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ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Apps
Esther Schindler writes "The Airline Control Program (ACP), introduced by IBM around 1967, predated the term 'open source' by decades. But you may be surprised by how much of its development resembles the FOSS movement today. The ITWorld.com article An Abbreviated History of ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Applications describes what made it special."
This was how it was back in the days, and that is why RMS started GNU and FSF, to keep it that way.
It's not because the code was available and IBM agreed to include the fixes people made that is is open source.
To be open source, people should have been allowed to distribute their own modified version and sell it, for example, which wasn't the case.
Also, open source is unrelated to the development model, it's only about what licenses for the consumers allow.
"the ACP programmers I knew spent entirely too much time trying to shove 5K of functionality into a 5K bag. "
I can do that in my sleep!
It was not IBM's DOS that inspired _The Mythical Man Month_. It was IBM's OS.
They cobbled together DOS because OS was so late.
OS is now z/OS.
DOS is now z/VSE.
Interesting article to be sure -
However, I'm not sure this really qualifies as OSS or FOSS software. You really couldn't run it on any other system and there was a very closed community of heavy-smoking computer people who were able to run or modify this.
I did find it cool that the article mentioned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month -The Mythical Man-Month which I'm reading right now. Funny how different - yet the same - software development is some fourty years later.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Does it run on Linux? Is this GNU/ACP?
mods: This post is on-topic because its author is old, too! (grumble grumble)
Yes, and the definition of specialty coffee includes the use of freshly-roasted beans (defined here on the interweb). That's a perfectly reasonable definition, but certainly doesn't apply to most of the coffee I've seen at counters that claimed to be selling "specialty coffee."
Just because you know one reasonable definition for a term doesn't mean that all other definitions are wrong. Open Source, meaning that the source is open for people to read, is very usefully suggested for things like voting machines. In this case, the manufacturers should be required to open their source to the public so independent (or even hostile) outsiders can validate their code, but there is no reason to require them to allow the code to be modified and used by one of their competitors.
Actually there were IBM "clones" after the DOJ forced unbundling of OS and apps from hardware, you could get the code and run it on a number of mainframes that were specifically designed to look like IBMs.
I'm old enough to have been active in this timeframe (you don't have to get off my lawn).
Interestingly there was also a budding OSS type effort in the minicomputer world - mostly with a vendor called Datapoint. There were quite a few apps and utilities that had been developed by end-users whose source was distributed for free by the vendor (or passed along by developers). The architecture was similar to the IBM PC (look here for more details wiki article on Datapoint ) and when the PC arrived the compiler and many apps were ported to that platform. I personally worked on a "Turnkey" system that eventually was ported to the PC using a 3'rd party compiler. I was also an author of some of those early pre-OSS apps, and I ported and distributed them as well.
...carrier dead.....
"open source" was the norm for almost all programs in the 1960s. Spacewar was certainly as open as ATP, or more so by most definitions (no commercial claims at all), and was released in 1962. Source code for earlier games, like Nim and Wumpus, were widely available as well.
This author appears to be committing the sin of omission, conflating his IBM-centric experience with the wider world.
Maury
The Apple Public Source License version 1 is an example of an OSI-approved license which is not a free software license. In fact, the APSL 1.x licenses remain a good example of the difference between "open source" and "free software". The differences between the movements put the lie to the use of the term "FOSS" when that term is used to smooth over these differences as if they didn't matter (like the /. headline does on this story). As the FSF said when APSL 1.x was current:
APSL v2.0 is a free software license with two major practical problems; so it's not recommended to release new software under APSLv2.0. There are other licenses that are OSI-approved and non-free. Such licenses exist even if there aren't many of them.
Digital Citizen
The IT branch spun off by American Airlines, which outsourced operations to EDS (which was bought by HP). Through a few layers of gateways, Travelocity is in the same room (albeit huge) as the TPF system. They can cluster up to seven of the fastest mainframes to run as a unit with TPF, and have set records for real-time transactions per minute. All this in Tulsa, OK.
cabg x3 is a life changing event...
IBM had the SHARE organisation since 1955.
In other words, the open source philosophy has been part of IBM's DNA since before most of us were born.
you had me at #!
It was only "open source" because the code had to be hand-crafted and re-assembled for each particular configuration. You young kids expect softwar to be rife with XML configuration files, and virtual methods, and hooks. Back in those days the code had to fit into 4K addressable segments, so they could not AFFORD to even think of opening up a file and reading configuration info, or having a table of external procedure hooks. More likely the configuration constants were not even separate, they were convenient opcodes. For instance, if you knew a 707 at this airline always had 112 seats, you'd recall that the HCF opcode happened to be 112 decimal, so you'd compare the seat count against that opcode. All you kids with your fancy separate data! Also it was extreme luxury to have a procedure hook (or as you callem nowadys "virtual methods"). You see you could only call within the current 4K block, and any addresses you wished to pass had similar or worse restrictions. And there was darnlittle dynamc linking available in old IBM DOS, so you could not call anything that had not been linked in last week at the weekly build (which took hours).
Ahh, understand. I wasn't aware that teh other mainframes could run MVS (?) or OS/360 code.
I'm a newbie to computers as I only started with my TRS-80 in the late '70s. I didn't actually get into mainframes until the late '90s. (I still have nightmares about coding EBCDIC <> ASCII in Visual Basic.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
No one wants to go on record? IBM got you by the YKWs?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
1967? That is old. I am wondering if the original program fell prey to Zawinski's Law:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Perhaps they were following the precedent set by the Valerie Plame case and assumed that it was OK to out covert CIA officers.
Or forty even. Sorry but you can't be much of a computer scientist if you've never heard of (and read) Brooks' book before now.
In the mid 80s I did a lot of assembly programming on ACP for KLM. We (125 programmers and me) shared a test system that boasted 128MB RAM and a 100MHz'ish CPU running ACP/TPF. The production system even had double the memory. It could do 100 transactions per second. Touroperators (KLM representatives) all over the world used reservation terminals connected by satellite lines to this mainframe. It definitely was mission critical. But I think the article exaggerates a bit, because internally the story was that the KLM would go broke if the mainframe went down for three consecutive days.
When I was there, C was being tested as an alternative for assembly language, but it was thrown out, because it was too slow, and wasted too many resources.
Mind you: my iPhone has more CPU and much more memory than this mainframe, and thus could easily run the entire worldwide reservation system for an medium sized airline!
Years ago I worked at Western Bancorp. It was the holding company that supported the data processing for 23 banks including First Interstate Bank. We used ACP as the transactional engine running on IBM 370/195 systems. It had better runtime characteristics then the usual IBM stuff. I haven't heard it mentioned for quite a while.
Around the IBM-AT time, IBM came out with a PC-like 370 machine. The problem was the software was priced for mainframes, and no one could afford the system software or languages for a desktop at mainframe prices.