Project Goals
CP-40 was a one-off research system. Its declared goals were:
- Provide research input to the System/360 Model 67 team working in Poughkeepsie, who were breaking new ground with the as-yet-unproven concept of virtual memory.
- Support CSC's time-sharing requirements in Cambridge.
However, there was also an important unofficial mission: To demonstrate IBM's commitment to and capability for supporting time-sharing users like MIT. CP-40 (and its successor) achieved its goals from technical and social standpoints – they helped to prove the viability of virtual machines, to establish a culture of time-sharing users, and to launch a remote computer services industry. However, the project became embroiled in an internal IBM political war over time-sharing versus batch processing; and it failed to win the hearts and minds of the academic computer science community, which ultimately turned away from IBM to systems like Multics, UNIX, TOPS-20, and various DEC operating systems. Ultimately, however, the virtualization concepts developed in the CP-40 project bore fruit in diverse areas, and remain important today.
Read more about this topic: IBM CP-40
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