There is, as they like to say in Yorkshire, nowt new under the sun.
Here's an announcement from IBM that covers not only advanced cloud virtualization (much more advanced than we have today!) but also CDP (Continuous Data Protection) of VMs too. IBM's Virtual Universe Operating System.
The announcement date for OS/VU? Three decades ago, in 1979.
I remember this spoof rather well. In 1982, some helpful soul at IBM's Yorktown Heights sent me this to cheer me up. I was spending long evenings and nights on the phone with IBM, struggling to install APL and a planning application running under VM/CMS on a mainframe.
I got there eventually. I was probably one of the first of a handful of people at that time that managed to deliver a virtualized, containerised and cloud-like environment for end users.
I even provided the equivalent of vMotion. On tape. Ah, how little times change.
This month also marks my 30th year in the IT industry. I started out with no specific plans except to do what I enjoyed most; getting to play with -- ahem, work with computers, and getting paid for it. It's been a great three decades.
No cards or flowers, please.
Because so many users have asked for an operating system of even greater capability than VM, IBM announces the Virtual Universe Operating System -- OS/VU.
Running under OS/VU, the individual users appears to have not merely a machine of his own, but an entire universe of his own, in which he can set up and take down his own programs, data sets, systems networks, personnel, and planetary systems. He need only specify the universe he desires, and the OS/VU system generation program (IEHGOD) does the rest. This program will reside in SYS1.GODLIB. The minimum time for this function is 6 days of activity and 1 day of review. In conjunction with OS/VU, all system utilities have been replaced by one program (IEHPROPHET) which will reside in SYS1.MESSIAH. This program has no parms or control cards as it knows what you want to do when it is executed.
Naturally, the user must have attained a certain degree of sophistication in the data processing field if an efficient utilization of OS/VU is to be achieved. Frequent calls to non-resident galaxies, for instance, can lead to unexpected delays in the execution of a job. Although IBM, through its wholly owned subsidiary, The United States, is working on a program to upgrade the speed of light and thus reduce the overhead of extraterrestrial and metadimensional paging, users must be careful for the present to stay within the laws of physics. IBM must charge an additional fee for violations.
OS/VU will run on any x0xx equipped with Extended WARP Feature. Rental is twenty million dollars per cpu/nanosecond.
Users should be aware that IBM plans to migrate all existing systems and hardware to OS/VU as soon as our engineers effect one output that is (conceptually) error-free. This will give us a base to develop an even more powerful operating system, target date 2001, designated "Virtual Reality". OS/VR is planned to enable the user to migrate to totally unreal universes. To aid the user in identifying the difference between "Virtual Reality" and "Real Reality", a file containing a linear arrangement of multisensory total records of successive moments of now will be established. Its name will be SYS1.EST.
For more information, contact your IBM data processing representative.
Mainframe humour! Honestly, it is funny, but perhaps you had to be there to get the jokes.
[I'm on holiday this coming week. Normal service will be resumed shortly.]
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