From Colin Gash,1100 Series and OS3 Marketing, Unisys Ltd, London.
Your lead item in issue No 747 refers to IBM’s pioneering configuration of three equal CPUs under one copy of the operating system. That may be pioneering for IBM, but at Unisys on the 1100 Series we have been employing and offering equal, it is only in the partitionable three processor and four processor multiprocessing architecture for about 12 years. Multiprocessing of this nature is and always has been an integral part of all 1100 Series. There are hundreds of major users who have been using such configurations for many years.
No contest it is only in the context of IBM and the cranky MVS that the feat is in any way noteworthy – IBM had no interest in multiprocessing until the compatibles made the market so competitive that it could no longer afford to force users to replace their processors completely when they needed additional power. And the 1100 hardly has a monopoly of routine multiprocessing – in the mainframe world, Honeywell’s GCOS 8 and its GCOS III predecessor have been at it for over a decade; in the Unisys context, the Burroughs camp will no doubt feel that its top-end Master Control Program rates a mention while NCR and ICL both went down the path ahead of IBM, and perhaps we should spare a thought for the dear departed DECsystem-10 – Ed.
