Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own Blade Server
fw3 writes "Information week is reporting
that IBM and Intel are opening up the standards for the eServer BladeCenter. 'The companies will make available the design specifications for IBM's eServer BladeCenter product... hardware vendors can build "BladeCenter compatible" networking switches, blade adapter cards, and appliance and communications blades for enterprise networks.' Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.) See also stories from EETimes, CNN."
where is the OS/360 today
It evolved into OS/370 than OS/390 (zSeries) and this line of systems is still sold today. Nice try but failing to sell the OS did not doom it to failure as your post implies.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Except for one of the key components to make a PC: the "Build your own BIOS" reference.
IBM included the BIOS source code in the technical references.
It had the entire friggin' BIOS listing!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
The IBM PC-AT spec opened the door to the commodity "PC" industry. The spec was detailed, and useful, enough for cloners to copy the PC, and the power of competition to drive the vast deployment of cheap PC hardware worldwide. Spawning not only Microsoft and Linux, but the Internet as we (think we) know it today. Especially in light of the obstacles to innovation domino effect we have today, like business process patents, domain name squatting, and every other "legal engineering" trick, IBM's PC-AT spec publication was a work of technology heroism.
But of course, every silver lining has its cloud. For example, the PC-AT spec didn't specify exactly where the motherboard screw holes must appear. So not only were there incompatible motherboard/chassis combinations, but the kluges to accomodate the differences made many cheap boxes significantly more expensive for manufacturers on a volume basis. Just an example of how the 80% solution can spawn its own problems, that require 80% more time to solve. Let's hope we've learned from the last watershed spec publication, and get all the details in the new blade server specs. Especially if we're all going to use them.
--
make install -not war
+4 interesting? More like -4 uninformative
/. these days. What the hell have htey done to deserve so much wrath?
Sun needs to read the writing on the wall, newspaper, toilet paper, everywhere * consumers are seeking alternatives from proprietary.
That is plain wrong. NFS isn't proprietry. SPARC is an ISO standard. Solaris runs on more than just SUN computers (ie Fujitsu ones as well, not mentioning Solaris/x86). As companies go, Sun is pretty un-proprietry and has been for quite a while.
Why is bashing Sun so fasionable on
SJW n. One who posts facts.
IBM's BIOS source was copyrighted. If Compaq had simply compiled the source code listing, they would have faced a lawsuit (and a unfriendly precedent in the form of Apple v. Franklin).
Back in the mainframe days - which is when I got my start in the biz - OS/360 and OS/370 (up to OS/MVS V7) were open source. The source was distributed on microfiche, and system programmers were encouraged to modify the code to make the whole thing run better. There was a user organization called the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) at which system programmers shared their code modifications with each other, and with the IBM developers. Some of the good stuff made its way back into the standard "distro" - although we didn't call it that back then.
Similarly, the hardware diagrams were standard manuals that existed in every datacentre. I remember browsing through them shortly after I finished school (a hundred years ago or so) and thinking, "there really isn't much to these mainframe computers; nothing much more than the final exam in electronics." But based on those diagrams, and other info, our datacentre was the first in the world to put the 9th megabyte on an S 370/168!
And yes, at the time, I did get questioned about how on earth we could have so much work that we needed a 9th megabyte on a 168.