IBM was doing essentially all that stuff before 1990 or so except possibly for multiple threads per processor core. So, there was pipelining, branch prediction, speculative execution, vector instructions, etc.
Then I was in an AI group at the Watson Lab, and two guys down the hall had some special hardware attached to the processors and were collecting and analyzing performance data based on those design features.
IBM was doing all sorts of amazing stuff before the 1990's. They had VMs, containers, etc.
Personally, I'd say that I don't care. They didn't want to make that technology available to the masses, we barely even got the PC architecture because they made several strategic blunders.
If the tech exists but it's not reachable by common folks, in my eyes it's as bad if not worse that it not existing at all.
”The XT/370 was an IBM Personal Computer XT (System Unit 5160) with three custom 8-bit cards.
The processor card (370PC-P) contained two modified Motorola 68000 chips (which could emulate most S/370 fixed-point instructions and non-floating-point instructions), and an Intel 8087 coprocessor modified to emulate the S/370 floating point instructions.
The second card (370PC-M), which connected to the first with a unique card back connector contained 512 KiB of memory.
The third card (PC3277-EM), was a 3270 terminal emulator required to download system software from the host mainframe.”
I don’t know whether that indicates that this was a monstrosity (not only did they combine a pair of 68000’s with a 8087, but both were modified. How did they ever license that?) or that it just was very hard to ship something that could run System/360 code at somewhat decent speed at the time.
> they didn't want to make that technology available to the masses
Do you have a source for this? It makes far more sense that it simply was not feasible to make a System/360 available to the masses than it was intentionally kept back. I would assume IBM would have been thrilled to sell one to everyone on earth, but it was expensive and physically large.
> if the tech exists but it's not reachable by common folks, in my eyes it's as bad if not worse than it not existing at all
I disagree strongly. If developing technology that isn't available to the public is worse than not developing technology at all, there goes research. No new technology makes it to the public in its original form.
About 1992-3, I worked at IBM Austin on the IBM Microkernel and Workplace OS[1]. The development machines we were using were "Sandalfeet"[2][3] which ran AIX and (IIRC) a weird 64-bit port of Windows NT (and the in-development Workplace OS). I once expressed the opinion that these were pretty neat little machines, and a co-worker (a real IBMer who had been there for a while, not a contractor like me) told me that they had warehouse full of them somewhere since they were never going to be released.
You keep attributing some kind of unfounded malice to IBM.
VMWare released their first hypervisor for x86 in 1999. That's 30 years after the first IBM virtual machines. If you are asking: "why didn't IBM release a hypervisor for x86?" I would respond "why would you expect them to make a virtual machine on a platform that isn't theirs?"
This 30 years is also the same timeline for Intel to make their microprocessors OoO and superscalar. That didn't have anything to do with IBM keeping their technology locked up.
Yes, their start in virtual machine was their CP67/CMS. The CP67 abbreviated "control program 360/67" and was written at their Cambridge Scientific Center in Boston as an interactive computing tool for development of operating systems. The CMS abbreviated "conversational monitor system" or, if you will, the command line interface to CP67. So CMS had a command IPL or "initial program load" which was software for the big red button on the front of an actual machine. The 360/67 was a 360/65 'tweaked' to have virtual memory. At one point for a demonstration they ran CP67 on CP67 on ... CP67 on the 'bare metal' seven levels deep -- it still actually ran. Eventually the 'system administration' advantages of virtual machine were noticed, and CP67 became VM/370. Some years later I got a dial up terminal and used CP67/CMS to write PL/I software to schedule the fleet at FedEx -- pleased the BoD and saved the company.
IBM did try with several projects and products cheaper than their 'big iron' mainframes: They had small versions of System 360, e.g., 360/40 with 64 KB of main memory and some still smaller. They had a rugged minicomputer sometimes used as a communications node/router. They had their System/38 that was 'friendly' and made relational database easy for some small/medium businesses; the S/38s were popular with hospitals that shared their applications software freely. Then of course they did the IBM/PC with PC/DOS they got from Microsoft and 8088 they got from Intel.
Yes, at that point and for some years later IBM had essentially everything in computing, e.g., even ran all of the Internet under a contract from the NSF. IBM had an amplifier that could wrap around an optical fiber and amplify the signal without detecting it and re-transmitting it.
But, right, IBM blew it. They had annual technology appraisals that gave them excellent projections about the future. They did take microprocessor lithography very seriously, in a sense more seriously than anyone else, still, in that they got a cyclotron as an X-ray source for making fine lines on silicon; the rest of microelectronics is still working with extreme ultra-violet and not as short as X-rays. They were into AI (a group I was in), wareable computing, etc. They did some very high level work on disk subsystems with some tricky optimization for placement of physical records based on access data.
But IBM didn't take personal computing or TCP/IP anywhere nearly seriously enough. In a sense, they missed what Gates saw -- put a PC on each desk of the developed world.
One reason Gates was right IBM should have seen quickly enough -- the PC blew away the old typewriters, including IBM's best efforts at typewriters.
So, IBM wanted to continue selling to their usual customers their usual way, suits to suits from the IBM branch offices. They knew plenty well enough, essentially from the first Intel chips, that microprocessors would challenge the existing approach to 'big iron' System/370 processors, but they neglected to see the implications. Or, now can buy an AMD FX-8350 processor, 64 bit addressing, 8 cores, 4.0 GHz standard clock speed, quantity one, for less than $100, and that puppy is, in historical terms, one HECK of a processor for one astoundingly low price per computer instruction per second.
So, along rushed Intel, Microsoft, Gateway, Dell, etc. The Intel 386, etc. architecture was serious, no toy, and by Windows NT Microsoft was well into operating systems essentially as serious as IBM's 'big iron' MVS (multiple virtual storage).
Then along came, right, TCP/IP and Cisco. IBM should have seen that the future of digital communications was end to end reliability of TCP instead of hop by hop reliability of IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture); indeed, major parts of IBM did very clearly and explicitly see this point. Still, for the product line, IBM was painfully slow to embrace TCP/IP, even when IBM was running ALL of the Internet.
And for 'workstations', e.g.. Sun, IBM tried with Power; there for Unix they tried with AIX.
At times IBM did begin to see the future, e.g., had an early Web browser, had Prodigy with Sears for on-line shopping and 'social computing' along with, again, the whole Internet. So, those efforts should have given IBM Netscape, Amazon, and Facebook -- if IBM had been wide awake and trying hard. They should also have had Intel, Microsoft, and Apple. For Apple, did I mention wearaable computing? Uh, don't forget Cisco; long IBM was making the core chips for both the Cisco and Juniper routers; IBM had the catbird seat over digital communications and the Internet but still didn't see them clearly.
By 1994, the word in the meeting room across the hall from the CEO's office in Armonk, as IBM was no longer making their revenue projections, was "God ceased to smile on IBM". In three years IBM lost $16 billion and went from 407,000 employees down to 209,000, and has had lots more shrinkage since.
IBM often wanted to regard itself not as an electronics company or a computer company but a marketing company. Well, as the market for computing changed, good shot a the biggest change in a market in all of history, IBM continued to do well understanding the electronics and computing but not the market or marketing. Net, IBM really blew it, really fumbled the ball, dropped the ball, tripped over the ball, fell on the ball, and ended up face down. IIRC one IBM CEO those days got some stock options and left worth about $125 million -- 'chump change' for what IBM missed from Netscape, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Chump change.
Then I was in an AI group at the Watson Lab, and two guys down the hall had some special hardware attached to the processors and were collecting and analyzing performance data based on those design features.