Lack of Marketing Success
The 3790 was never very successful. One reason was that it had an almost incomprehensible programming language, The 3790 Macro Assembler, and the customers who purchased it found it very hard to deploy applications on it. The major drawback with the Macro Assembler was that the customer had to compile on an IBM mainframe and then move the compiled and linked object to the target computer for testing. The 1970s were a decade of turmoil within IBM, the company wanted to expand their reach into the mid-size companies, and the 3790 was designed as a departmental processor. The requirement of needing an IBM mainframe development environment defeated the purpose, and the result was lackluster interest in the product. As with so many other IBM Mini Computers that appeared in the 1970s it was overpriced and under powered.
One of the products IBM released to help developers was Program Validation Services (PVS). With PVS, one could test a program in the mainframe environment using scripts. The scripts were cumbersome to create, and one mistake would result in a worthless run. Back then, mainframe time was expensive and hard to schedule. Very few programmers used PVS for anything other than the crudest of testing.
The manual for the Macro Assembler was about 4 inches thick, and it was almost impossible to find out how to do the simplest thing. Another major issue was code design and size. The hardware architecture loaded code into memory on 2k segments, for optimal execution time it was critical to ensure that processing intensive loops did not cross the segment boundary and incur delays swapping segments in and out of memory.
IBM recognized the problems with the Macro Assembler and created an automated program generator, DMS. DMS later became Cross System Product (CSP) when the 8100 became available. DMS was little more than a screen painter. While field values could be checked (number between 1-100, or character rather than number), there was very little logic that could be automatically generated. The user still had to resort to the Macro Assembler to make the program actually do useful work.
Read more about this topic: IBM 3790
Famous quotes containing the words lack of, lack and/or success:
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases. As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to fire, so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 26:20-21.
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)