles. Over the years, new versions were released to add new features and to fix errors. However, fixing one error often caused another in some remote part of the system, so that the number of known errors in the system remained fairly constant.
Virtual memory was added to OS/360 with the change to the IBM 370 architecture. The underlying hardware provided a segmented-paged virtual memory. New versions of OS used this hardware in different ways. OS/VS1 created one large virtual address space and ran OS/MFT in that virtual memory. Thus, the operating system itself was paged, as well as user programs. OS/VS2 23.9 Mach 851 Release 1 ran OS/MVT in virtual memory.
Finally, OS/VS2 Release 2, which is now called MVS, pro\r ided each user with his own virtual memory. MVS is still basically a batch operating system. The CTSS system was run on an IBM 7094, but MIT decided that the address space of the 360, IBM's successor to the 7094, was too small for MULTICS, so they switched vendors. IBM then decided to create its own time-sharing system, TSS/360 (Lett and Konigsford [1968]). Like MULTICS, TSS/360 was supposed to be a large, time-shared utility. The basic 360 architecture was modified in the model 67 to provide virtual memory. Several sites purchased the 360/67 in anticipation of TSS/360. TSS/360 was delayed, however, so other time-sharing systems were developed as temporary systems until TSS/360 was available.
A time-sharing option (TSO) was added to OS/360. IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center developed CMS as a single-user system and CP/67 to provide a virtual machine to run it on (Meyer and Seawright [1970], Parmelee et al. [1972]). When TSS/360 was eventually delivered, it was a failure. It was too large and too slow. As a result, no site would switch from its temporary system to TSS/360. Today, time sharing on IBM systems is largely provided either by TSO under MVS or by CMS under CP/67 (renamed VM). Both TSS/360 and MULTICS did not achieve commercial success.
What went wrong with these systems? Part of the problem was that these advanced systems were too large and too complex to be understood. Another problem was the assumption that computing power would be available from a large, remote computer. It now appears that most computing will be done by small individual machines—personal computers—not by large, remote, time-shared systems that try to be all things to all users.
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